Commentary on Alex Byrne & David R. Hilbert (2003). Color realism and color science. BBS 26(1):3–21.

1. There is clearly a difference between the concept of causal explanation and that of causal implication. For while it is true that, if X causally explains Y, then X is causally implicated in the explanation of Y, the converse fails: X could be causally implicated in the explanation of Y without causally explaining Y. For ease of exposition, however, I will simply talk about causal explanation in what follows. What I say about causal explanation applies to causal implication as well.

2. Although it is not clear to me whether B&H intend these to be distinct claims, for present purposes I will treat them separately.

3. This sort of worry is by no means unique to philosophical discussions of color. To take a familiar example, some philosophers of mind hold the view that the property of being in pain is a disjunctive property. In humans, the property of being in pain is the physical property Ph; in dogs, the physical property Pd; in Martians, the physical property Pm; and so on. So pain turns out to be the disjunctive property Ph or Pd or Pm, or the set ﹛Ph, Pd, Pm﹜. And the causal worry remains: It is not my being in pain that is causing my headache, but my having Ph. For more on this sort of worry see the papers collected in Kim (1993).