Is color in the eye of the beholder?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, is it still brown and green?

In principle, color is primarily determined by a property of light, wavelength, that has little to do with hikers passing by… Or has it? On the one hand, it is true that physical properties of light are independent of beholders (as long as we don’t go into the weird world of quantum physics) but, on the other, a wavelength is not a color. A wavelength only becomes a color once a creature with the right kit to detect it puts it in a mental box different from the mental box for some other detectable wavelength. That’s where things get interesting.

The visible spectrum for humans ranges from around 380 to 700 nm. That’s a fair amount of wavelengths – 320 at the nanometer level; 320,000 at the picometer level; 320,000,000 at the femtometer level… But English has only 11 basic color terms: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and grey. They are basic in that they are known by all English speakers and come readily to mind, unlike specialised terms like cyan, teal, or burgundy. Since there are more wavelengths than colors, multiple wavelengths correspond to a single color. For example, in English, light with a wavelength of 460 nm is put in the ‘blue’ box, and so is light with a wavelength of 490 nm. However, in Russian, a wavelength of 460 nm is put in the box labelled ‘siniy’, but a wavelength of 490 nm goes into a different box labelled ‘goluboy’. Does that mean Russians see the world in greater technicolor? Going in the other direction, there are languages with just 2 basic color terms, like Bassa from Liberia. Does that make their world black and white? Are there no 50 shades of grey for the poor souls who grow up speaking Bassa?

If we rely on biology to answer the question of how many colors speakers of different languages see, we would have to acknowledge that humans have the same eye wetware regardless of where they are born. So speakers of Bassa and speakers of Russian should have the same underlying perception no matter how many chunks they divide the visible light spectrum into.

Then again, there’s more to perception than meets the eye. The brain plays just as big a role if not bigger. After all, eyes on their own are not too successful at seeing, but people whose eyes are not working can use other kinds of stimuli (touch or sound) to form mental images of the world around them. Biology, then, does not hold the key – we also need to consider what the brain does with the information that comes from the eyes. In sum, we need to consider the mental processes of perception.

That’s where language comes in because, let’s face it, it is a pretty good tool to probe what people perceive given that languages are there to help us describe what goes on in our heads. We may not be able to put everything we think into words, but we definitely would not be able put into words what we cannot think. So, if a color has a name, it must have been noticed. But what about the reverse? Is a color without a name unnoticeable? Ok, perhaps “unnoticeable” is too strong a descriptor, but some researchers do think that the language we speak shapes not just the way we think, but also what and how we perceive. Certainly, having a handy label for a concept or property makes it easier to play with in our heads and to store in memory. But it may be stretching it a bit to then claim the fundamental processes of perception are affected by the kinds or the number of labels a speaker has at their disposal.

Curiously, languages may be variable in how finely they mince the visible light spectrum, but they follow a remarkably consistent mincing recipe. Known languages have from 2 to 12 basic color terms. However, it is not as if, having opted for 2 terms, one language names red and brown and another yellow and pink; or one language divides the spectrum at a wavelength of around 300 nm and another at around 600 nm. Not at all. If a language has only 2 terms, they correspond to light and dark (roughly whit-ish and black-ish); if 3 terms, it’s light, dark and red; if 4 terms, it’s the previous 3 plus either yellow or green; if 5 terms is white, black, red, yellow and green. It cannot be a coincidence that these colors nicely match the sensitivities of the cells which carry information from the retina to the brain. After that, brown is added to the linguistic palette and, finally, the other colors (orange, pink, purple and grey) can enter in any which order. With an extra chop, some languages make a distinction between lighter and darker hues of red or blue. This degree of consistency is easier to explain if color terms are constrained by fairly basic physiological drivers rather than being allowed to go with the flow.

The linguistic influence on perception may be debatable but the perceptual influence on language is difficult to deny. Nevertheless, it is just as undeniable that speakers depend on language to package the information they want to convey and packaging matters. Just ask advertisers!

So, is color in the eye of the beholder? What do *you* think?