by GrahamH wrote:zoon wrote:To say that a London bus is not really red is normally to imply that it’s some other colour, not that there’s something inherently subjective about colour terms.
To be clear, I have not stated that "a London bus is not really red". Rather, I have pointed to problems in claiming that "a London bus is actually red", which is still an unclear meaning unless we take the "most people will agree it is red" line.
In the very general way you are stating this, it’s not just a problem for colour terms but for all words, the meaning of any word is unclear unless we take the “most people will agree” line. A word does not have meaning as an intrinsic physical property, it only has meaning in so far as a human brain has processed it (in ways we don’t understand), and it’s only useful for communication if enough human brains process it in the same way.
Perhaps the more accurate point about colours is that e.g. the colour of a bus is a combined property of the chemicals in the bus’s paint, and of normal lighting conditions and normal human brains, it’s not, scientifically, a simple property of the bus. But the colour is then still objective, in the way that it’s an objective fact that a normal human brain has hippocampi and optic nerves. This way of looking at it avoids the philosophical problems of subjectivity versus objectivity. If we start trying to pin down the meanings of words without assuming a high level of intersubjective agreement, we get into trouble, we have to question the fundamentals of our thinking and communication. Perhaps they should be questioned (as jamest does, I agree with his questioning but not his answer), but this is going further than the question of why the colour of an object is treated differently from e.g. its mass.
