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”.
In: 75
You got some great explanations already, but I want to add one thing that I find super interesting. There is a color hierarchy, which manifests linguistically. That’s to say that some languages only have 2 words for colours, some 3 words, some 20. So where we would say red is different from orange, a language that only has two or three words for colours would call orange “red” as well. They do see all the same colors as we do, but they just group more of the colors together under one name.
This is also because color is relative: something can look blue next to something white but then when you hold it next to something “even more blue” you can perceive it as actually more green.
What makes this even more crazy and interesting is that hierarchy, because it’s a specific order. Languages that only have 2 words for color, only specify black or white (or dark and light). So yellow would for example fall under light/white. If a language has 3 words, it’s always black, white and red. If it has for words, it’s always black, white, red and if I remember correctly blue. So there is not a single language that has only 3 words for colors and it’s red, blue and green.
Isn’t that cool!?
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