September 2009 Archives

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).

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

A language-game: report whether a certain body is lighter or darker than another. — But now there's a related one: state the relationship between the lightness of certain shades of color. (Compare with this: determining the relationship between the lengths of two sticks — and the relationship between two numbers.) — The form of the propositions in both language-games is the same: "X is lighter than Y". But in the first it is an external relation and the proposition is temporal, in the second it is an internal relation and the proposition is timeless.

The best way to see color is to keep one's opponent cells as fresh as possible...

Huh? — Consider hearing. Your ears may be at rest in total silence, but your mind usually isn't, because the slightest noise can be be startling. The purpose of the entire apparatus of hearing is to discriminate between things that make noise. If you want the discriminating component of your hearing apparatus to be rested, "white noise" is probably better than total silence. Similarly, if the discriminating component of your color-seeing apparatus is to be fully rested, gray is better than total darkness (black) or its opposite (white).

I shall explain what "opponent cells" are and how they function at a later stage. For now, it is enough to know that opponent cells discriminate lightness from darkness, blue from yellow, and green from red, and they are all at their default — "in between" — setting when we are looking at a neutral middle gray.