Abstract
The ways in which languages have come to divide the visible spectrum with their color terminology, in both their variety and the apparent universal tendencies, are still largely unexplained. Building on recent work in modeling color perception and categorization, as well as the theory of signaling games, we incrementally construct a color categorization model which combines perceptual characteristics of individual agents, game-theoretic signaling interaction of these agents, and the probability of observing particular colors as an environmental constraint. We also propose a method of transparent evaluation against the data gathered in the World Color Survey. The results show that the model’s predictive power is comparable to the current state of the art. Additionally, we argue that the model we suggest is superior in terms of motivation of the principles involved, and that its explanatory relevance with respect to color categorization in languages is therefore higher. Our results suggest that the universal tendencies of color categorization cannot be explained solely in terms of the shape of the color space induced by our perceptual apparatus. We believe that only by taking the heterogeneity of the phenomenon seriously can we acquire a deeper understanding of why color categorization takes the forms we observe across languages.
References
Alexander, J. McKenzie, Brian Skyrms, and Sandy L. Zabell. “Inventing New Signals.” Dynamic Games and Applications, 2:1 (2012), 129–45.10.1007/s13235-011-0027-2Search in Google Scholar
Baronchelli, Andrea, Tao Gong, Andrea Puglisi, and Vittorio Loreto. “Modeling the Emergence of Universality in Color Naming Patterns.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, (2010), 2403–7.10.1073/pnas.0908533107Search in Google Scholar
Baylor, Denis. “Colour Mechanisms of the Eye.” In Colour: Art and Science, edited by Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau, 103–26. Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1995.Search in Google Scholar
Belpaeme, Tony. “Color Category Learning in Naming-Game Simulations.” Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology. (2014), 1–5.10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_51-5Search in Google Scholar
Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1969.Search in Google Scholar
Cook, Richard, Paul Kay, and Terry Regier. “WCS Data Archives.” 2013 (accessed January). URL: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/data.html.Search in Google Scholar
Correia, José Pedro. “COM model and data analysis scripts,” July 2015. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1428652.Search in Google Scholar
Correia, José Pedro. “COM1 results,” July 2015. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1411267.Search in Google Scholar
Correia, José Pedro. “COM2 results,” July 2015. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1411268.Search in Google Scholar
Correia, José Pedro. “COM3 results,” July 2015. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1411269.Search in Google Scholar
Correia, José Pedro. “RKeK results,” July 2015. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1411252.Search in Google Scholar
Correia, José Pedro. “RKK results,” July 2015. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1411250.Search in Google Scholar
Correia, José Pedro. “WCS majority maps,” July 2015. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1411240.Search in Google Scholar
Dedrick, Don. Naming the Rainbow: Colour Language, Colour Science, and Culture. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.10.1007/978-94-017-2382-4Search in Google Scholar
Dedrick, Don. “Explanation(s) and the Patterning of Basic Colour Words Across Languages and Speakers.” In Progress in Colour Studies, Vol. Ii: Psychological Aspects, edited by Nicola Pitchford and Carole P. Biggam, 1–11. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006.Search in Google Scholar
Dowman, Mike. “Explaining Color Term Typology with an Evolutionary Model.” Cognitive Science. 31:1 (2007), 99–132.10.1080/03640210709336986Search in Google Scholar
Fairchild, Mark. Color Appearance Models. The Wiley-IS&T Series in Imaging Science and Technology. Chichester, England: Wiley, 2005.Search in Google Scholar
Fraley, Chris, Adrian Raftery, and Luca Scrucca. Mclust: Normal Mixture Modeling for Model-Based Clustering, Classification, and Density Estimation. 2014. URL: http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=mclust.Search in Google Scholar
Franke, Michael, Gerhard Jäger, and Robert van Rooij. “Vagueness, Signaling and Bounded Rationality.” In New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2010, edited by Takashi Onoda, Daisuke Bekki, and Eric McCready, 45–59. Springer, 2011.10.1007/978-3-642-25655-4_5Search in Google Scholar
Franke, Michael, and José Pedro Correia. “Vagueness and Imprecise Imitation in Signalling Games.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 69:4 (2018), 1037–67.10.1093/bjps/axx002Search in Google Scholar
Franke, Michael, and Elliott Wagner. “Game Theory and the Evolution of Meaning.” Language and Linguistics Compass. 8:9 (2014), 359–72.10.1111/lnc3.12086Search in Google Scholar
Huttegger, Simon. “How Much Rationality Do We Need to Explain Conventions?” Philosophy Compass. 9:1 (2014), 11–21.10.1111/phc3.12100Search in Google Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard. “Natural Color Categories Are Convex Sets.” In Logic, Language and Meaning - 17th Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, December 16-18, 2009, Revised Selected Papers, edited by Maria Aloni, Harald Bastiaanse, Tikitu de Jager, and Katrin Schulz, 11–20. 2010.Search in Google Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard, and Robert van Rooij. “Language Structure: Psychological and Social Constraints.” Synthese. 159 (2007), 99–130.Search in Google Scholar
Jameson, Kimberly. “Where in the World Color Survey is the support for the Hering primaries as the basis for color categorization?” In Color Ontology and Color Science, edited by Jonathan Cohen and Mohan Matthen, 179–202. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010.10.7551/mitpress/9780262013857.003.0008Search in Google Scholar
Jameson, Kimberly, and Natalia Komarova. “Evolutionary Models of Color Categorization. I. Population Categorization Systems Based on Normal and Dichromat Observers.” Journal of the Optical Society of America. 26 (2009), 1414–23.Search in Google Scholar
Jameson, Kimberly, and Natalia Komarova. “Evolutionary Models of Color Categorization. II. Realistic Observer Models and Population Heterogeneity.” Journal of the Optical Society of America. 26 (2009), 1424–36.Search in Google Scholar
Jameson, Kimberly, and Roy G. D’Andrade. “It’s Not Really Red, Green, Yellow, Blue: An Inquiry into Perceptual Color Space.” In Color Categories in Thought and Language, edited by Clyde Laurence Hardin and Luisa Maffi, 295–319. Cambridge University Press, 1997.10.1017/CBO9780511519819.014Search in Google Scholar
Kallens, Pablo Andrés Contreras, Rick Dale, and Paul E. Smaldino. “Cultural Evolution of Categorization.” Cognitive Systems Research. 52 (2018), 765-774.Search in Google Scholar
Kay, Paul. “Synchronic Variability and Diachronic Change in Basic Color Terms.” Language in Society. 4 (1975), 257–70.Search in Google Scholar
Kay, Paul, and Luisa Maffi. “Color Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons.” American Anthropologist. 101 (1999), 743–60.Search in Google Scholar
Kay, Paul, and Chad McDaniel. “The Linguistic Significance of the Meanings of Basic Color Terms.” Language. 54 (1978), 610–46.Search in Google Scholar
Kay, Paul, and Terry Regier. “Resolving the Question of Color Naming Universals.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100 (2003), 9085–9.Search in Google Scholar
Kay, Paul, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William R. Merrifield, and Richard Cook. The World Color Survey. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language; Information, 2009.Search in Google Scholar
Kay, Paul, and Richard Cook. “World Color Survey.” In Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology, edited by Ming Ronnier Luo, 1265–71. New York: Springer, 2016.10.1007/978-1-4419-8071-7_113Search in Google Scholar
Komarova, Natalia, Kimberly Jameson, and Louis Narens. “Evolutionary Models of Color Categorization Based on Discrimination.” Journal of Mathematical Psychology. 51:6 (2007), 359–82.10.1016/j.jmp.2007.06.001Search in Google Scholar
Kuehni, Rolf. “CIEDE2000: Milestone, or Final Answer?” COLOR Research and Application. 27 (2002), 126–27.10.1002/col.10035Search in Google Scholar
Lenneberg, Eric, and John Roberts. “The Language of Experience: A Study in Methodology.” In Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics, Memoir 13. Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1956.Search in Google Scholar
Lewis, David. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Harvard University Press, 1969.Search in Google Scholar
Loreto, Vittorio, Animesh Mukherjee, and Francesca Tria. “On the Origin of the Hierarchy of Color Names.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (2012), 6819–24.Search in Google Scholar
Lucy, John. “The Linguistics of ‘Color’.” In Color Categories in Thought and Language, edited by Clyde Laurence Hardin and Luisa Maffi, 320–46. Cambridge University Press, 1997.10.1017/CBO9780511519819.015Search in Google Scholar
Lyons, John. “Colour in Language.” In Colour: Art and Science, edited by Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau, 175–93. Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1995.Search in Google Scholar
Masaoka, Kenichiro, Roy Berns, Mark Fairchild, and Farhad Moghareh Abed. “Number of discernible object colors is a conundrum.” Journal of the Optical Society of America. 30:2 (2013), 264–77.10.1364/JOSAA.30.000264Search in Google Scholar
Mollon, John. “Seeing Colour.” In Colour: Art and Science, edited by Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau, 127–50. Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1995.Search in Google Scholar
O’Connor, Cailin. “The Evolution of Vagueness.” Erkenntnis. 79:4 (2014), 707–27.10.1007/s10670-013-9463-2Search in Google Scholar
Ocelák, Radek. “Carving up the Rainbow: How to Model Linguistic Categorization of Color.” Master’s thesis, 2013.Search in Google Scholar
Ocelák, Radek. “The Myth of Unique Hues.” Topoi. 34:2 (2015), 513–22.10.1007/s11245-014-9249-4Search in Google Scholar
Ocelák, Radek. “‘Categorical Perception’ and Linguistic Categorization of Color.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 7:1 (2016), 55–70.10.1007/s13164-015-0237-4Search in Google Scholar
Olmos, Adriana, and Frederick Kingdom. “A Biologically Inspired Algorithm for the Recovery of Shading and Reflectance Images.” Perception. 33:12 (2004), 1463–73.10.1068/p5321Search in Google Scholar
Park, Jungkyu, Sean Tauber, Kimberly Jameson, and Louis Narens. “The Evolution of Shared Concepts in Changing Populations.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology. (2018), 1-20.10.1007/s13164-018-0420-5Search in Google Scholar
R Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2014. URL: http://www.R-project.org/.Search in Google Scholar
Rand, William. “Objective Criteria for the Evaluation of Clustering Methods.” Journal of the American Statistical Association. 66:336 (1971), 846–50.10.1080/01621459.1971.10482356Search in Google Scholar
Regier, Terry, Paul Kay, and Richard Cook. “Focal Colors Are Universal After All.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102 (2005), 8386–91.Search in Google Scholar
Regier, Terry, Paul Kay, and Naveen Khetarpal. “Color Naming Reflects Optimal Partitions of Color Space.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (2007), 1436–41.Search in Google Scholar
Regier, Terry, Charles Kemp, and Paul Kay. “Word Meanings Across Languages Support Efficient Communication.” In The Handbook of Language Emergence, edited by Brian MacWhinney and William O’Grady. Hoboken, Wiley, 2015.10.1002/9781118346136.ch11Search in Google Scholar
Roberson, Debi, Jules Davidoff, Ian Davies, and Laura R. Shapiro. “Color Categories: Evidence for the Cultural Relativity Hypothesis.” Cognitive Psychology. 50 (2005), 378–411.Search in Google Scholar
Roberson, Debi, Ian Davies, and Jules Davidoff. “Color Categories Are Not Universal: Replications and Evidence Form a Stone-Age Culture.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 126 (2000), 369–98.Search in Google Scholar
Saunders, Barbara. “Revisiting Basic Color Terms.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 6 (2000), 81–99.10.1111/1467-9655.00005Search in Google Scholar
Saunders, Barbara. “Towards a New Topology of Color.” In Anthropology of Colour: Interdisciplinary Multilevel Modeling, edited by Robert E. MacLaury, Galina V. Paramei, and Don Dedrick, 467–79. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007.Search in Google Scholar
Saunders, Barbara, and Jaap van Brakel. “Are There Nontrivial Constraints on Colour Categorization?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 20 (1997), 167–228.Search in Google Scholar
Saunders, Barbara, and Jaap van Brakel. “Colour: An Exosomatic Organ?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 20 (1997), 212–20.Search in Google Scholar
Skyrms, Brian. Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information. Oxford University Press, 2010.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580828.003.0005Search in Google Scholar
Skyrms, Brian. Evolution of the Social Contract. Cambridge University Press, 1996.10.1017/CBO9780511806308Search in Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert. “Saying and Meaning, Cheap Talk and Credibility.” In Game Theory and Pragmatics, edited by Anton Benz, Gerhard Jäger, and Robert van Rooij, 83–100. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.10.1057/9780230285897_2Search in Google Scholar
Steels, Luc, and Tony Belpaeme. “Coordinating Perceptually Grounded Categories Through Language: A Case Study for Colour.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 28 (2005), 469–529.Search in Google Scholar
Taylor, Peter D., and Leo B. Jonker. “Evolutionarily Stable Strategies and Game Dynamics.” Mathematical Biosciences. (1978), 145–56.10.1016/0025-5564(78)90077-9Search in Google Scholar
Vinh, Nguyen Xuan, Julien Epps, and James Bailey. “Information Theoretic Measures for Clusterings Comparison: Variants, Properties, Normalization and Correction for Chance.” Journal of Machine Learning Research. 11 (2010), 2837–54.Search in Google Scholar
Witzel, Christoph. “Misconceptions About Colour Categories.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology. (2018), 1–42.Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 José Pedro Correia et al., published by De Gruyter Open
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.