From what I understand, humans can see red green and blue and everything in the middle. Some animals I’ve heard see more colors than us, so what’s to say that some things in nature are colors that we don’t see? Who’s to say that some apples are red? And instead a different color that we don’t have a name for because we can’t process it?
How can we tell if this “apple” is as a matter of fact “red”.
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Color is basically the wavelength of light reflected from objects and interpreted by our eyes and brain. The wavelength part can said to be objective. (We also sometimes assign color names to wavelengths on the spectrum, like describing 650 nm as spectral “red”, but those namings are arbitrary.)
Colors themselves are not objective because they are produced by our brain as a response to sensations or a combination of them further filtered by our eye cones. We can safely say that all animals process color a bit differently. For example, your dog can’t actually watch TV the way you do, because TV screen emit light specifically in a way that’s easy for humans to perceive. Dogs have two photoreceptor cells in their retina, humans have three. When dogs look at a screen they likely see a lot of flickering, even if they may be smart enough to recognize some shapes as images.
One famous example you may have heard of, the difference between purple an violet. When the human eye perceives light at 400 nm, just below blue at the limit of our perception, it produces a color. When we see red and blue light together, it also produces a color. But, for some reason, due to some peculiarity or deficiency in our brains, these colors are the same. Likely many animals are able to see a completely different new color when they see violet, but for humans, when you show them a picture made with mixed violet and purple color, they can’t tell the difference.
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