Louie, we had a previous discussion on this here:
http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=25412&hl=redness&page=3
There as here you hold to the idea that attributes are epistemological. You had previously asked me to direct you to where you could read more on why your mistaken. Here are some quotes:
Heads, arms, and legs can be cut off and they are entities. But I was speaking here in the context of entity as against attribute or action. Actually, I was speaking here in the Aristotelian sense of the primary “substance”—which is a very misleading term, but what he meant was that the primary existent is an entity. And then aspects of an entity can be identified mentally, but only in relation to the entity. There are no attributes without entities, there are no actions without entities.
An entity is that which you perceive and which can exist by itself. Characteristics, qualities, attributes, actions, relationships do not exist by themselves.
In the act of observing entities, of course, the child, like the adult, observes (some of) their attributes, actions, and relationships. In time, the child’s consciousness can focus separately on such features, is olating them in thought for purposes of conceptual identification and specialized study. One byproduct of this process is philosophers’ inventory of the so-called “categories” of being, such as qualities (“red” or “hard”), quantities (“five inches” or “six pounds”), relationships (“to the right of” or “father of”), actions (“walking” or “digesting”). Th e point here, however, is that none of these “categories” has metaphysical primacy; none has any independent existence; all represent merely aspects of entities.
There is no “red” or “hard” apart from the crayon or book or other thing that is red or hard. “Five inches” or “six pounds” presuppose the object that extends five inches or weighs six pounds. “To the right of” or “father of” have no reality apart from the things one of which is to the right of another or is the father of another. And—especially important in considering the law of cause and effect—there are no floating actions; there are only actions performed by entities. “Action” is the name for what entities do. “Walking” or “digesting” have no existence or possibility apart from the creature with legs that walks or the body or organ with enzymes that does the digesting
Even the rest of the quote from the OP affirms this:
In a deeper sense, however, such products are “in the object.” They are so, not as primaries independent of man’s sense organs, but as the inexorable effects of primaries. Consciousness, to repeat, is a faculty of awareness; as such, it does not create its content or even the sensory forms in which it is aware of that content. Those forms in any instance are determined by the perceiver’s physical endowment interacting with external entities in accordance with causal law. The source of sensory form is thus not consciousness, but existential fact independent of consciousness; i.e., the source is the metaphysical nature of reality itself. I n this sense, everything we perceive, i ncluding those qualities that depend on man’s physical organs, is “out there.”
So, to answer your question, yes I am “saying that color, is a metaphysical actuality”.
Now when you said that:
there are some attributes which are not the result of a relationship
You are actually holding to a form of the primary-secondary quality distinction Ms. Rand repudiated specifically in ITOE
.
Prof. C: I have a question about the primary-secondary quality distinction. A quality like bitterness is not an attribute of an object, but it is caused by an attribute. At least I would be tempted to say that.
AR: I would not accept the distinction of primary and secondary qualities, because it leads you into enormous pitfalls. It is not a valid distinction.
We perceive light vibrations as color. Therefore you would say the color is not in the object. The object absorbs certain parts of the spectrum and reflects the others, and we perceive that fact of reality by means of the structure of the eye . But then ask yourself: don’t we perceive all attributes by our means of perception—including length? Everything we perceive is the result of our processing, which is not arbitrary or subjective.
The primary-secondary quality distinction is a long philosophical tradition which I deny totally. Because there isn’t a single aspect, including length or spatial extension, which is perceived by us without means of perception. Everything we perceive is perceived by some means.
Prof. C: Would you put taste and smell in the identical category with length?
AR: All of them. Because they would be different forms of the way your particular sensory apparatus works in order to grasp something. Consider taste. It relates to the way your particular nerve ends react to certain chemicals or certain components of the things which you eat. Tastes as such do not exist apart from your sensory apparatus. But that which arouses a certain sensation of taste in you, does it exist or not?
Prof. C: Yes, of course. But I would not claim that the object has the particular taste. I would say that the taste is an effect of the object.
AR: Certain elements in the object, when they strike your taste apparatus, your nerve endings, produce a certain sensation. Now take length. How do you become aware of length, which is usually taken as a primary quality? Are your eyes involved?
Prof. C: Yes.
AR: What else? You perceive the attribute by means of your eyes, but you can also perceive it by means of touch. And both these enter your mind as certain sensations conveyed by certain kinds of nerves and nerve endings in response to certain stimuli. Therefore, if you say that taste is a “secondary quality” but length is a “primary” one, you are open to the same criticism. The primary-secondary distinction in fact starts from the idea that that which we perceive by some specific means is somehow not objective.
Now you can properly distinguish that which is in the object from the form in which you perceive that quality. But that isn’t the same thing as saying color is a secondary quality but extension is a primary quality. That isn’t the same issue at all. Color is a form of perception—something caused by one existing phenomenon, namely wavelength, acting on another phenomenon, namely, the retina of our eye. That does not make color a “secondary quality,” as if one could say color isn’t in the object but extension is.
You see, it’s the classification of the attributes of reality according to how and by what means we perceive them that is wrong in that whole classification. The same argument can be made against any sensation, anything that you perceive by means of your senses.
If you notice here, as with Universals, Ms. Rand brings the issue back to affirming objectivity as against subjective and arbitrary. In OPAR in the chapter on Objectivity Peikoff states:
If someone asks: where is a perceptual object, e.g., a man? it is accurate, even though we do perceive in a certain form, to answer: the object is out there, in the world. Bu t if someone asks: where is a conceptual object, e.g., manness? Ayn Rand answers: such an object is neither “in the world” nor “in the eye of the beholder.” Manness or any other “universal,” she holds, is facts of the world, it is concretes—as reduced to a unit not by the eye, but by the mind of a conceptual being.
The same applies to attributes because entities are their attributes. As I said before in the other thread, red is out there but redness is an abstraction, which presupposes the entity being abstracted from. This is objective because there really is something out there, the object of redness.
I will admit the wording on the form-object,sensory quality discussion in the literature can be confusing.
Before I answer, Im curious if you consciously found that your position on attributes was bolstered by the new book on concepts and if so, do you remember where?..