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What makes unique hues unique?

  • S.I.: Neuroscience and Its Philosophy
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Abstract

There exist two widely used notions concerning the structure of phenomenal color space. The first is the notion of unique/binary hue structure, which maintains that there are four unique hues from which all other hues are composed. The second notion is the similarity structure of hues, which describes the interrelations between the hues and hence does not divide hues into two types as the first notion does. Philosophers have considered the existence of the unique/binary hue structure to be empirically and phenomenally well-grounded, and the structure has been considered to be primary because this can account for the similarity structure. Consequently, the unique/binary hue structure has played a central role in color philosophy. This calls for the assessment of the justification for its existence carried out in this paper. It is concluded that, despite the prevalent view among philosophers, none of their reasons for endorsing the existence of the unique/binary hue structure are justified. Since the notion of the unique/binary hue structure appears intuitively plausible for many, however, a sketch explaining this intuition is outlined at the end.

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Notes

  1. The structure of phenomenal color space concerns colors as experienced. Therefore, it should not be confused with different color models that make use of primary colors from which other colors can be combined.

  2. Rather than adding “unique” for each occurrence of “unique red”, I simply refer to it as “red” (and inter alia for other unique hues) in Sects. 2, 3, 4 and 5, which focus on the unique/binary hue structure.

  3. It is often taught that red, yellow, and blue are the only basic hues and that other hues can be mixed from them. The previous may explain paint-bias (Miller 1997), which is the common error of excluding green from the unique hues since it is true that green can be mixed from yellow and blue when the discussion concerns commonly used pigments. Yet this does not imply that green is any more a phenomenally composed color than red.

  4. This analogy is obviously not perfect, given that warmth is not a circular qualitative space while colors are. Nevertheless, this difference does not have a bearing on the issue of phenomenal composition.

  5. The third prominent theory of color during the first part of the twentieth century was Christine Ladd-Franklin’s (1916, 1929) theory of color sensations. It unified Helmholtz’s and Hering’s theories by incorporating the ideas of three types of receptors (Helmholtz) and four opponent colors (Hering). Ladd-Franklin was first to provide an explanation of the evolutionary development of color vision in humans too. Her theory is not elaborated on because it can be seen to anticipate Hurvich and Jameson’s theory of opponent-processes and the interest towards Ladd-Franklin’s theory decreased significantly once their theory was presented.

  6. It is interesting to note that the same conclusion can be drawn from the history of describing the colors of the rainbow. If making judgments about one’s own color experiences were easy, one would assume that this is a matter in which people would have approximately the same opinions. Yet, the number of colors perceived in the rainbow have been claimed to be three (e.g., Aristotle, later Thomas Young), six (e.g., Aëtius, Ammianus Marcellinus), seven (Sir Isaac Newton’s assistant), eleven (Sir Isaac Newton), and too many to count (e.g., Ovid, Virgil) (Gage 1999; Newton 1704/1952).

  7. As the discussion on Helmholtz implied, he was explicit in not linking properties of chromatic processing with hues as experienced. Instead, unique hues became explicitly linked to neurophysiological mechanisms only after the opponent-processes were discovered in LGN. As will be discussed shortly, such an idea is no longer generally endorsed, as there is no physiological evidence for the existence of primary axes of opponent processes that match unique hues.

  8. Moreover, Bosten and Boehm’s results showed that what subjects identified as a unique hue shifted significantly as a function of the color terms used in the instructions. This in part causes one to “question subjects’ abilities to identify certain hues as unique.” (Bosten and Boehm 2014, p. A385)

  9. For example, they do not separate blue and green, but they have a separation that does not exist in English (see the study for details).

  10. It is worth noticing that, while the graphical multiscaling result gave reasons to accept the presented interpretation of the original Dani experiment (Heider and Olivier 1972), the interpretation can be questioned too. This is because the statistical measures used by Heider and Olivier gave conflicting results by also suggesting that the performance of the Dani people is best explained by linguistic and cognitive factors. For some reason, the first measure was accepted while an explanation for the second measure is still missing.

  11. Indeed, excluding yellow, unique hues are not more salient in search tasks than binary hues (Wool et al. 2015).

  12. This is in accordance with the earlier study showing that the preferred hues of color-selective neurons (those that respond almost only to colors) cover nearly all color space and thus show no preference for unique hues (Komatsu et al. 1992).

  13. For a very thorough discussion on how this could be done, see (Clark 1993).

  14. It should be remembered that this analogy is only partial because warmth does not form a circular qualitative space. This difference is not crucial here, however, because the issue at hand concerns similarity judgments, not the linearity or circularity of a quality space per se, and we can make such judgments for both colors and warmth.

  15. At the same time, this plasticity of the basic hue categories would explain the larger color vocabulary of visual artists and their reluctance to regard only red, green, yellow, and blue as basic hues (and unique hues). Since most people do not need such a refined color vocabulary, they consider fewer hues as basic hues.

  16. They can be perceived together in special circumstances (Crane and Piantanida 1983) and this has been used in an argument against color objectivism (e.g., Arstila 2003).

  17. As an analogy, consider a line in which we arbitrarily mark some basic points. Every non-basic point is then close to only two basic points and becomes defined in relation to them and not to the other basic points. The same thing holds for color space, and that is why every “composed” hue can only be composed of two hues.

  18. I am grateful to Austen Clark, Franklin Scott, Kalle Pihlainen and Susanne Uusitalo, as well as for the anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive comments on prior versions of the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Valtteri Arstila

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Arstila, V. What makes unique hues unique?. Synthese 195, 1849–1872 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1313-3

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