Your language defines your perception of reality

[_subgenius]

What is a primary color?

well, from a human perspective (eg trichromatic) it is one of the 3 colors that combine to make all the other colors that we have named for a variety of reasons (ie gamut). These colors can be organic and/or inorganic depending on their constituent elements; and can also be light. Regardless, they elicit a human perception that is predictable and/or consistent.
The relative perception of a bovine notwithstanding.
(and for giggles, the psychological primaries are 6 in number)

[_subgenius]

What the flippin' hell does that have to do with primary colors?

well, for the memory challenged - the poster claimed that blue (aside from water) was a rarity in nature, and clearly that is not an accurate claim.
Now if you are questioning whether "blue" even exists then by all means, keep spanking it.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I guess whether or not Subgenius ever checks Google before he embarrases himself again and again and again has just been answered:

https://www.google.com/search?q=rare+co ... e&ie=UTF-8

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

Regardless, they elicit a human perception that is predictable and/or consistent.

Not really. Serious, subbie. Check out the RadioLab piece on, "Why the Sky Isn't Blue". You're off on almost every point you've made in this discussion.

[_subgenius]

I guess whether or not Subgenius ever checks Google before he embarrases himself again and again and again has just been answered:

https://www.google.com/search?q=rare+co ... e&ie=UTF-8

- Doc

I can't find a big enough facepalm meme for your post. Maybe read upthread first.
and then for giggle, go outside .go for a walk..and tell me when you don't see anything blue.

[_honorentheos]

subbie, subbie, subbie -

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2 ... -sky-blue/

A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors. It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither The Odyssey nor The Iliad included any references to the color blue. In fact, it turns out that, as languages evolve words for color, blue is always last. Red is always first. This is the case in every language ever studied.

Scholars theorize that this is because red is very common in nature, but blue is extremely rare. The flowers we think of as blue, for example, are usually more violet than blue; very few foods are blue. Most of the blue we see today is part of artificial colors produced by humans through manufacturing processes. So, blue is the last color to be noticed and named.

An exception to the rarity of blue in nature, of course — one that might undermine this theory — is the sky. The sky is blue, right?

Well, it turns out that seeing blue when we look up is dependent on already knowing that the sky is blue. To illustrate, the hosts of Radiolab interviewed a linguist named Guy Deutscher who did a little experiment on his daughter, Alma. Deutscher taught her all the colors, including blue, in the typical way: pointing to objects and asking what color they were. In the typical way, Alma mastered her colors quite easily.

But Deutscher and his wife avoided ever telling Alma that the sky was blue. Then, one day, he pointed to a clear sky and asked her, “What color is that?”

Alma, at first, was puzzled. To Alma, the sky was a void, not an object with properties like color. It was nothing. There simply wasn’t a “that” there at all. She had no answer. The idea that the sky is a thing at all, then, is not immediately obvious.

Deutscher kept asking on “sky blue” days and one day she answered: the sky was white. White was her answer for some time and she only later suggested that maybe it was blue. Then blue and white took turns for a while, and she finally settled on blue.

The story is a wonderful example of the role of culture in shaping perception. Even things that seem objectively true may only seem so if we’ve been given a framework with which to see it; even the idea that a thing is a thing at all, in fact, is partly a cultural construction. There are other examples of this phenomenon. What we call “red onions” in the U.S., for another example, are seen as blue in parts of Germany. Likewise, optical illusions that consistently trick people in some cultures — such as the Müller-Lyer illusion — don’t often trick people in others.

So, next time you look into the sky, ask yourself what you might see if you didn’t see blue.

You might learn something if you listen to the actual podcast.

[_huckelberry]

Honorentheos, thanks for the link about color. It is an enjoyable presentation which can create or point out some interesting questions. I did not hear it quite the same as you did however. I heard reasons to think that learning to perceive color was to a degree a result of individual working with the perception, not something received by culture. Culture could supply some incentive to that learning I suppose.

I would think of the portion about the woman with the extra type of color sensitive cone in her eyes. She could make some subtle distinctions that other people missed. The male painter without the extra cones could make the distinction as well. He had learned to see with more care as a result of working carefully with color pigments.(both individuals were in employment which asked for making careful observations about subtle color variations which people may be in a habit of not noticing.

There was a portion about word for blue appearing late with Egypt being an exception. Egypt had a blue pigment to work with so they named the color. I will bet they all saw the same thing upon looking into a clear sky. (a spectrum of color with blue predominating on sunny days after a rain. )

The story of the child identifying colors is interesting. What happened to all the possible questions to ask the child about how he decided what color it was. Could the child describe what was happening when he was uncertain about the color???? I could not help but think the child could have provided important clarification.

I was struck by to story of the monkeys given the physical change to see another color but taking 20 weeks for that physical change to be understood by the mind as perception of a new color. It sounded like several monkeys when through the same time process in their individual learning.

Sorry, I do not see this learning as culture, or at least far from primarily culture. I do wonder if the effect of words making categories which lump together as one kind things which have some variety in themselves influences what variations we notice. We can identify such and such and look no further to see the variations. I believe even under this baleful influence we can choose to look further and start to see what we ignored at first glance. After all our first glance has a small bit of input information which we fill in with what we know should be there. If we keep looking we continue to gather input information clarifying and sometimes correcting the visual image we have constructed.

I do not think the categories block our perceptions unless we are talking about politics. In that area of thought the categories people hold block out all other perception , forever and ever and ever.

[_honorentheos]

One word: chartreuse.

[_Morley]

A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors. It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither The Odyssey nor The Iliad included any references to the color blue.

I seem to remember that Julian Jaynes (of bicameral mind fame) used this to argue that the ancients couldn't even see the color blue.

[_subgenius]

...(snip)...couldn't even see the color blue.

does this conclude with the color blue did not exist at that time?