Color Categories in Thought and Languag

8/22/2019 Color Categories in Thought and Languag

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Department of Philosophy NORMAN R. GALL

University of Winnipeg

515 Portage Avenue

Winnipeg MB R3B 2E9, Canada

E-mail: [email protected]

C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi, eds, Color Categories in Thought and Language.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. x+404 pp. ISBN 0 521496934

(hardback) ISBN 0 521498007 (paperback).

Robert MacLaury, Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categor-

ies as Vantages. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997, xxvii+616 pp. ISBN 0

292-75193 (hardback).

In a message posted to one of the cognitive science discussion groups the author

asked, to paraphrase roughly, what should be read to get an up-to-date account ofresearch into color naming? My advice is (and was) to consider the two books

under review here: C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffis excellent collection of essays on

color language research; Robert MacLaurys magnum opus on color naming and

cognition.

Color language research finds its modern roots in the work of the anthropologist

Brent Berlin and the linguist Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and

Evolution is their seminal text which, when published in 1969, created a contro-

versy that continues to this day (N.B. the recent Behavioral and Brain Sciences

target article Are their non-trivial constraints on color categorization, Saunders

and van Brakel 1997). At the heart of that controversy is the following claim:

some color categorieslinguistic classifications such as red or black in their

English versionsare basic in the sense of being cultural universals. One might

expect this to mean that such words appear in all languages. Not so. A color word

such as pink is universal according to Berlin and Kay (1969), but there are

many languages which do not have an associate term. In what sense, then, is there

universality? Enter Berlin and Kays (1969) evolutionary hypothesis. While it

is not the case that every language has all of the basic terms, each language does

possess some subset of thema subset which can be ordered with all othersinto

a developmental sequence that moves from languages with only two basic terms

to those with all eleven (i.e., red, yellow, green, blue, orange, purple, pink, brown,

gray, black, white). Every language (choosing some of the small set of basic terms)

stands at some stage in the sequence and adds further color terms in a predictable

way.For thirty years an ongoing and interdisciplinary research tradition has refined

and revised these central claims. A major aspect of this tradition has been devoted

to their explanation. It is argued, for instance, that the nature and structure of the

color vision system is responsible for the high degree of psychological salience


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which attaches to exemplars of the basic color names. Most researchers designate

four elemental colorsred, yellow, green, and blueas especially salient (similar

claims are made for black and white which I ignore here). These are said to be

elemental because, for each of these four colors or hues, there are samples which

are perceived to contain no other chromatic content. There is a pure blue, for

example, in a way in which there is not a pure orange. Orange is not elemental

but composed of a mixture of red and yellow. What accounts for elementalness?

Again, we are propelled to vision science and the widely agreed upon opponency

of the color vision system. Articulated psychophysically and physiologically, the

idea is that the vision system generates the four elemental hues, a fact that color

categorizers exploit in their construction of linguistic categories. Taken as a whole,

the goal of contemporary color language research is to understand the links and

relationships between our vision system (understood cognitively, psychophysically,

and physiologically) and the socially embedded practices of color naming.

The essays collected in Color Categories in Thought and Language originate

from a conference that the philosopher C. L. Hardin organized and which tookplace at Asilomar, California in the fall of 1992. Organized into four sections, Color

Categories in Thought and Language begins, in Part I, with an essay by Kay, Berlin

and their collaborators Luisa Maffi and William Merrifield. This is appropriate not

only because Berlin and Kay have founded the contemporary research tradition

but also and especially because they are due to publish their long-awaited multi-

volume work, the World Color Survey (Forthcoming). Their essay Color naming

across languages is based on the data of that project and serves as something of

a progress report on the current state of analysis of the WCS [World color survey]

data, as well as a promissory note on the full analysis to come (p. 21). This article

provides terms of reference for those to follow: a summary of cross-linguistic

research, a brief presentation of the data and the techniques used to collect it, asurvey of the conceptual issues that have been and need to be addressed. Part II,

Visual Psychologists is devoted to essays by visual scientists. The title of Part III

Anthropologists and Linguists is self explanatory. Part IV, Dissenting Voices

provides two articles critical of color naming research in the mold of Berlin and

Kay. Bracketing the four parts of the book we find introductory and concluding

essays by the editors Hardin and Maffi (Ch. 1 and Ch. 16) that put the various

contributions into a broader perspective.

The first three essays in Part II are primers on different aspects of vision science

and their relevance to color naming research. In Chapter 3, The psychophysics of

color, Bill Wooten and David Miller provide an account of the opponent processes

theory of color perception and its experimental and conceptual development. In

Chapter 4, Physiological mechanisms of color vision, Israel Abramov addressesthe encoding of color stimuli in the nervous system, offering fact and speculation

as to the relationship between the functional. psychophysical models described in

the previous chapter and contemporary physiological accounts of vision. Chapter

5, by the neuropsychologist Jules Davidoff, deals with color vision deficits and the


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light they cast on the mechanisms of color vision and on linguistic color classi-

fication itself. There is much overlap in these three articles (throughout the book

in fact) and this is a good thing. One comes away with a clear sense that there

is no ultimate separation of, say, the psychophysics and the physiology of color,

two sub-disciplines of vision science that are continually posing questions to one

another. Abramov, for example, makes it clear that there is no simple fit between the

psychophysics of opponency and its physiology as they are presently understood

(p. 107). That said, he speculates about what we should expect from physiology

given the constraints of psychophysics: At higher, presumably cortical, levels of

the nervous system the responses of LGN [Lateral Geniculate Nuclei] cells must be

combined and recombined in many ways in order to disambiguate their responses,

to extract the information corresponding to each sensory function (p. 108, my

italics). Other contributions to Part II focus on more specific areas of interest. In

Chapter 6. Robert Boynton (Insights gained from the naming of OSA colors)

discusses his own history of color naming research and concludes that too much

emphasis has been placed on opponent models when it comes to discussion ofBerlin and Kays work. His research indicates that the original eleven basic color

terms name colors that are equally salient. Elementalness may be a fact, but it does

not matter much when it comes to hue-naming experiments. Boyntonand again

we see the constraining role of psychophysicsproposes that there may be eleven

neural processes, each corresponding to a Berlin-Kay color (p. 148).

The hierarchical distinction among colors returns in Chapter 9, the first essay

of Part III. The linguist Greville Corbett and the psychologist I. R. L. Davies

(Establishing basic color terms: measures and techniques) argue that a hierarchy

with the elemental colors as most significant appears when one utilizes appropriate

techniques for identifying basic terms but is submerged if other tests are used.

The elicitation of lists from subjects is good at identifying basic terms, not goodat revealing hierarchy. Evaluation of the frequency with which basic color names

appear produces an opposite result: hierarchy emerges but one does not get an

adequate reading of the range of basic terms in a language. As the authors note,

these two types of test (and others are considered as well) are complementary

(p. 218). On the other hand, their evaluation of the various tests for basicness

underlines an important and sometimes overlooked home-truth. The results that

one gets often depend on the nature of the task and it is unwise to hang too much

generalization on any result or type of result. This theme threads its way through

many of the papers in this volumesee, in particular, the contributions by Lars

Sivik (Color systems for cognitive research, Ch. 8) and David Miller (Beyond

the elements: investigations of hue, Ch. 7)and it is one that we might apply to

Boyntons claims, based as they are on hue-naming tasks.As befits its devotion to the work of anthropologists and linguists Part III is

richer in cultural and linguistic detail. In the wonderful Chapter 10Color shift:

evolution of English color terms from brightness to huethe anthropologist Ron-

ald Casson reconstructs the history of English color words and their develop-


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ment from essentially brightness classifiers to hue terms (see also MacLaury, Ch.

12, Skewing and darkening: dynamics of the Cool category). James Stanlaw

(Chapter 11, Two observations on culture contact and the Japanese color nomen-

clature system) discusses the vexing problem of loan words and the results of

different cultures coming into contact with each other. Stanlaw is also an anthro-

pologist and, like Casson, he is circumspect when it comes to universalism: the

universalist arguments of Berlin and Kay do not necessarily refute all Whorfian

[i.e. relativistic] considerations under all conditions. Languages can certainly vary

semantically, but obviously not without constraint. ... These constraints, however,

are often a complex interface of both human and cognitive universals, and the

particulars of cultures and languages in contact (p. 259). This is a modest form

of cultural relativism. As the quotation from Casson indicates, he is not denying

the legitimacy of the Berlin-Kay schema. It is, rather, a matter of locating them in

cultural context.

In the first of the two essays that appear in Part IV, Dissenting Voices, Kim-

berly Jameson and Roy DAndrade (a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive an-thropologist respectively) take direct aim at the relevance of opponent colors theory

(cf. Boynton, Ch. 6). The standard explanatory paradigm supposes a psychophys-

ical color space organized in terms of two axes: one from red to green, the other

from yellow to blue. The high degree of salience which attaches to these colors

a result that shows up in many (though not all) measures of significanceis held

to derive from physiological organization (though the physiological story is not

complete: see the comments on and by Abramov, above). Jameson and DAndrade

reject this paradigm, arguing that, on certain psychological and physiological meas-

ures, a different set of axes is specified (pp. 300301). This is well and good but

what justifies their choice of measures over the numerous tasks and techniques that

converge on the elementalness of red, yellow, green, and blue? In their concludingremarks Hardin and Maffi discuss this issue (pp. 356358) and a similar one (p.

350) that arises from the anthropologist John Lucys essay The linguistics of

color (Ch. 15). Lucy has long been a critic of Berlin and Kays work on color

(Lucy and Schweder 1979). In this, the final contribution to the volume, he argues

that color words do not form a legitimate linguistic category: we have the extrac-

tion of a set of individual lexical items from the grammar primarily on the basis of

their capacity to refer to a fixed stimulus array, and then the reduction of that list in

terms of the items denotational potential and internal relations with one another

(p. 326). This continues a time-honored line of attack on universalist research. Uni-

versalist and evolutionary claims are reductionist, disregarding important social

and linguistic dimensions. Color words do not, Lucy argues, constitute a well-

formed syntactic class, being interesting to universalists for essentially semanticreasons. Further, universalists fail to do justice the semantic dimension and its

richness of detail. It is hard to be unsympathetic to Lucy and his plea for detailed

studies. It is also difficult to see the supposed chasm between local, specific, eth-

nographical studies of color language, such as Lucy prefers, and those that are


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explicitly simplifying, general, and cross-cultural. It is an old debate. Levi-Strauss,

with some exasperation, had this to say about an earlier relativist, Franz Boas:

Are we compelled to carry Boasian nominalism to its limit and study each of the

cases observed as so many individual entities? ... to reject institutions exclusively

in favor of societies? (quoted in Sahlins 1976, pp. 6869). Levi-Strauss point

is that whether it makes sense to construct general theories of social practices is

partly determined by what such theories reveal and cannot be settled in advance by

appeal to traditional methods, approaches, and assumptions. This is a useful idea

to keep in mind when evaluating claims about color namingclaims that straddle

the boundaries between traditional disciplines.

If Color Categories in Thought and Language has a weakness it is that many

though certainly not all of its authors are unfamiliar with research conducted in re-

lated areas. Hardin and Maffi fill in many gaps in their Introduction and Closing

thoughts but it remains true that, as the book-jacket text informs us, the Asilomar

conference is where visual scientists and psychologists met with linguists and

anthropologists for the first time. Given the length of the research tradition, andthe fact that vision science has been in on the story from the start, this is surprising.

What is not is the presence of some insularity in the otherwise excellent essays of

this volume.

Having perused the contributions of distinguished visual scientists, anthropolo-

gists, and linguists to Color Categories in Thought and Language one is advised

to turn to Robert MacLaurys Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing

Categories as Vantages. This book provides a unified treatment of color naming

research by one of the fields preeminent investigators. MacLaury, a cognitive an-

thropologist and former student of Berlin and Kay at Berkeley has undertaken color

naming fieldwork in various areas of the world and he has published numerous

articles on the topic. Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica is his magnum opus.It brings together a startling and impressive body of history, data, theory, and

speculation based on (but not limited to) fieldwork by MacLaury and others in

Mesoamerica.

MacLaury is something of a heretic in the color naming trade. He disagrees

with Berlin and Kays concentration on hue as the attribute of visual sensation that

speakers use to categorize color. There is, he argues, a very complex brightness

sequence which may run parallel to the hue sequence, though it will always, even-

tually, merge with the hue sequence (pp. 4446). This complicates the Berlin-Kay

account which was first developed in 1969 and subsequently revised (pp. 2330).

There has been some resistance to it in the Berlin and Kay camp. My own view

is that MacLaury is dead-on about this. There is a legitimate hue sequence, as

MacLaury agrees (pp. 4449), but it is a sequence that occurs only if speakershave latched on to hue. If they have not, then brightness classifications may be

operative. Since hue is not the only dimension in which color samples can be scaled

by subjectsbrightness and saturation are also standardit would not be surprising

to find these attributes operative in classification. MacLaurys data suggests that


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speakers have to find their way to hue as the primary classificatory dimension, and

this is a more realistic view than accounts which take its dominance for granted.

There are other respects in which MacLaurys work differentiates itself from

that of Berlin and Kay and the universalist tradition in general. Here I note some

significant differences. In the first place, MacLaury takes individual data very ser-

iously. Most color naming research is based on results for linguistic groups. One

interviews a number of informants from a given language group, normalizes their

responses so that it makes sense to speak of the basic color terms in their language,

assigns the language to a stage of development. Where is the individual or social

mind in this? Nowhere. The idea is that color language development is like em-

bryological development: an epigenetic process that unfolds as a consequence of

human biology under tight constraint as to variation. The basic color categories

are physiologically determined and any deviation from the universal sequence

given the robustness of that sequenceis noise. But there are, MacLaury argues,

individual differences in color naming that do not fit any standard model and which

cannot be chalked up to mistake or noise (p. 111). They exhibit, instead, a range ofstrategies that require articulation and explanation.

The attention to individual data has lead MacLaury to an explicitly cognitive

account of color naming. His essential principle is that Color categorization is

both perceptual and cognitive (p. 86). You cannot categorize in terms of color

unless you have conceptualized that domain. More to the point, you cannot have a

theory of color categorization that is not, in part, a cognitive theory. While virtually

all color naming research pays lip service to a cognitive component in categoriz-

ation (it must be there, after all)just as it pays lip service to a cultural component

(it must be there too)MacLaury is the only person to have worked out, in detail,

such an account (for another discussion of why this is required and what it might

be like see Dedrick 1998). Differences that are glossed over by other researchersare grist for MacLaurys vantage theory which, he hopes, has the resources to

account for a wide range of differences in individual color naming, cross culturally

(pp. 392393). One is tempted to the thought that this is the route to madness

and, indeed, the complexity of vantage theorywhich MacLaury hopes will have

general significance as a theory of categorizationis remarkable. Its articulation

takes up the middle two parts of this four-part book: 266 pages. That said, the basic

idea is simple and good. In a domain with no natural boundariesthat of the color

continuum, sayone needs cognitive landmarks. The salience of the elemental hues

can serve this function: one can exploit it in ones partition of the sensory color

space into categories. This is not a new idea. Eleanor Rosch (1975) utilized it in

her early and influential work on color prototypes. But there are, as MacLaury

notes, problems with a prototype theory of color categorization (p. 182) and withits main rival, the fuzzy set interpretation of color categorization later introduced

by Kay and McDaniel (pp. 3036). Vantage theory is intended to provide a more

adequate account of color categorization. Speakers/cognizers construct complex

vantages that consist of a hierarchy of fixed and mobile coordinatesanalogous to


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space-time coordinatesin relation to which the individual can zoom (a technical

term, p. 538). This involves the shifting from one sort of coordinate as fixed to

another as fixed, collapsing (or inflating) the hierarchy as one goes, and utiliz-

ing mobile coordinates in relation to those that are, at a level, fixed. The theory

proposes that elemental hues typically serve as the fixed coordinates from which

color categories are constructed by subjects, their fixed position plus an attention

to similarity and/or an attention to difference driving the boundaries to different

positions in color space. Crucially, and for a variety of reasons, the coordinates may

shift and this allows MacLaury to explain what is happening when an informant

alters his or her categorizational practice, or to explain why it is that the speakers

of a single language may differ in systematic ways. This later feature of the theory

is especially important for the Mesoamerican data. Mesoamerican speakers use a

range of categorizational strategies, especially in their categorization of green and

blue, the so-called Cool colors (Ch. 8, Skewing and darkening).

From my vantage the most impressive thing about this book is the range of

issues it covers. Aside from the fifty-page bibliography and the useful (if somewhatidiosyncratic) thirty-page glossary, this book includes interesting discussions on

everything from the history of color naming research, to methods and standards,

to an excellent meditation on why it is that color categorization develops at all.

For the data-junkie this book has scores of naming maps distributed throughout

the text, many of them for individuals. Of the eight appendices, mostly concerned

with technical information, there are two of particular interest. An Inventory of

observations (Appendix VII) which lists 100 (!) observations any theory of color

categorization ought to account for, and a good discussion of whether there could

be more than 11 basic color terms (Appendix IV, A cognitive ceiling of eleven

basic color terms).

Taken together Color Categories in Thought and Language and Color andCognition in Mesoamerica add up to more than 1000 pages of writing on color

naming research. Who would want to read this much? Is it worth it? The first thing

to note is that there is a lot more where these books came from. The literature is

quite large (NB MacLaurys bibliography) and is likely to expand further. These

books are good guides to the literature, though neither is designed for that purpose.

Secondly, these two books are complementary. Color Categories in Thought and

Language offers multiple, often disciplinary, perspectives on color naming while

Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica presents a more unified treatment. One can,

if one wishes, zoom-in on technical vision-scientific issues that MacLaury deals

with perfunctorily, finding them in all their messy glory in an essay from Color

Categories in Thought and Language. MacLaury, on the other hand, gives us a

bigger if in some respects sketchier picture of how the material that forms theinter-discipline of color naming research might fit together and this, after all is said

and done, is what the research tradition must be about. Finally, as both of these

books make clear, color naming research is one of the few perceptual/cognitive

areas of study where there actually are workable accounts at a variety of levels:


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physiological, psychophysical, cognitive-psychological, linguistic, ethnographic.

This is the territory cognitive science must traverse. In these books on color naming

the reader will find the journey to be well underway.

References

Berlin, B. and Kay, P. (1969), Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, University of

California Press.

Dedrick, D. (1998), Naming the Rainbow: Colour Language, Colour Science, and Culture,

Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Kay, P., Berlin, B., Maffi, L. and Merrifield, W., World Color Survey, (Forthcoming).

Lucy, J. and Schweder, R.A. (1979), Whorf and his Critics: Lingusitic and Non-linguistic Influences

on Color Memory, American Anthropologist81, pp. 581615.

Rosch, E. (1975), Cognitive reference points, Cognitive Psychology 7, pp. 532547.

Sahlins, M. (1976), Culture and Practical Reason, University of Chicago Press.

Saunders, B. A. C. and van Brakel, J. (1997), Are their non-trivial constraints on color categoriza-

tion, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20(2), pp. 167179.

Department of Philosophy DON DEDRICK

Concordia University

Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G1M8

E-mail: [email protected]

Andy Clark, Jess Ezquerro, and Jess M. Larrazabal (eds.), Philosophy and Cog-

nitive Science: Catergories, Consciousness, and Reasoning, Philosophical Studies

Series 69, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, xviii + 270 pp., ISBN 0-7923-4068-X.

This book is a collection of eleven papers that were presented at the Second In-

ternational Colloquium on Cognitive Science held at San Sebastian on May 71,1991. In the ten-page introduction by the editors that provides an overview of all the

papers, the goal of the colloquium is set forth: namely to explore the philosophical

foundation of the rapidly evolving field of cognitive science. These two factors

pretty much set the stage for what this volume delivers.

As this book grew out of a conference proceeding, the papers gathered here are

loosely related at best. Despite the editors attempt to draw various threads together

into a unifying braid in the introduction, the chapters themselves bear almost no

relation to each other. Their themes cover diversity of topics including the purely

philosophical issues of meaning and reference (Chapter 5 and 6), and the Al-related

themes of how to model commonsense causal and default reasoning (Chapter 10),

diagrammatic reasoning (Chapter 9) and uncertain reasoning (Chapter 11). On thepositive side, this volume includes contributions from such well-known figures as

John Perry, Keith Lehrer, Martin Davies, and others. On the negative side, though

the conference was held in 1991, and the current volume was published in 1996,

there seems to be little effort at post-colloquium editing and updating of the papers.

There also does not seem to be any effort by different authors towards identifying

Color Categories in Thought and Languag

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