Tags: categorization, convention, review (paper)
Status: draft
-[This is a cool paper about how language affects how people remember colors!](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158725) You would expect that the design of the eye is human-universal (_modulo_ [colorblindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness) and [maybe some women with](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans) [both](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW) [kinds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW2) of green opsin gene), but not all languages have the same set of color words. There are some regularities: [all languages have words for light and dark; if they have a third color word, then it's _red_; if there's a fourth, it'll cover green or yellow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)—but the details differ, as different languages [stumbled onto different conventions](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/). Do the color category conventions in one's native tongue affect how people think about color, in accordance with the famous [Sapir–Whorf hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)? Maybe—but if so, how??
+[This is a cool paper about how language affects how people remember colors!](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158725) You would expect that the design of the eye and its colorspace to be human-universal (_modulo_ [colorblindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness) and [maybe some women with](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans) [both](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW) [kinds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW2) of green opsin gene), but not all languages have the same set of color words. There are some regularities: [all languages have words for light and dark; if they have a third color word, then it's _red_; if there's a fourth, it'll cover green or yellow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)—but the details differ, as different languages [stumbled onto different conventions](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/). Do the color category conventions in one's native tongue affect how people think about color, in accordance with the famous [Sapir–Whorf hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)? Maybe—but if so, how??
Our authors discuss an experiment where people are briefly shown a color, and then try to match it on a color wheel after a short delay.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff