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The subject of colour has long fascinated Frank Jackson. Perhaps one reason that colours have fascinated Jackson is that they represent a striking instance of what he has called a ‘location problem’. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 sketches Jackson's solution to ‘the location problem for colours’. Section 3 argues that Jackson's attempted resolution of the clash between the two axioms of the folk theory fails because of its inconsistency with other firm folk intuitions about colours. In Section 4, after agreeing with Jackson that the folk theory entails both axioms, it is argued that these axioms imply a conception of colours as simple, non-physical, intrinsic properties of objects. Section 5 takes up the issue of why Jackson rejects this primitivist conception of colours and the easy solution it provides to the apparent clash between his two basic axioms. Section 6 examines the exclusion assumption and its role in his argument for the conclusion that colours must be physical properties. Section 7 outlines a conception of causation according to which non-physical properties as well as physical properties can both cause colour experience in ways that do not compete with each other and do not exclude each other.

Serious metaphysics is the business of giving an account of what our world is like, which is much more than a shopping list. A famous example is physicalism, the doctrine that our world is a huge aggregation of items that are purely physical or physical without remainder. This chapter uses physicalism to explore what such a claim comes to in terms of supervenience; how it leads to a necessitation doctrine; and how it raises the location problem—the problem of locating an item described in non‐physical terms in the physical account offered by physicalism.

This chapter gives an account of what cognitivism in ethics is and argues that the a priori global nature of the supervenience of the ethical on the descriptive requires cognitivists in ethics to identify ethical properties with descriptive ones. It argues that we can locate ethical properties with descriptive ones in terms of the role ethical properties play in folk morality, a view of ethics I call, with Philip Pettit, ‘moral functionalism’.

This chapter offers an answer to the location problem for colour via a defence of physicalism/realism about colour. However, it is set in a framework that is more subjectivist than that favoured by many realists about colour.

This chapter considers the views of two philosophers — Ronald Dworkin and John McDowell — who repudiate the premise of the location problem, namely, that causal efficacy is always the mark of the real. From the standpoint of legal philosophy, Dworkin's response is particularly significant, since his theory of law and adjudication makes a party's legal rights turn on the answer to moral questions: if those answers are not ‘objective’, then Dworkin's theory is a license for extraordinary judicial discretion. It shows that Dworkin has no good arguments against taking the location problem seriously, and that his and McDowell's alternative account of the objectivity of morality is both empty and entails counter-intuitive conclusions.

This chapter explores three ways in which the armchair method of analysis can assist in the assembling of “platitudes”. It is unknown whether these usages should count as “conceptual analysis” or not-perhaps the “location problem” will need to be resolved first. This chapter hopes to show that much of the method is of a kind with the method that Jackson, Lewis, and others take to be what we are doing when we are doing conceptual analysis. More options for the method are pointed out, and they help to solve the puzzle found at the beginning of this chapter: the problem of what philosophers could justifiably be doing when they employ armchair methods to solve metaphysical problems.

In part II we describe some possible methods of modeling spatial phenomena with spatial evolutionary algorithms. We will explain what spatial evolutionary models and spatial evolutionary algorithms are and how they can be designed. We will also provide a general framework for spatial evolutionary modeling. We believe that this framework can be used to create evolutionary models (and algorithms) of spatial phenomena that will reach well beyond the model discussed in the book. Wherever possible we will give examples to illustrate the concepts, terms, and procedures we discuss. In fact, by the end of part II we will have built, using presented principles, a complete spatial evolutionary model—a spatial evolutionary model of a wireless communication system. We shall begin our discussion with an explanation of the distinction between spatial evolutionary models and evolutionary models of spatial phenomena. As we shall see, the difference between these two terms, while subtle, is very important for the understanding of spatial modeling in general and evolutionary spatial modeling in particular. . . . "Spatial Evolutionary Models" Versus "Evolutionary Models of Spatial Phenomena" . . . The differences between the terms spatial evolutionary models and evolutionary models of spatial phenomena extend well beyond their lexical dissimilarities and touch upon very basic issues of evolutionary and spatial modeling. The term spatial evolutionary model, as used here, refers to an evolutionary model that constitutes a separate, distinct class of computer evolutionary models. In contrast, the term evolutionary models of spatial phenomena denotes applications of existing evolutionary methods (or mere extensions of established evolutionary methodologies) to problems defined in space. Our view of the science of spatial modelling is driven by the choice of which definition, along with its consequences, that we accept. If we accept that spatial evolutionary models constitute a separate and distinct class of evolutionary models, then we will also have to accept the proposition that they possess unique rules governing their behavior, a unique genome design to represent a model-specific data structure, and a set of unique operators that cannot be readily applied to nonspatial problems. Moreover, it will follow that these evolutionary models also possess problem-specific language, that is language specific to the domain of spatial evolutionary models.