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Is your green my green? Probably not. What I perceive as pure green may appear slightly yellowish or bluish to you. This is because people have different visual systems. Moreover, the color of an object may appear different on different backgrounds or in different lighting conditions.
These facts may lead you to the conclusion that colors are subjective. Unlike characteristics such as length and temperature, colors are not objective qualities. Either nothing has a true color, or colors depend on the perception of observers and the conditions of observation.
However, perceptual variation can be misleading. We, philosophers of color, objectivity, and science, argue in our book, The Metaphysics of Colors, that colors are as objective as length and temperature.
Change of perception
There is a surprising amount of variation in how people perceive the world around them. If you present a group of people with a spectrum of colored chips from chartreuse to purple and ask them to pick a unique green chip—a chip with no yellow or blue—their choices will vary widely. In fact, there will be no chip that most observers would consider uniquely green.
In general, the background of an object can cause dramatic changes in how you perceive its colors. If you place a gray object on a lighter background, it will appear darker than if you place it on a darker background. This change in perception is perhaps most noticeable when you look at an object under different lighting, where a red apple may appear green or blue.
Of course, just because you perceive something differently doesn't prove that your perception isn't objective. Water that feels cold to one person may not feel cold to another. And while we don't know who perceives water “correctly,” or whether the question even makes sense, we can measure the temperature of water and assume that its temperature is independent of how you perceive it.
Likewise, just because you can change the appearance of an object's color doesn't mean its color has changed. You can make an apple green or blue, but that doesn't prove the apple isn't red.
For example, the Moon looks larger when it is on the horizon than when it is close to the zenith. But the size of the Moon has not changed, only its appearance. Thus, a change in the appearance of an object's color or size is not in itself a reason to assume that its color and size are not objective characteristics. In other words, the properties of an object do not depend on how they look to you.
However, given the huge amount of variation in how objects look, how can you tell what color something actually is? Is there a way to determine the color of an object despite the many different impressions you may have?
Matching colors
Perhaps defining the color of something boils down to determining whether it is red or blue. But we suggest an alternative approach. Note that squares that appear the same shade of pink on different backgrounds look different on the same background.
Sourse: www.livescience.com
