How can we observe if an object is a color we can’t see?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

There are two ways of looking at this question.

Aesthetically, an apple is red because that is the color we can see. That’s it. Color is a human-made concept, so it’s rather natural for us to limit the concept of color to what we can see. We can see the color red, so red is a color. We can’t see radio waves, so radio waves aren’t a color.

Scientifically, we can measure all the possible wavelengths of light that reflect off a surface, even those we can’t see. This way, we can categorize an object by what light it reflects and call that its color.

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