I’ve been consistently bothered thinking about this story and I think the biggest issue I have with it is the idea that there is a right answer at all. I know this just puts me in the same category as the people at the college who teach everyone that Green and Blue are equally valid viewpoints, but it seems to me that the truth of the matter is that perception is so subjective and societally constructed. The other people in this thread have discussed this as a matter of the Greens rationalizing, hypothetically “seeing” the wrong color because they want to, but I think that argument is fundamentally wrong because the way we view color has changed so dramatically over history and is different among cultures. It’s like the base system for numbers, or even language, to an extent—once you learn it, it’s really hard to snap out of it and think in a different way. I feel like the entire story, and the idea of the rightness of the Blues being confirmed, is just privileging a particular point of view as “right”. Maybe this is just me arguing for a less objective reality, but even though I read this a few days ago it’s been tickling the edge of my mind, bothering me.
No. No, no, no, no. Blue light is light that has a wavelength of approximately 450-495 mm and green light is light that has a wavelength of approximately 520-570 mm. If I had a device that measured the wavelength of light, the wavelength of the light coming from the sky is an empirical fact. It may not be constant, and if the wavelength is in between those ranges then it may look more bluish-green or greenish-blue depending on various factors, but I cannot socially construct the wavelength of light emitted by a given source.
No, blue is what’s perceived as blue. There are problems with physical definitions because of an endless list of exceptions involving perceptual disorders, optical illusions, lighting conditions, etc. etc. etc. People worked on this problem, and there is no objective definition of color that I am aware of.
No, blue is what is collectively perceived as blue, while also not being collectively perceived as any other colour (or color if you are a “gray”).
That’s how they came up with the objective, standard, scientific definition of blue above.
And the sky isn’t pure blue, it’s a quarter of the way between blue and green.
It was blue because its color was within the set of colors that were commonly perceived as blue. It’s the color that is defined by human perception, not each individual instance of said color.
If that’s the case, then they should be the approximately 450-495s and the approximately 520-570s, but there are lots of languages where green and blue are one color. See also history of blue; for anecdata see the link I posted in my original post in which the child who wasn’t taught the sky is blue regularly calls it colorless or white.
That would have been terrible writing. I know that language is imprecise, but that doesn’t mean that facts don’t exist, it just means that it can be hard to express them.
There’s a second point to the fable, which is that “Blue” and “Green” have had extra connotations snuck in by history:
Society is still divided along Blue and Green lines, and there is a “Blue” and a “Green” position on almost every contemporary issue of political or cultural importance. The Blues advocate taxes on individual incomes, the Greens advocate taxes on merchant sales; the Blues advocate stricter marriage laws, while the Greens wish to make it easier to obtain divorces; the Blues take their support from the heart of city areas, while the more distant farmers and watersellers tend to be Green; the Blues believe that the Earth is a huge spherical rock at the center of the universe, the Greens that it is a huge flat rock circling some other object called a Sun. Not every Blue or every Green citizen takes the “Blue” or “Green” position on every issue, but it would be rare to find a city merchant who believed the sky was blue, and yet advocated an individual tax and freer marriage laws.
Part of the point of the fable is that these positions have nothing to do with each other and also nothing to do with the color of the sky, and when you go around teaching people that the Green and Blue points of view are equally valid, you’re also teaching them not to try to settle any of these other questions (while reinforcing the implicit premise that any of the “Blue” positions above have anything to do with the sky being blue and dually for green).
Anyway, the fable isn’t actually about color. Feel free to substitute something you feel is more objective if it helps you understand the fable better (e.g. whether the air on the surface is safe to breathe).
In that case, feel free to substitute any issue in which there is a technical definition for a word that varies distinctly from culture to culture, can change dramatically over time, and discusses issues of subjectivity as applied to rationalist koans.
I’m assuming it’s something about how the assertions in the story are “the sky is blue” and “the sky is green” instead of “the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 460 nm” and “the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 540 nm”, since there can be an honest cross-cultural confusion between just what real-world colors “green” and “blue” translated to the respective languages correspond to.
What about if the parable had red instead of green then? There are no human cultures that conflate red and blue according to the cultural color term chart.
But there can’t be any cross-cultural confusion, because it is written in English. Vietnamese or Japanese people either know what the English words “blue” and “green” mean, or they don’t speak English at all and wouldn’t be reading this story.
And if the story was written in Vietnamese, it would use “xanh lá cây” which means green and “xanh dương” which means blue, rather than just “xanh”. Just because people normally use the same word to describe two different colours, doesn’t mean they can’t see the difference between those colours, and don’t have ways of describing the difference when they need to.
I’ve been consistently bothered thinking about this story and I think the biggest issue I have with it is the idea that there is a right answer at all. I know this just puts me in the same category as the people at the college who teach everyone that Green and Blue are equally valid viewpoints, but it seems to me that the truth of the matter is that perception is so subjective and societally constructed. The other people in this thread have discussed this as a matter of the Greens rationalizing, hypothetically “seeing” the wrong color because they want to, but I think that argument is fundamentally wrong because the way we view color has changed so dramatically over history and is different among cultures. It’s like the base system for numbers, or even language, to an extent—once you learn it, it’s really hard to snap out of it and think in a different way. I feel like the entire story, and the idea of the rightness of the Blues being confirmed, is just privileging a particular point of view as “right”. Maybe this is just me arguing for a less objective reality, but even though I read this a few days ago it’s been tickling the edge of my mind, bothering me.
No. No, no, no, no. Blue light is light that has a wavelength of approximately 450-495 mm and green light is light that has a wavelength of approximately 520-570 mm. If I had a device that measured the wavelength of light, the wavelength of the light coming from the sky is an empirical fact. It may not be constant, and if the wavelength is in between those ranges then it may look more bluish-green or greenish-blue depending on various factors, but I cannot socially construct the wavelength of light emitted by a given source.
What do you think this is a metaphor for?
No, blue is what’s perceived as blue. There are problems with physical definitions because of an endless list of exceptions involving perceptual disorders, optical illusions, lighting conditions, etc. etc. etc. People worked on this problem, and there is no objective definition of color that I am aware of.
No, blue is what is collectively perceived as blue, while also not being collectively perceived as any other colour (or color if you are a “gray”). That’s how they came up with the objective, standard, scientific definition of blue above.
And the sky isn’t pure blue, it’s a quarter of the way between blue and green.
This is a charming phrase.
Was Neptune not blue in 1400 because nobody had perceived it yet?
It was blue because its color was within the set of colors that were commonly perceived as blue. It’s the color that is defined by human perception, not each individual instance of said color.
If that’s the case, then they should be the approximately 450-495s and the approximately 520-570s, but there are lots of languages where green and blue are one color. See also history of blue; for anecdata see the link I posted in my original post in which the child who wasn’t taught the sky is blue regularly calls it colorless or white.
That would have been terrible writing. I know that language is imprecise, but that doesn’t mean that facts don’t exist, it just means that it can be hard to express them.
There’s a second point to the fable, which is that “Blue” and “Green” have had extra connotations snuck in by history:
Part of the point of the fable is that these positions have nothing to do with each other and also nothing to do with the color of the sky, and when you go around teaching people that the Green and Blue points of view are equally valid, you’re also teaching them not to try to settle any of these other questions (while reinforcing the implicit premise that any of the “Blue” positions above have anything to do with the sky being blue and dually for green).
Anyway, the fable isn’t actually about color. Feel free to substitute something you feel is more objective if it helps you understand the fable better (e.g. whether the air on the surface is safe to breathe).
In that case, feel free to substitute any issue in which there is a technical definition for a word that varies distinctly from culture to culture, can change dramatically over time, and discusses issues of subjectivity as applied to rationalist koans.
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make here.
I’m assuming it’s something about how the assertions in the story are “the sky is blue” and “the sky is green” instead of “the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 460 nm” and “the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 540 nm”, since there can be an honest cross-cultural confusion between just what real-world colors “green” and “blue” translated to the respective languages correspond to.
What about if the parable had red instead of green then? There are no human cultures that conflate red and blue according to the cultural color term chart.
But there can’t be any cross-cultural confusion, because it is written in English. Vietnamese or Japanese people either know what the English words “blue” and “green” mean, or they don’t speak English at all and wouldn’t be reading this story.
And if the story was written in Vietnamese, it would use “xanh lá cây” which means green and “xanh dương” which means blue, rather than just “xanh”. Just because people normally use the same word to describe two different colours, doesn’t mean they can’t see the difference between those colours, and don’t have ways of describing the difference when they need to.