Abstract
This paper responds to Justin Broackes’ reply to my paper, “On the retinal origins of the Hering primaries.” This paper aims to clarify and further develop the ideas presented in that article. I take up several of the points Broackes raises regarding the connection between my work and that of William Thornton (Journal of the Optical Society of America 61:1155–1163, 1971) and (Color Research and Application 24:139–156, 1999) on the “prime” and “anti-prime” colors of the human visual system, the connection between those prime and anti-prime colors and hue category boundaries, and my attempt to link facts about low-level processing to the unique hues. Ultimately, while Broackes brings up several interesting issues and usefully illustrates the limits of my approach, I see no reason to retreat from the main claims I made about human spectral sensitivity and the hues.
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Notes
I also include an additional anti-prime in the extra-spectral region for reasons explain in my 2011. Since that point is irrelevant to the issues treated in this section, I pass over it here.
I say this while also wanting to raise a point about phenomenology. Broackes claims that “There are no purples that do not look to have some red and some blue in them” [doi:10.1007/s13164-011-0050-7] and in correspondence has said much the same about red and yellow always being seen in orange samples. Such claims are, of course, common in philosophical and scientific discussions of color. While I can understand their appeal, my own phenomenological reflection leads me to not know what to make of them; I have normal color vision by the usual tests. For example, I can find in the Munsell Book of Color (1976) orange (and purple) chips with hues that appear to me as basic as any unique Hering primary. I do not detect any redness or yellowness (/redness or blueness) in them, but find only certain similarities to redness and yellowness (/redness and blueness), in the same way that I find similarities between blue and green. However, samples between, say, focal yellow and this balanced/unique orange have a binary appearance that is described pretty well by “seeing amounts of yellow and red in it,” although at a certain point it becomes natural for me to prefer describing them as more-or-less orangish. Similar remarks apply for purple. On the other hand, samples between blue and green and between green and yellow all have a binary appearance to me. These observations are among the reasons I have for taking seriously Jameson and D’Andrade’s (1997) dissent from mainstream thought about the hues. See also Jameson (2010).
Characteristic curves were determined by first separating plant reflectances (those used in my 2011) denominated by ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’ (or ‘violet’), or ‘yellow’ into four groups based on those generic color descriptors; “reds” with strongly U-shaped reflectance spectra were reassigned to blue. For each sample, a new curve was derived, with the value at each wavelength determined by dividing the sample’s reflectance at that wavelength by the sum of the sample’s reflectances across all measured wavelengths. For each hue group, the characteristic curve was generated by taking the mean of the values of its members’ new curves at each wavelength. The rationale for using the new curves and characteristic curves based on them, rather than empirical reflectances, was to enable comparisons of patterns in natural spectral shapes that are unaffected by variations in absolute reflectivity throughout the spectrum between individual samples or groups.
For the record, I am convinced that the other method of predicting unique hues that I considered in section 5 of my 2011 is altogether a nonstarter. I noted its shortcoming when it was introduced and nothing since then has led me to think it can be rehabilitated.
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I thank Justin Broackes for his insightful reply to my 2011 and the exchanges we have had about these matters. His reply provides a good opportunity for me to further clarify and reflect on the project undertaken in my 2011.
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Wright, W. More on the Origins of the Hues: A Reply to Broackes. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 629–641 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0049-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0049-0