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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It’s important to distinguish between the ability to sense light of certain wavelengths, and the perception of color. They aren’t the same thing – two colors can appear absolutely identical but be made from entirely different combinations of light wavelengths.
For example, ‘blue’ sapphires don’t look that way because they transmit only a narrow range of blue light. They actually permit most wavelengths of humanly-visible light to pass through them. But they absorb, and therefore subtract from white light, a narrow range of ‘yellow’ light. And we perceive white-light-minus-yellow as blue.
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