To understand our world we employ in our daily lives traditional distinction between primary and secondary properties.
According to the tradition, secondary properties are dispositions to produce experiences; colour is supposed to be secondary.
All other properties, those independent of experiences, are primary. It should be noted that (a) those properties essential to objects as space-occupying matter (mass, volume, solidity, motion) are primary, and (b) we think of such properties as constituting the nature of an object in virtue of which it can cause experiences in us, so (c) such primary properties put a flesh of actuality on what would otherwise be a ghostly unperceived existence of something having only secondary properties (i.e. unrealised potentialities).
Our system of concepts of primary properties is more like a primitive theory of the world. If the sources of the conceptual resources of that system are constrained by an atomistic empiricism, then those concepts are simply not to be had.
According to the tradition, secondary properties are dispositions to produce experiences; colour is supposed to be secondary.
All other properties, those independent of experiences, are primary. It should be noted that (a) those properties essential to objects as space-occupying matter (mass, volume, solidity, motion) are primary, and (b) we think of such properties as constituting the nature of an object in virtue of which it can cause experiences in us, so (c) such primary properties put a flesh of actuality on what would otherwise be a ghostly unperceived existence of something having only secondary properties (i.e. unrealised potentialities).
Our system of concepts of primary properties is more like a primitive theory of the world. If the sources of the conceptual resources of that system are constrained by an atomistic empiricism, then those concepts are simply not to be had.
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