Barbara Saunders

Are there nontrivial constraints on colour categorization

In this target article the following hypotheses are discussed: (1) Colour is autonomous: a perceptuolinguistic and behavioural universal. (2) It is completely described by three independent attributes: hue, brightness, and saturation: (3) Phenomenologically and psychophysically there are four unique hues: red, green, blue, and yellow; (4) The unique hues are underpinned by two opponent psychophysical and/or neuronal channels: red/green, blue/yellow. The relevant literature is reviewed. We conclude: (i) Psychophysics and neurophysiology fail to set nontrivial constraints on colour categorization. (ii) Linguistic evidence provides no grounds for the universality of basic colour categories. (iii) Neither the opponent hues red/green, blue/yellow nor hue, brightness, and saturation are intrinsic to a universal concept of colour. (iv) Colour is not autonomous.

Re-Evaluating Basic Colour Terms

Colour has been one of the central concerns of philosophers for centuries and colour terms have been of especial interest to empiricist philosophers of mind and language.3 Much of traditional empiricist philosophy relies on ascribing to the mind or brain the function of providing a faithful record of the nature of external physical reality. The mind or brain then transmutes this record by a kind of calculus into the necessary form of language, thereby re-presenting the constituents of reality in the form of names and relations.

Grammar(s) of Perception

In this essay, I take up Patrick A. Heelan’s proposal that visual perception is “hermeneutic.”1 For Heelan, visual perception is the capacity to “read” (select, abstract) the appropriate structures of the world and form perceptual judgments about which these structures “speak.”2 For example, visual space only has a Euclidean geometrical structure when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly facetted objects that exhibit standard Euclidean shapes. Vernacular visual space in contrast is non-Euclidean, while a digital environment produces perception appropriate to the information age.3 Such structures — vernacular, Euclidean, digital — cannot be translated into one another. Heelan terms these structures “grammars”4 (which later I will take to be similar to, though not quite the same as, Wittgensteinian grammar(s)). Non-Euclidean grammar is used for local, vernacular Lifeworld spaces; Euclidean grammar for the space of classically measured physical entitities, and digital grammar of pixels, nanometers and space-time compressions for information processing.5 Euclidean perception resulted from the invention of technological “prostheses” or “readable technologies” which helped cope with changed circumstances, substituting for what inherited capacities did not supply. Digital perception destabilised and desubstantialised Euclidean perception to cope with the changed circumstances of the information age.6 Thus the red ochre of the landscape, the red of the Munsell colour chart, and the red of a computer screen’s “contrast colour” belong to three different grammars: they are quite simply not the same “red.”7

Kwakwaka'Wakw Museology:

a manner that one assumes they are intended to speak for themselves-as indeed they do in certain respects to the Kwagiulth. Nevertheless, the bland, modernist show cases interposing between visitor and objects, serve to focus attention on the decay of the objects rather than their ’aesthetic qualities’, ’ethnographic interest’ or historical or narrative significance. Some objects look as though they are crudely made stage props or were hastily thrown together. Masks, a few coppers, headdresses, costumes, rattles, whistles, meant to be seen by the light of the Big House fire, in motion, are incongruously spotlighted from above, thereby losing much of their ’supernatural’ force. The power of these objects-their quintessential raison d’etre-is nowhere to be seen. Only a tape of ceremonial singing played when visitors enter gives a hint of the potential ineffability of these objects. Even the story of the Confiscation is missing. To white visitors, lulled by the anaesthetizing design frames of metropolitan museums, something here seems eerily awry. In conventional (that is white) terms of museum display, the Potlatch Collection appears to be presented as an end in itself. Having once been installed, it is now a remembrance of the loyalty of the Kwagiulth to their Chief, a commemoration of colonial injustice, and a gentle nudge to the conscience of liberal whites. Yet museum practice-of collecting and preserving, of seriating and systematizing as ’art’, ’scientific specimen’ or ’evolutionary index’-is alien to these objects. Commemorative they might be, for once they gave sacred life to Kwagiulth society and now they are a symbol of white condemnation of so-called Native profligacy. Yet, in their show-cases, they resemble nothing so much as crumbling museum pieces unable to decide whether to be ’aesthetic’ or ’ethnographic’. The pretence, however, is that these objects-albeit devitalized, divested of their context and purpose-ad-

Colour word trouble

In reply to Wierzbickas advocacy of semantic primitives we argue that talk of the semantic primitives (like to see ) repeats the fallacies addressed in the target article at a higher level. In reply to Malcolms plea for a Wittgensteinian grammar of colour words, we argue that he uses words like “we” and “us” too easily, falling into the trap of “silly relativism.” In reply to McManuss science of word counts, we reiterate the nineteenth-century criticism that this method is based on an illegitimate application of seemingly rigorous statistical methods.