What is it like to be a tetrachromat?
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2025
Authors
Newall, M.
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Journal article
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Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 2025; 6:1-28
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Most people are trichromats, but some people have an extra kind of cone cell in their retinas: theyare tetrachromats. Recent science shows that some tetrachromats can make distinctions betweenreflectances that ordinary viewers are unable to detect. This paper asks what kind of colourexperience these tetrachromats have. It rejects the claim that they simply see finer gradations ofthose colours familiar to trichromats. Instead, it draws on both scientific evidence and anecdotaldata to argue that tetrachromats visual acuity is due to seeing novel colours: elementary coloursthat trichromatic viewers are unable to see or imagine.
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Copyright 2025 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)