Someone who is familiar with reddish-green should be in a position to produce a color series which starts with red and ends with green and which perhaps even for us constitutes a continuous transition between the two. We would then discover at the point where we always see the same shade, e.g. of brown, this person sees brown and sometimes reddish-green. It may be, for example, that he can differentiate between the colors of two chemical compounds that seem to us to be the same color and he calls one brown and the other reddish-green.
Someone who has learned to find or to mix a shade of color that is more yellowish, more whitish or more reddish, etc., than a given shade of color, i.e. who knows the concept of intermediary colors, is (now) asked to show us a reddish-green. He may simply not understand this order and perhaps react as though he had first been asked to point out regular four-, five-, and six-angled plane figures, and then were asked to point out a regular one-angled plane figure. But what if he unhesitatingly pointed to a color sample (say, to one that we would call a blackish brown)?
Even if green is not an intermediary color between yellow and blue, couldn't there be people for whom there is bluish-yellow, reddish-green? I.e. people whose color concepts deviate from ours &emdash; because, after all, the color concepts of color-blind people too deviate from those of normal people, and not every deviation from the norm must be a blindness, a defect.
People might have the concept of intermediary colors or mixed colors even if the never produced colors by mixing (in whatever sense). Their language-games might only have to do with looking for or selecting already existing intermediary or blended colors.
Someone is given a certain yellow-green (or blue-green) and told to mix a less yellowish (or bluish) one — or told to pick it out from a number of color samples. A less yellowish green, however, is not a bluish one (and vice versa). and there is also such a task as choosing, or mixing a green that is neither yellowish nor bluish. I say "or mixing" because a green does not become both bluish [usual interpretation of 'grünlich', generally regarded as a slip of the pen] and yellowish because it is produced by a kind of mixture of yellow and blue.
What is there in favor of saying that green is a primary color, not a blend of blue and yellow? Would it be right to say: "You can only know it directly by looking at the colors"? But how do I know that I mean the same by the words "primary colors" as some other person who is also inclined to call green a primary color? No, — here language-games decide.
Intuitively, some colors "feel" like primary colors more than others
If I say a piece of paper is pure white, and if snow were placed next to it and it then appeared gray, in its normal surroundings I would still be right in calling it white and not light gray. It could be that I use a more refined concept of white in a laboratory (where, for example, I also use a more refined concept of precise determination of time).
The meaning of the word 'white' is highly contextual
And of course such a construct may in turn teach us about the way we in fact use the word.
Lichtenberg says that very few people have ever seen pure white. So do most people use the word wrong, then? And how did he learn the correct use? — He constructed an ideal use from the ordinary one. And that is not to say a better one, but one that has been refined along certain lines and in the process something has been taken to extremes.
In this image, exactly the same shade is used for A and B
In a picture in which a piece of white paper gets its lightness from the blue sky, the sky is lighter than the white paper. And yet in another sense blue is the darker and white the lighter color (Goethe). On a palette white is the lightest color.
The two items at the far end of the clothes line are white
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