Dynas wrote:
Well personally I couldn't say it because I'm not a scientist, but I am a thinker. The whole discussion reminds me of racism and children. Ever notice how children don't care who's black,white,red,yellow,green, whatever they only care to play with someone. It's until someone teaches them racism that they act differently.
I believe that's the concept you're trying to get across psychologically. However, racism isn't something that's scientifically defined as say light.
If you were to first look at a color without knowing it's name, would it be any different than if you did?
Look at this color. Try to describe it without naming it. You could say its tone is bright. The color is very vibrant and is eye catching. But after awhile you'll run out of things to describe it. Then you might compare it to other things around you that look similar to the color. I've seen a version of this color at sunset for example.
My belief is, it doesn't matter if we're taught the color's name or what they look like. They would be that way anywho regardless of their name. We would find other ways to describe the color to assign it a value. Naming it is more efficient and easier to remember than, "Sunset-looking-vibrant-color".
That is pretty much the crux of the argument though.
Your analogy to babies is not without research evidence. As I mentioned in a one of my posts previously, babies' performance in oddball colour studies does suggest that they respond to actual differences in colour, i.e. its wavelength. However, after and beyond 2-4 months of age, for some reason that perception changes. People no longer respond to colours based on their actual appearance alone. Now we have a problem about whether actually assigning it a name has altered our interpretation of these colours or whether we're actually seeing colours as they really are.
Differences in "colour vision" appear globally, e.g. Africans' "grue", Koreans' "yellow", etc. They would swear blindly that our colour perception is completely wrong and/or different to ours, assuming we could communicate in equivalent terms with them; after all, some languages do not even have a word for "colour".
Now, there may be actual, quantitative differences of light wavelength which produces subjectively different colour experiences. However, the webpage you sited approaches colour in the English language. The inherent epistemology of organising colour in the way they have presented is not globally sound; it is not generalisable.
The point is we can never really know what the actual structure of what we're seeing
is what we're seeing, because it's muddied by language -- the way in which we simultaneously label these colours
and communicate them to others -- and the very possibility that learning a language has moulded the way we see things anyway.
Studies with babies could be a very good indication that there are pre-language "labelling" abilities, but thus far it can only be elicited using comparison tasks between categories. Babies get bored of looking at the "green" category after a while, despite each one being what we might say would be physically different from the rest. But we're using this colour system we know to prove the colour system we know, which one may argue is circular logic.
Modern day methods and ways of thinking, I believe, tend to over-aggrandise the empiricist, scientific basis of doing things. I too think there must be something physically different about colour on the wavelength level, but I also argue how can we actually know this. And know it
definitely.
In essence, we're saying the same thing, except you're approaching it from a cognitive load perspective and I'm thinking more ontologically. :P
I think I need a coffee.