True purple, for which there seems to be no place in the physical spectrum, — javi2541997
On this analogy, purple is like a musical chord. A light beam with more than one spectral peak in frequency. Real enough, then? — bongo fury
Khaki is another example of a composite color that does not feature in the light spectrum, — Olivier5
In Iran and Afghanistan, where Persian is spoken, there aren't many trees and greenery, often, so khaki is the dominant colour in the environment, the colour of the earth around you, and it deserves a name.
Blue in Persian is "abi", the colour of water (ab or aw). — Olivier5
we all see colours in exactly the same way generally, but this is probably an aspect which can be answered by neuroscientists. — Jack Cummins
It is also questionable if black is an actual colour. — Jack Cummins
It may help us to realize the arbitrary character of
our own classifications if we study the very different
classifications of the same material which other
peoples have practised in the past or indeed still
practise in the present; for example, the way in
which the ancient Greeks and Romans classified
colours not as we classify them, by the qualitative
differences they show according to the places they
occupy in the spectrum, but by reference to some-
thing quite different from this, something connected
with dazzlingness or glintingness or gleamingness or
their opposites, so that a Greek will find it as natural
to call the sea ‘wine-looking’ as we to call it blue, and
a Roman will find it as natural to call a swan ‘scarlet’ —or the word we conventionally translate scarlet
— as we to call it white. It has been suggested that this
is because the Greeks and Romans were colour-blind.
But no sort of colour-blindness known to physiology
would account for the facts. In both languages there
are the rudiments of what we should call a true colour-
nomenclature ; and in both languages it happens
that there are words for red and green, the colours
that colour-blind persons cannot distinguish. — Colingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics
It's interesting to compare our colour categories with those of other cultures. You might like this but I read recently: — Olivier5
If we block a child in a room all of his childhood teaching him the green colour while is actually yellow. Will he name all of his life “green” when he would actually see yellow? In this topic John Locke answered this is a perfect empirical experiment so he put the following sentence:
What you are trying to say is that complex terms like colours are not innate because we can teach children to misunderstand mixing them. I guess this is the same example of fearness. You can feel the fear because previously someone taught you what is darkness, witches, demons, etc... — John Locke
t (khak where kh is pronounced like the Spanish jota), — Olivier5
Well, not quite. Three receptor types do not imply three primary colors.The eye has certain receptors on the retina that detect color, the "cones." These come with three different sensitivities. Hence the three "primary" colors. — javi2541997
Are we not part of the physical world?True purple, for which there seems to be no place in the physical spectrum, is something we see when the cones sensitive to blue and red are both stimulated, giving us something like an imaginary color. — javi2541997
your RGB monitor has three colors that are varied in intensity (and thus this diagram is only an approximation). An example of this can be found in the wiki SRGB article. — InPitzotl
So, yes, we're trichromatic, but no, there aren't three primary colors... unless you pull tricks like CIE-1931 color space does, and make your primaries abstract. — InPitzotl
Either way, color per se isn't so much about photons per se as it is about how human eyes measure them, so I wouldn't try to put too much stock into the "colors" (human-color-label-things) that aren't wavelengths. — InPitzotl
Looking at the colour wheel (top) it does seem that the violet is blocked by the red but emphasised by the blue. — counterpunch
Otherwise - how could we explain the overwhelming uniformity of perceptions that we can speak meaningfully of a blue sky? — counterpunch
so that a Greek will find it as natural
to call the sea ‘wine-looking’ as we to call it blue, and
a Roman will find it as natural to call a swan ‘scarlet’ —or the word we conventionally translate scarlet
— as we to call it white. It has been suggested that this
is because the Greeks and Romans were colour-blind.
But no sort of colour-blindness known to physiology
would account for the facts. In both languages there
are the rudiments of what we should call a true colour-
nomenclature ; and in both languages it happens
that there are words for red and green, the colours
that colour-blind persons cannot distinguish — An Essay On Metaphysics
Fruit undergoes a chemical change, that then eliminates different wavelengths of light reflected from its surface - that signals to the organism that the fruit is ripe and ready to eat. Colour is not subjective - nor made possible by nomenclature. It exists in reality, as is then described in increasingly literal terms. — counterpunch
In my view, construing colour as subjective in nature is a product of the "subjectivism industry" that characterises most of philosophy, religion, politics, the humanities, literature, culture.
Yet art exists, and could not exist unless it were assumed that perception were objective in character, and similar to subsequent observers. Art is impossible to explain if reality is subjectively constructed.
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