I here defend the 'Australian' view that colors are physical properties of objects. This view is sometimes known as the primary quality view of color, although the idea is not that colors are identical with complexes of primary qualities in a sense tied to Locke's famous list, but rather that they are identical with complexes of the properties the physical sciences appeal to in their causal explanations. An immediate problem for the primary quality view is the fact that there is something truistic or somehow a priori about the connection between something's looking a certain color in the appropriate circumstances and its being that color. We will see how to reconcile this insight with colors being primary qualities or complexes of primary qualities. We can acknowledge what has rightly impressed dispositionalists about color without abandoning the primary quality view of it. I start by emphasising what I take to be the most obvious fact about color, the fact that is sufficiently central to count as defining our subject. Deny it and you are no longer talking about color. We will see how this fact when combined with what science tells us, forces us to identify colors with primary qualities. We will note some properties of the resulting account of color including how it accommodates what is right about the dispositional view. The remainder of the paper is concerned with certain objections to the primary quality view that arise from questions to do with its relationship to folk views of color.
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