There is another theory of colours which has something in common with the illusion theory, in that it rejects objectivist accounts, but which is crucially different. It is the theory defended by Evan Thompson, the Ecological View of Colours, and is designed to be consonant with J.J.Gibson's views on perception. On this account, colours are taken to be dependent, in part, on the perceiver and so are not intrinsic properties of a perceiver-independent world. This account is not the same as an illusion theory. Being coloured, instead, is construed as a relational property of the environment, connecting the environment with the perceiving animal. In the case of the colour of physical surfaces, "being coloured corresponds to the surface spectral reflectance as visually perceived by the animal". [Thompson (1995) Ch. 5, pp. 242-50.]

In more detail this account is spelled out in the following way: "being coloured a particular determinate colour or shade is equivalent to having a particular spectral reflectance, illuminance, or emittance that looks that colour to a particular perceiver in specific viewing conditions" [p.245]. Thompson insists that this account is to be distinguished from both a Lockean dispositionalist account and an illusion theory of colours. It is difficult to see, however, how he can maintain this stand. For one thing, he concedes that we see colours as perceiver-independent properties of things while maintaining that colours are perceiver-dependent properties. His answer to this difficulty, i.e., to why this is not a form of the illusion theory, is that on the ecological view it is not possible to perceive colour as relational. That is, the relational nature of colour does not allow the perceiver to perceive colours as relational. But this answer is not an answer to the question posed. What it explains is why one should not be surprised to find that, on the ecological view, that colours are experienced as perceiver-independent properties. But this is to admit that the way colours are represented in experience is not the way they are. The illusion theory denies that objects have the property (the colour) they are represented as having. It need not deny that it is possible to formulate another concept of colour that objects do satisfy. What it insists upon is that there is a need for the concept of colour in the illusory sense.