Strange Death of Silas Deane Information and Essay

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Strange death of Silas Deane

Information and selection: Different ways of proving a hypothesis

The question of whether colors have an objective existence is a difficult question to answer, given the degree to which perceptions of color are subjective. To explain the phenomena of color identification, authors have drawn upon the disciplines of anthropology, history, and linguistics, as well as the natural sciences. For example, in the essay by Henry Fountain "Proof positive that people see colors with the tongue," Fountain examines the linguistic relativity hypothesis which argues that humans see the world less with their eyes than with their language. Fountain uses a comparative cultural analysis of the different ways various peoples throughout history and all over the world have perceived color. What seems like a self-evident construct -- the color of objects -- is quite culturally specific and limited by language.

For example, one research study compared the ability of English speakers to identify and remember colors, in contrast to members of the Berinmo tribe, who have completely different ways of identifying and separating the world into different colors.

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While English speakers make a distinction between blue and green, the Berinmo do not. But the Berinmo do make a distinction between different shades of yellow. In the study, English speakers were better able to match and remember blue-green color distinctions and much poorer in making yellow-yellow matches according to the Berinmo categories. For the Berinmo, they were able to remember and distinguish yellow-yellow color matches vs. blue-green matches.

In contrast, James Elkin's book How to use your eyes, which is also about the difficulty of defining the existence of separate colors, uses scientific evidence rather than the anthropological cross-cultural analysis and experimental cross-cultural research favored by Fountain. Elkin notes that "ever since Newton used a prism to separate white light into the spectrum, there have been varying opinions about how many colors he found. Newton himself favored six, but he vacillated on that point." Elkin mainly draws his distinctions between colors based upon their functional use. For example, there are 'painter's primary' colors based on the….....

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