This doesn’t actually work. We speak of seeing green things. And we can say an object looks green even when it isn’t emitting any such rays, due to various optical illusions and the like. If it turned out that there was some specific wavelength (say around 450 nm in the otherwise blue range) that also triggered the same visual reaction in our systems as waves in the 520-570 range I don’t think we’d have trouble calling objects sending off that frequency as green. And we actually do something similar to colors from objects that emit combinations of wavelengths. People with synesthesia are similarly a problem. Dissolving this does have some subtle issues. The real issue is that the difficulty of dissolving what we mean when we say a given color is not good evidence that colors cannot be dissolved.
So, I think I can just say “mind projection fallacy” and you’ll know what I mean about most of those things.
But yes, I am not endorsing Solvent’s definition (I’ll edit in a disclaimer to that effect, and explaining why I still quoted). “Green,” as a human word, is a lot more like “disease” from Yvain’s post than it is like “a featherless biped.”
This doesn’t actually work. We speak of seeing green things. And we can say an object looks green even when it isn’t emitting any such rays, due to various optical illusions and the like. If it turned out that there was some specific wavelength (say around 450 nm in the otherwise blue range) that also triggered the same visual reaction in our systems as waves in the 520-570 range I don’t think we’d have trouble calling objects sending off that frequency as green. And we actually do something similar to colors from objects that emit combinations of wavelengths. People with synesthesia are similarly a problem. Dissolving this does have some subtle issues. The real issue is that the difficulty of dissolving what we mean when we say a given color is not good evidence that colors cannot be dissolved.
So, I think I can just say “mind projection fallacy” and you’ll know what I mean about most of those things.
But yes, I am not endorsing Solvent’s definition (I’ll edit in a disclaimer to that effect, and explaining why I still quoted). “Green,” as a human word, is a lot more like “disease” from Yvain’s post than it is like “a featherless biped.”