There's a very famous idea that you've probably heard
at least once in the pub, "What if we don't see colours the same way? What if what you call red I would experience
as blue, and you've just been taught to call it red your whole life! We'd never
know!" And it's such a famous idea that it's seeped into the popular
consciousness. So let's have a look at it.
The question is, what is colour? And the obvious answer is, colour is a wavelength of light. Different
objects reflect different wavelengths of light, which enter our eyes, and we call
the different wavelengths colours. In normal human eyes there are three types of specialised
cells called cone cells. Each type of cone cell is sensitive to a different wavelength
of light. So this wavelength is blue, this wavelength is yellow, and so on. Our 3 types of cone cells give us trichromatic vision.
But it's quite as simple as that. Because you can show different eyes the same wavelength of light and
they won't have the same experience. Dogs and cats have only two types of cone cells,
they are dichromats. Many sharks have no cones at all. And there are people who are colour blind
and we say of them that they cannot see colour. Or cannot differentiate colours.
Even though all their eyes get the same wavelengths
of light there is something that we are getting that they are not.
There are even people who see more than the normal amount of colours. Earlier this year it became known that
scientists had identified a woman who has four functioning types of cones in her eyes who
sees approximately 99 million more colours than ordinary humans. She gets the same wavelengths
of light into her eyes but her experience is vastly different. Who knows what it's like to see the world
through her eyes. To science and the world at large this woman is known as cDa29. But to me,
she's known as Mum!
Yeah, in one of those weird cosmic twists of fate, cDa29, the first functioning human tetrachromat
ever identified, who will forever be a footnote to science and philosophy, is
my Mum. I remember her doing the tests and I remember the scientists running the
tests getting very very excited and then they tested
my grandmother and they tested my brothers and they tested me and basically, my Mum is a mutant.
And before you ask, yes, I did inherit some exceptional colour vision, though not quite as good
as hers. My brother and me see more shades of green than ordinary people do, though we see fewer shades
of red. And obviously my normal vision isn't exactly perfect, so I'm not up for a position in the X-Men just yet. But the point is, my family is living
proof that colour is not just a wavelength of light - it's at least partially in here somewhere.
An eliminativist would say that objects have no colour at all. That colour is all in here, it's just a
perception of the mind. And the same is true of smells and touches and tastes and sounds...
everything really! Objects in the real world don't have any of those features. Which by the way would mean yes, if a tree falls in the forest and no-one is
around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound. It causes the air to vibrate but unless that vibration is perceived by some
ear that's not technically a sound. Glad we finally put that one to bed.
But hang on, maybe eliminativism is going a step too far. Maybe colour is a disposition: so
to say that a tomato is red is to say that it has some properties that generally cause most
humans to experience it in similar ways. Colour, then, is the disposition to reflect
wavelengths of light that generally cause similar experiences in most human beings.
In their book "Basic Colour Terms," anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay claim that words
for colour translate very easily between different languages. Having done some laboratory experiments they claim that all languages on Earth have
between 2 and 11 basic colour terms, with more complex, "more evolved" languages
having more. If that's true, then it might mean that there's something about our brains
or our eyes that causes us to perceive the world in those 11 or so categories, and that our biology
shapes the way our language develops. And that is a very interesting idea: there's a big question,
which overlaps philosophy and anthropology: does language shape how we see the world and behave
or does it only describe the world? The idea that biology precedes language
is called linguistic universalism. And if
Brent and Kay are right about colour terms very easily translating then it looks like that might be evidence for linguistic universalism. But there might be some problems with their research. Social scientist Barbara Saunders
points out that they assume a very Eurocentric, very Western idea of "progress and evolution." Just
because a language has fewer basic colour terms doesn't mean that it's "less evolved;"
it might have just as many colour terms as the speakers need - i.e. it's perfectly evolved
to suit its environment. And it also doesn't mean the language is less complex:
linguist and ethnographer Daniel Everett claims that the Pirahã people of
the Amazon have no words for colour at all, and yet Pirahã is one of the most complex languages there is!
Furthermore, Berlin and Kay assumed that you could find out what a language's colour words are
in a laboratory by pointing to a colour wheel and going, "What's that?" What they
didn't consider is that the appropriateness of a using certain word might be socially
determined, and so you'd have to look at lots of different contexts of usage to find out
what people really mean when they use it. This was a point that was actually made by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein years
before Berlin and Kay even did their experiments: Wittgenstein writes:
"If I say a piece of paper is pure white, and if snow were placed next to it and it
then appeared grey, in its normal surroundings I would still be right in calling it white
and not light grey. It could be that I use a more refined concept of white in, say, a
laboratory (where, for example, I also use a more refined concept of precise determination of time)."
So Saunders says of course Berlin and Kay's research appears to support linguistic universalism:
they were pretty much setting it up to do that from the start!
Wittgenstein has his own ideas about what colour words really mean, but I wanna take a step back from all of this,
since we're unlikely to ssettle this question in a 10 minute video anyway, and just ask, "Who
cares? Who cares about the philosophy of colour? Why do it? Most of the time when we use colour words
people know what we mean and we can navigate the world just fine: if I tell you I want
you to paint that wall 'blue' you can do it. So why bother asking the question? Why do the philosophy of colour at all?
Well, first of all because it's interesting. Or at least it's interesting to some people; I assume
it's at least a little bit interesting to you otherwise you wouldn't be here.
Sometimes philosophy can be just learning for its own sake, and that's fine. That should be enough. As Existential Comics once
wisely said, "What can you do with a philosophy degree? Effectively criticise the ideology
that says education should only be for economic production."
And secondly, because it overlaps with this very big question about whether language affects behaviour.
Remember the Pirahã? Everett argues that their uniquely complex language massively shapes
the way that they live: there are concepts and ideas that appear in English that cannot appear
in Pirahã, and vice versa, so a native English speaker's behaviour will differ hugely from a native Pirahã
speaker's behaviour. The idea that language affects how we behave
is called Linguistic Relativity.
And Linguistic Relativity versus Linguistic Universalism will have bearing on questions
of politics, media, computer programming, cognitive theory, acting - like any human field
where language is used. Which is... most of them, I guess? Except maybe dance. And mime.
See, philosophy is not just some isolated ivory tower alchemy - or it least it doesn't
have to be. It can overlap with various other fields to be fascinating and varied and dynamic,
as well fun and interesting in its own right. Which, I guess, is kinda why I do what I do.
What do you think? What is colour, and what kinds of other questions get thrown up when we look very closely at this issue?
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