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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“Red” is a social construct. It’s the term that English speakers use to identify electromagnetic wavelengths within a certain range (620-720 nanometers). We know that an apple is “red” both from our vision, and also because we can construct devices that react when struck with a photon whose wavelength falls within a given range.
We do have names for colors we can’t see. It’s just that, since they are not colors that we interact with on a casual level, the names tend to be rather technical. There are names for the different categories of non-visible light: Radio, microwave, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma ray. But specific “colors” are simply identified by their wavelength.
The colors that we micro-divide into millions of different shades are simply the ones that most people interact with on a daily, casual level, and they represent a teeny tiny slice of the different wavelengths of light. They are the most common wavelengths that we see on Earth, and since we interact with them directly and without the need for specialized equipment, we have given them specific names so that we can talk about them casually.
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