1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
Summary
Do visual science and anthropological linguistics have anything to say to each other? Does the makeup of the human color-vision system constrain the linguistic expression of color categories in any interesting ways? Does the way we use color language suggest anything about the biological organization of color vision? In the early 1950s, an open-minded reading of the relevant scientific literature would have offered scant reason to answer such questions affirmatively. Color scientists concerned themselves with color matching and discrimination, adaptation, and the measurement of thresholds, but said little about the categorical structure of color appearance. For their part, anthropological linguists had long since put behind them earlier attempts to arrange systems of color naming in evolutionary schemes from “primitive” to “developed,” or to relate the paucity of color words in some languages to color-vision deficiencies in the peoples who spoke them. Indeed, the supposed arbitrariness with which various languages divided color space came to be taken as paradigmatic not only of cultural relativity, but of the capacity of language to shape the perceptions of its speakers.
Hering's opponent-process theory
A pronounced sea-change in the thinking of visual scientists began in 1955 with a series of papers in which Leo M. Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson advanced a quantitative opponent-process theory. A qualitative version of the theory had earlier been propounded by Ewald Hering, who claimed on introspective grounds that there are two perceptually elementary achromatic colors, black and white, and four perceptually elementary chromatic colors, red, yellow, green, and blue, all other colors being seen as perceptual blends of those six.
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- Color Categories in Thought and Language , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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