No no. Colour is actually the perfect example of what I want, and the objection raised proves the point, because colour is notoriously hard to account for. There simply aren't any working theories of colour that account for it and are still termed to be colour realists. And the reason there aren't working theories is that every time someone puts one up, there isn't the data to support it (or, to be more precise, there are vast troves of data that contradict whatever theory of colour you might want to propose). Chances are better than simply good that the data and experiments that you're talking about that "prove" colour actually work along the lines of "given that there are colours, how does phenomena x help explain theory y." (which is the way that physics and chemistry have historically treated colour) (biology is actually worse as far as realism goes, because biology runs into problems like heptachromic birds, who give the option that there may be real colours, but humans certainly can't see them).
Certainly, the idea of splitting light and colour wheels and so on either beg the question, or offer evidence that is neither conclusive nor overly useful. The simplest example of the way that colour falls over as a usefully "proven" object with an external existence is by way of duplicability: do you, in fact, know anyone at all who always agrees with your own judgements of colour? (That is to say, do you have any good reason to suppose that, if you point to something and say "that is orange", there will be other people who agree with you).
But yes. Colour is very handy, because folk theories of colour have a tendency to be held broadly, followed faithfully, and have almost no realist basis. So too things like time, causation, etc.
Not that there's anything wrong with being one of the colour faithful. It has very few practical implications. Certainly, one of the big name, anti-realist colour theories, the illusion theory, effectively goes "there are no colours, but we may as well operate as if there were. Because it's better that way." But people believe in all sorts of things they have absolutely no good evidence for, even if they think they do, and it's not bad, wrong, or unreasonable of them to do so.
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Certainly, the idea of splitting light and colour wheels and so on either beg the question, or offer evidence that is neither conclusive nor overly useful. The simplest example of the way that colour falls over as a usefully "proven" object with an external existence is by way of duplicability: do you, in fact, know anyone at all who always agrees with your own judgements of colour? (That is to say, do you have any good reason to suppose that, if you point to something and say "that is orange", there will be other people who agree with you).
But yes. Colour is very handy, because folk theories of colour have a tendency to be held broadly, followed faithfully, and have almost no realist basis. So too things like time, causation, etc.
Not that there's anything wrong with being one of the colour faithful. It has very few practical implications. Certainly, one of the big name, anti-realist colour theories, the illusion theory, effectively goes "there are no colours, but we may as well operate as if there were. Because it's better that way." But people believe in all sorts of things they have absolutely no good evidence for, even if they think they do, and it's not bad, wrong, or unreasonable of them to do so.