Russell's Argument Thus Far Essay

5. Weaknesses of Russell’s Argument Thus Far
5.1 The Argument from Conflicting Appearances
Russell’s argument in chapter one of Problems, as seen below, takes the form of a quite simple explanation:
“It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table – it appears to be of different colours from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of these as more really its colour than others….”
“And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we move about the room; so that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table”
From here
However, conditionals in formal logic of the form p  q are equivalent to its contrapositive, which is not qnot p. For example, if we take the conditional that if a leader gets elected into the House of Commons (P) then the people of the UK have to vote (Q). Therefore, the contrapositive of that conditional would be if the people of the UK did not vote (not Q), then the leader does not get elected into the House of Commons (not P). A more obvious example would be if I pass all of my exams, then I will achieve an honours degree in philosophy, with the contrapositive being that if I did not achieve an honours degree in philosophy, then I did not pass all of my exams. Hence, from (C) we can get a different outlook of the original argument from the contrapositive as
For instance, if we test the notion there is some colour that is inherent within the object, according to (C*), there will be no circumstances where a different colour will be presented to us. So, for example, (C*) will only hold if the table appears the same colour when we see it through a pair of red lensed glasses or if we see it when the sunlight reflects upon it. But, this seems absurd to accept a view that suggests the same colour will appear in these different circumstances. It seems reasonable to severely doubt this assumption made in (C*). As Dawes Hicks suggests, for this reasoning in (C*) to hold we have to assume that if the table is inherently coloured, the real colour must appear to be that colour in all varieties of different conditions. This assumption, as Dawes Hicks puts it should be ‘dismissed as untenable’