Comments | cogsci: Recommended Books/Essays etc on "Colour Semantics"?

miravisu in cogsci

Recommended Books/Essays etc on "Colour Semantics"?

Nov 01, 2005 14:34

Does anyone know of a book/essay etc with a good overview on "colo(u)r semantics"?My essay supervisor thought she had heard of someone by the lastname Davidhoff that had written some on this topic, but she wasn't sure. I haven't been able to find anything for anyone with that lastname either in the databases I have tried so far. I'm mostly ( Read more... )

Comments 11

conradin November 1 2005, 14:06:52 UTC

Know nothing about the area, but some googling makes it seem likely that the guy you were after was Prof Jules Davidoff...

miravisu November 1 2005, 21:18:01 UTC

Ah, indeed, the challenges of phonemes vs the written text strikes again.. the difference one letter makes there!

Thank you :)

themaskedmedea November 1 2005, 14:21:02 UTC

I don't know about color semantics, but two generally interesting books on the nature of color + our perceptions of it itself are Colour for Philosophers by C. L. Hardin and Readings on Color edited by Byrne and Hilber. :)

miravisu November 1 2005, 22:27:22 UTC

Thanks for the tips!

I did like Frank Jackson's experiment from 1982 with the imaginary and brilliant scientist Mary, so chances are that she is mentioned in that Philosophy book? :)

themaskedmedea November 1 2005, 22:30:48 UTC

Oh, yes, she comes up in the book -- Frank Jackson has an essay in the Readings on Color book. Mary is a big deal in the literature, for a number of different reasons. There is a whole collection of essays recently published devoted to her -- it is called There's Something about Mary. I've done a lot of reading on different arguments about the Mary experiments, and I actually think John Perry does a good job of diffusing the force of the Mary argument in Knowledge Possibility and Consciousness ... but that's just my humble opinion. :)

miravisu November 4 2005, 00:44:58 UTC

I may have actually encountered that one, but not sure.. his name at least sounds familiar, but I still have not much knowledge of most philosophical theories and so, maybe I ought to take a basic course in practical or theoretical philosophy at my university at some point. Would feel nice to know the more!

shinesforyou November 1 2005, 14:47:36 UTC

This may be unrelated but you may want to check out some work on synesthesia - when someone looks at letters and sees them in different colors.

miravisu November 1 2005, 21:20:11 UTC

Yeah, I probably should have emphasised that in my initial post, although I felt it might take the focus of what I really was after.. As that is why I am investigating this in the first place, my C essay in General Language Science is about certain aspects of grapheme-synaesthesia and my supervisor thought I should try and find some info on colour semantics :)

scearley November 1 2005, 17:30:21 UTC

Your first reading must include Berlin and Kay's Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969) where they discuss the commonality in the presence of words in language.

They get into "rules" of color in language, why the ancient Greeks only had words for white, black, red, and yellow (and no, it's not along the lines of Gladstone and Geiger's ideas that they were a more primitive culture than we were in the 19th century and therefore more primitive physically and unable to see colors)

Consider Berlin & Kay's basic rules:

All languages contain terms for white and black
If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a ( ... )

Better than the original serapio November 1 2005, 21:15:40 UTC

The original Berlin & Kay study was extended by Kay and McDaniel (1978), and there has been a fair amount of updates since that time, reviewed in Levinson (2000). The original study was ground breaking, but was a bit simplistic in its conclusions.

LEVINSON, STEPHEN C. 2000c. Yélı^ Dnye and the theory of basic color terms. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10.1.3-55.

Re: Better than the original miravisu November 1 2005, 21:45:03 UTC

[ Doh, silly me, thought I had clicked the reply button to the wrong person, but you had in fact replied already and that's why my reply first ended up where it did ;) ]

*nods*

This reference I did include in my Linguistics B-essay that also was about grapheme-synaesthesia, where I mostly re-did Sean A. Day's investigation, confirming "trends" in colouring for certain graphemes for grapheme-synaesthetes. Although Berlin & Kay don't seem the more into cultural differences or theories on to why certain colours are percieved the way there are. To me they are more about "colour distinctions" than "colour semantics".. but you're right, I can emphasise their work on this point and the implications it has on grapheme-synaesthetes. And these rules, don't recall those, and this Levinson sounds very good too.. must read up, thank you both for the pointers & reminders ( ... )