Linguistic and cognitive categorization in the domain of color

CAIVANO, JOSE LUIS

La sémiotique visuelle: nouveaux paradigmes

L’Harmattan

Lugar: Paris; Año: 2010; p. 225 - 232

Human beings create and use categories in order to understand the environment —in the broadest sense of this word, including nature and culture—, to create a model of it, to be able to adapt to its modifications, and to communicate with other human beings.1 Cognition is mediated by signs and signs are arranged in categories, otherwise it would be impossible to manage the infinite diversity that nature and culture provides. In strictu sensu, every bit of the environment is different from every other, no thing is identical to other thing. However, some things appear to be similar to others. Categories provide a means of forming groups of things based on certain common features between them. For example, the word “table” designates a category that includes many different objects that have something in common and make a class. Colors constitute a sensorial continuum. According to the viewing conditions, human beings are able to visually discriminate an enormous quantity of colors. If allowed to compare color samples one besides the other in the best conditions of illumination, a person can discriminate approximately from three to eight million colors (Pointer and Attridge 1998, McCamy 1998, Pointer 1998). If presented to individual color samples one after another, a person can differentiate about two thousand colors; the number is considerably lower than the previous one because here the discrimination depends on short-term color memory. However, when one asks a person to designate colors with names, he or she will use only a few color names; for instance, in his survey on basic Mandarin color terms, Ching-Fu Lü (1997: 5) obtained an average of forty color names from each informant. Names impose divisions in the continuum of color perception, and these divisions constitute the limits of color categories. According to Nancy Hickerson (1980), these categories are not completely natural, as to be constructed in the same way in all cultures and languages, and yet they are not completely arbitrary as to preclude the existence of common domains between cultures and languages and to rule out the possibility of translation from one language to another.