Colors (was: Re: Homing pigeons...)

[Allen Hazen <allenph@unimelb.edu.au>]

First, a book recommendation for anyone interested in (but not 
already an expert on) color vision, color categorization, etc etc.: 
"Color for Philosophers," by C.L. Hardin.  Hardin is a philosopher, 
and the book, in later chapters, addresses traditional philosophical 
questions (are colors "real" or only in the mind of the perceiver 
etc), but along the way to them gives a good, readable, review of the 
current state of scientific (physical, psychological, linguistic) 
knowledge about colors.  (And then tries to address the philosophical 
questions in the light of that.)  Very, VERY, good book.  (There's a 
second edition, which may have more up-to-date references than the 
first.)

 The stuff about different (human) languages having different color 
categories (different NUMBERS of color categories even) but there 
being some regularities in it that Mike Keesey describes is discussed 
in Hardin's book: it stems from fascinating research reported in B. 
Berlin and P. Kay, "Basic Color Terms" (U. of Cal. Press, 1969)-- 
there has been further research on it since, but Berlin and Kay's 
findings have held up pretty well.

Very, VERY roughly: boundaries between color categories are weak, but 
their centers are more robust: if you show people an array of color 
samples and ask them to draw the line between the red ones and the 
orange ones, they have difficulty and the results are variable 
(between speakers of different languages, between speakers of the 
same language, between the same speaker one day to the next), but if 
you ask them "Which sample is the reddest red?" the answers are much 
more confident and more consistent.  And if you ask speakers of two 
different languages to pick the foci of their color categories, there 
is a good chance that the irtnoggest irtnog picked by speakers of one 
language will coincide with the quipfelest quipfel picked by speakers 
of another, even if the two languages have different systems of color 
categories (irtnog being one of, say, four and quipfel one of, say 
seven).  It seems that there are a small number (on the order of ten) 
of natural "landmarks" in the color landscape (there has been recent 
research suggesting that their locations are interestingly connected 
to "hardwired" aspects of eye-brain function), that different human 
languages all choose natural landmarks as "foci" for their color 
categories, and that if a given language has only a few color 
categories some landmarks (black, white, red...) are more likely to 
be chosen than others.

All pretty tangential to dinosaurs, but Hardin does have a brief 
speculative discussion (speculation grounded, however, in the science 
of how OUR experience and categorization work) of the way in which a 
being that a dinosaur-like (specifically bird-like) array of color 
receptor-types in its eyes (instead of our impoverished mammalian 
system) might experience and categorize colors.

--

Allen Hazen
Philosophy Department
University of Melbourne