REVISITING BASIC COLOR TERMS

B S
Centre for Social & Cultural Antropology and Institute for Philosophy,
University of Leuven

This article revisits the classic paradigm of Berlin and Kay (1969). First, four substantial revi-
sions indicating the current position and appeal to evolution are outlined. Second, the work
is placed in its historical context of scholarly thought. Third, the attempt to operationalize
the Whorfian hypothesis is shown to establish a frame against which Berlin and Kay reacted,
and an experimental practice they appropriated. Their programme is disclosed as a structure
in which results are self-evident, when in fact they are deduced from prior commitments.
Berlin and Kay’s new alliance with colour science is then examined by showing how experi-
ments cancel the life-world, how a notion of ‘unmediated presence’ is methodologically
exploited, how research techniques are effaced and data are ‘cleaned’. Finally, it is suggested
that the thesis is built on layers of mistakes which produce misrepresentations both of colour
science and of intercultural relations.

Berlin and Kay’s (1969) theory of the universality and evolutionary emergence
of Basic Color Terms (BCTs) has withstood the test of time and may be
regarded as ‘classic’ (Gadamer 1989). Four substantial theoretical revisions (Kay
1975; Kay & McDaniel 1978; Kay & Kempton 1984; Kay, Berlin & Merrifield
1991) have strengthened the programme and moved it out of anthropo-
logical linguistics into colour science, and a prestigious conference held in
California in 1992 provides the stamp of approval by one cohort of colour
scientists (Hardin & Maffi 1997).1 Sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists
and ecological cognitive scientists also regard it as a pre-eminent case study
(Lumsden & Wilson 1981; Shepard 1992; Thompson 1995). With the immi-
nent publication of new data from the World Color Survey (hereinafter: WCS)
(Kay et al. 1997), it seems appropriate to review and assess this programme.
My intention is three-fold: (i) to restore a historiographic dimension to the
account of Basic Color Terms; (ii) to examine its co-optation of colour science;
(iii) to identify errors in it and suggest a new perspective. Before doing so
however, I will briefly recapitulate Berlin and Kay’s (1969) programme, present
an outline of its four revisions, indicate its current position, and bring out its
appeal to ‘bio-cultural evolution’ (now referred to as ‘development’).

Berlin and Kay 1969

Berlin and Kay (hereinafter: B&K), presenting their work as genuinely new,
formulated their key question as: If ‘the colour sense’ is universal, why is its
lexicalization so diverse? Like Magnus (1880), their initial answer was: There
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2000.
J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 6, 81–99
82 BARBARA SAUNDERS

is evolution in language. Unlike Magnus, however, B&K were preoccu-

pied by a ‘deeper level’ of linguistic behaviour, a level that revealed ‘building
blocks’ or ‘atoms’ or ‘tokens’ in the brain.2 When linguistically activated, these
tokens, structuring the ‘colour space’, became a mandatory ‘code’ of semantic
universals (later to be called ‘categories’). It is to this ‘code’ that the original
expression ‘Basic Color Terms’ refers.
However, even at this deeper level, B&K found that languages differ in the
number of ‘tokens’ activated. Therefore, they proposed an even deeper level
of ‘species-specific bio-morphological structures’ which would govern their
emergence in a preordained order (B & K 1969: 109). This level, the product
of evolutionary forces, was related to processes found in society at large,
correlated to the ‘level’ of technological development and ultimately shaped
by the human biological substratum.
B&K proposed BCTs as a ‘natural law’ or ‘generative rule’ of endogenous
growth (see Diagram 1). They emerge in a continuous series, each later stage
‘transcending’ earlier stages in differentiation, marking a metamorphosis along
the path towards its telos – the full lexicalization of the ‘colour space.’ Thus,
the diversity of colour lexica should no longer be seen as ‘relative’ or ‘arbi-
trary’ or ‘random’.3 Colour lexica may differ superficially, but their underly-
ing substructure forms a continuous series.
Revisions to the model were introduced in four subsequent papers. First,
in the light of a body of work (Berlin & Berlin 1975; Dougherty 1974; Hage
& Hawkes 1975; Rosch 1972a; 1972b), Kay (1975) proposed a number of
changes in the specification of the evolutionary stages. The Chomskian ‘error’
of an ideal homogeneous language community – underpinning the 1969
research – was recognized, the psychological criterion of a BCT (saliency, easy
elicitation) was abandoned, and individual speakers henceforth were held to
embody their own evolutionary stage.
Second, Kay and McDaniel (hereinafter: K&McD) said that ‘basic color
categories . . . can be derived directly from the neural response patterns that
underlie the perception of color’ (K&McD 1978: 630). There are six
Fundamental Neural Response Categories (FNRs): black, white, red, yellow,
green, blue. Each is identical with a primary semantic category and can be
named by the English words. More than six BCTs in a language (stage V and
beyond) result from fuzzy intersections of FNRs, leading to derived BCTs.
Less than six BCTs is the result of composite categories based on fuzzy unions
of FNRs, the most common being GRUE (GREEN + BLUE). With this, K
& McD have located the ‘Species-specilic biomorphological structures’
hypothesized to underlie BCTs.

Stage I Stage II Stage III/IV Stage V Stage VI Stage VIII

BLACK GREEN PURPLE

WHITE + RED + or/and + BLUE + BROWN + PINK
YELLOW ORANGE
GRAY

D 1. Evolutionary sequence of BCTs as proposed by Berlin & Kay (1969: 4).
 BARBARA SAUNDERS 83

Third, Kay and Kempton (1984) assert there is a ‘Whorfian effect’ in colour
category boundaries.They show that where there is a lexical boundary opera-
tive in a domain like colour, it is possible to get between language and per-
ception in psychophysical JND experiments to show how the lexical
boundary ‘distorts’ perception. (JND – just noticable difference – refers to the
perceptual threshold that corresponds to the magnitude of the stimulus needed
to generate the very least noticeable difference between two stimuli. JNDs
go back to Fechner’s aim to establish measurable units of sensation, quantifiable
increments that would allow human perception to be made calculable and
productive.) Kay and Kempton invoke the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and argue
that the American English habit of placing a boundary between green and
blue distorts the perception of ‘true’ JND similarity and difference, while
Tarahumara speakers of Mexico have no such habit and so see JND-reality
correctly. This modifies the cavlier anti-relativist claims to become the ‘cor-
rective to . . . ethnocentric evolutionism’ (Kay & Kempton 1984: 65).
Fourth, Kay, Berlin and Merrifield (1991) is the first publication in this
stream in which all pretence to ‘cultural’ evolution is dropped. Instead, the
authors say that the broad aim of their project is to ‘discover which . . . bio-
logically exogenous factors determine the particular parameters of cultural
variation in particular times and places’ (1991: 13). They justify this aim by
invoking the constraints on intercultural variation that had been discovered
(B&K 1969); new knowledge of the relevant biological substrate, much of it
discovered independently of anthropology (in colour science); a set of fairly
precise generalizations linking the substrate and constraints (K&McD 1978);
the fact that the findings of the WCS support and explain parts of the model
(although they challenge other parts).4 Reflecting this naturalistic shift, in 1997
Kay and Berlin argued, with respect to a 4-stage neurobiological model of
colour perception of De Valois and De Valois (1993; 1996), that the two
outputs of a hypothetical Stage 3 (see Figure 1) ‘would give us a neurologi-
cal basis for the red-or-yellow and green-or-blue categories so often observed
in the color vocabularies of local languages’ (Kay & Berlin 1997: 201; though
they do not impute this position to De Valois & De Valois).
Mainstream cultural anthropology might argue that language is the pre-
eminent cultural achievement, and thus cross-cultural colour naming should
be regarded as purely cultural, a thesis Berlin and Kay might support. However,

L0 M0
+ stage 3 +
-M0 -L0

+ + + +
stage 4
S0 -S0 S0 -S0

red yellow resulting green blue

colours

F 1. Stage 3 and stage 4 of the model of De Valois and De Valois (1993; 1996), as pre-
sented and used by Kay and Berlin (1997). Stage 3 in the model of De Valois and
De Valois would correspond with Kay and Berlin’s composites red-or-yellow and
blue-or-green in the evolutionary model suggested by their colour naming data.
84 BARBARA SAUNDERS

their direct concern (1969: 109–10) is with the ‘bio-cultural systems’ of

perceptuo-linguistic functions which ‘whisper through’ the human genus. From
the outset it had been made clear that perceptual processes and language were
necessarily isomorphic; language, like perception, being biologically grounded.
But the ambiguity of the ‘bio-cultural’ appears when we grasp the implica-
tion of the appeal to the De Valois model, for should such a neurological
structure be identified it would hard-wire two composite categories at their
relevant evolutionary (‘developmental’) stage as the necessary ‘pre-cultural’
precursor.5
In what follows I show that, just as Newton’s famous self-description
‘Hypotheses non fingo’ masks the actual deduction of his experimentum crucis from
‘higher-level’ laws, so too Berlin and Kay’s BCTs and their evolutionary stages
are based on a similar appeal to invisible laws. First, however, I will describe
the historical context of the research paradigm of Basic Color Terms.

History of BCT
While BCT was still in press, B&K’s theory was presented at a special Institute
of the 1969 American Anthropological Association, and its reception left no
doubt that their work was regarded as significant.As Berlin (1970: 3) made clear,
BCT was an important case-study. It vindicated (evolutionary) semantic uni-
versals at least for the ‘colour domain’, one of the sensory domains through
which it was held we can get at the unvarnished and pre-theoretical deliver-
ance of experience, and so routed entrenched relativist perspectives. It demon-
strated the merits of an ethnoscience that aimed at ‘the discovery of the tacit
theory of the world lying behind a language and its usage’ (Fischer 1970: v; cf.
Kay 1970: 20), and so silenced its critics, notably Harris (1968: 591, 597), who
was rebutted in Berlin (1970) and Kay (1970). The anthropological and lin-
guistic community accepted the thesis of BCT as a highly original work, a view
that accords with B&K’s ahistorical methodology but that ignores their debt to
the earlier research traditions that made their work possible.
B&K (1969: 134) said that they had been ignorant of all preceding work:
‘After our theory had been developed it became clear that a search of the lit-
erature for relevant evidence was essential . . . [and] we first became aware of
the long history of the study of the development of color nomenclature.’ They
were first introduced to earlier interest in colour naming when they consulted
the reports of the Torres Strait Expedition (Bartlett 1929 and Rivers 1901a
are sources in B&K 1969).
Gladstone (1858; 1877) had been the first to deal with the evolution of
colour terms, matching Greek terms against a set of English terms held to be
the standard.6 In response to Gladstone’s work, a literature developed linking
the history of colour terminologies of literate peoples to the contemporary
colour terminologies of non-literate peoples. This reached an apex of interest
in the 1870s in both German and English publications.
While Gladstone had been concerned only with a single culture (Homeric
Greek), Geiger (1871; 1872) proposed the first cross-cultural evolutionary
theory of colour names. He considered colour words to be a kind of ‘reflex’
of a coloured stimulus. Possessing a structure of its own, this reflex registered
linguistically the spectral order in an additive progression of at least six stages.
 BARBARA SAUNDERS 85

First, black and red were named, suggesting a vague conception of something
coloured; second, black and red stood in contrast to one another; third, yellow
registered; fourth, white, previously included in red, was distinguished; fifth,
green developed out of yellow; sixth and last, blue emerged.
Geiger followed Gladstone in arguing that ‘primitive’ people had fewer
colour names because they were physiologically underdeveloped. For him,
people with no word for blue could not see blue. However, those informed
by Darwinian theory soon pointed out that this was extremely implausible,
and in the 1870s data on colour vision started to appear which undercut this
physiological argument. Positioning himself within contemporary evolution-
ary theory, Allen (1878; 1879) articulated detailed, scientifically well-informed
objections to the arguments of Gladstone and Geiger. He argued that any
‘colour sense’ was fully present not only in humanity’s remotest ancestors but
also in those least touched by European thought. Instead, he proposed a theory
of socio-cultural and linguistic development to account for the regularities
noted by Geiger and by Magnus (1877).
Views similar to those of Allen appeared in the German literature from
1877. Magnus (1880) considered Geiger and his earlier self (Magnus 1877) to
have been right about philological evolution, but wrong about physiological
evolution. Using the same data gathering methods as Allen, questionnaires sent
out to missionaries and colonial officials, Magnus collected a corpus of field
data from which he concluded that colour recognition and colour vocabulary
were not necessarily tied together.7
Two aspects of the data Magnus assembled were especially intriguing. Firstly,
there was an elaboration of secondary colour terminology ‘in areas of high cul-
tural interest’. Secondly, there was a lack of precise lexical differentiation
among the ‘colours of shorter wave lengths, therefore green and especially
blue’ (B&K 1969: 141). Almost all cultures had words for ‘white’, ‘black’ and
‘red’; very few of the ‘primitive’ cultures had both a word for ‘blue’ and one
for ‘green’. This ‘evolutionary development’ from the long to the short wave-
length range of the spectrum, it was claimed, was the same as had been found
by Gladstone and Geiger in languages such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit.

Operationalizing the Whorfian Thesis

According to B&K there were no further relevant theoretical advances
after Magnus, although Rivers8 and Van Wijk filled in details.9 In American
anthropology, stultification set in ‘due to the extreme cultural relativism of
Franz Boas and his students’ (B&K 1969: 149) having thrown evolutionism
into disrepute. Hence, B&K could dismiss the revival of interest in colour
naming in psychology in the 1950s as irrelevant, because it was concerned
with the linguistic-relativity thesis attributed to Sapir, a student of Boas, and
Whorf, a student of Sapir. Congruent with their own ahistorical stance, while
B&K mention briefly the work of Lenneberg and Roberts (1956), Ray (1952,
1953) and Conklin (1955), they scarcely engage with it.
In what follows I briefly review the complexities that arose within the
psychological paradigm while trying to define, measure and quantify the rela-
tionship between linguistic and cognitive parameters (to objectify and opera-
tionalize the Whorfian hypothesis) and will indicate the impasse in which it
86 BARBARA SAUNDERS

resulted.10 I do so in order to show just how much theoretical background

and experimental practice was in place in the decades preceding the publica-
tion of BCT.
In the United States in the years just after the Second World War, the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis had become a major focus of investigation in anthropol-
ogy, linguistics, psychology and philosophy.11 For my purposes, the most
important research was by Brown (at Harvard) and Lenneberg (at MIT), who
were examining ethnolinguistic assumptions in the hope of characterizing the
relation of linguistic to cognitive (i.e. psychological) parameters.Their aim was
to arrive at psychological generalizations of cross-cultural validity. In a retro-
spective paper (1976: 128–9) Brown states that this group of researchers pinned
hope on finding correlations between language structure and cognitive struc-
ture, thereby opening up the possibility of formulating a theory of non-lin-
guistic cognition (recognition, attention, memory) lacking in Whorf. This
programme was to be operationalized as follows (Rosch 1988: 375):

1. Choose a lexical domain for which the referents are completely universal: colour
is ideal because it has a ‘basic description’ in terms of coordinates in the Munsell colour
space.
2. Determine the lexical ‘codability’ of different regions of the colour space, using a
standardized set of colour chips. The codability of a colour is defined as better or higher if
the lexical item used is shorter, is produced faster, and has a meaning widely agreed upon
by native speakers.
3. Correlate the linguistic variable ‘codability’ with some cognitive variable, e.g.
‘recognition.’

The goal was to find a universal law relating ‘referent codability’ to recogni-
tion (and perhaps other aspects of cognition). Yet when the Brown and
Lenneberg experiment (1954), performed on English-speaking subjects,
appeared to show that the ‘codability’ of a colour correlated with ‘recognition
memory accuracy’, the result was challenged by Burnham and Clark (1955).
Using the Farnsworth-Munsell array of unsaturated colours (instead of the
saturated Munsell colours of Brown and Lenneberg), they found that the
colour with the most uncertain name was the colour chip most accurately
remembered: conversely, the better the naming agreement, the lower the
recognition score. With different methods producing widely varying results
there seemed to be a total lack of correlation between the linguistic and the
cognitive.
In his retrospective discussion of Lenneberg’s conclusion, Brown (1976:
143–4) considered the use of highly saturated and de-saturated colours in the
different tests to have been decisive in accounting for the inconclusive results.12
However, Lantz and Stefflre (1964), following up Lenneberg’s (1961) conclu-
sion, proposed that ‘communication accuracy’ was the important variable, not
codability. In other words, even for something so apparently straightforward
as colour, the cryptographer model did not work – a conclusion that
Lenneberg seems to have shared.
Prior to this conclusion, however, Lenneberg had conducted a
theoretical-experimental study that stands out as setting in detail the prag-
matic agenda (though not quite the theoretical agenda) for B&K’s work to
 BARBARA SAUNDERS 87

come.This was reported in Lenneberg and Roberts (1956). Conducting field-

work in 1953 to compare English and Zuñi colour words, Lenneberg and
Roberts tested four monolingual and eight bilingual Zuñi informants for their
colour nomenclature (1956: 21). For purposes of elicitation they used the
Munsell colour array of 320 chips, all at maximum saturation, representing 40
hues and 8 degrees of lightness-brightness. To these were added 9 achromatic
hues – shades of white, black, grey. (This is the same array that B&K were to
use for their 1969 study.) The conclusion was that (1956: 30) ‘most of the
color categories of one language have an equivalent category in the other.
The exception, however, is interesting. In English yellow and orange are very
sharply defined, separate categories whereas in Zuñi (as spoken by monolin-
guals) there is only one category encompassing both orange and yellow’.
It is worth noting that the framing of this experiment involved important
simplifications. For instance, Lenneberg had no patience for teasing out and
distinguishing levels of ‘impressions’ (the state of a perceiver), noticings (requir-
ing concepts), and reportings (indicating the causal antecedent common to
reports of how things are and how they look).13 Rather, congruent with his
cryptographer stance (and just as B&K were later to do), Lenneberg conflated
these very different levels into one amorphous package which he called ‘the
language of experience’, a kind of primordial and non-problematic feature of
immediate experience.
Remarkably, when B&K (1969) provided BCTs for Zuñi (as listed in Table
1) they totally revamped the material. They chose those terms from L&R’s
elicitation lists (not experiments) with the highest agreement (their own psy-
chological criterion of salience and easy elicitation for a BCT). But they failed
to apply their other linguistic criteria,14 which ought, in theory, to have pro-
duced a ‘basic’ term coincident with a ‘focus’. Linguistic criteria and ‘foci’ do
not mesh in Zuñi. A number of terms chosen by B&K violate the criteria
for a BCT: they are not monolexemic, they are not used by all speakers, or
they are not abstract.

T 1. Zuñi ‘colour’ words. In the left column the Zuñi

terms according to B&K; in the right column, those according
to L&R. The English terms in the middle column are also the
BCTs for Zuñi as given by B&K (1969: 103), purportedly
derived from L&R. In B&K’s experimental procedure L&R’s
component yellow-orange is erased.

klojanna ‘white’ k?ojanna

glinna ‘black’ q?inna
shilowa ‘red’ shilowa
lashena ‘green’ ?ashena
lhupzlinna ‘yellow’ lhupz?inna
?openchinanne ‘orange’ ?olenchinanne
lhil lanna ‘blue’ lhi??anna
sossona ‘brown’ sossona
kle:qlina ‘purple’ k?e:q?ina
jekk?achonanne ‘pink’ jekk?achonanne
?okk?ana ‘gray’ lokk?anna
88 BARBARA SAUNDERS

Adopting all the experimental procedures devised by Lenneberg, Brown and

Roberts, B&K differed only in their antecedent commitments. Lenneberg
and Roberts, inspired by Mach (1900; see Lenneberg & Roberts 1956: 30
n. 34), attempted a rigid ‘operationalisation’ of the ‘language of experience’
in order to fit Whorfian ethnolinguistics into their cryptographer model of
language and thought. B&K, cryptographers too, were however attempting
a ‘pseudo-empirical’ synthesis, to prove semantic universals. (The sense in
which it is ‘pseudo-empirical’ will become clear in the next section.)15 The
point of Lenneberg and Roberts’s experiments was irrelevant to B&K. They
disregarded the point of Lenneberg and Roberts’s foci, universal agreement
on a single chip; they misapplied their own criteria for BCTs: words chosen
as BCTs were consistent only with the psychological criterion of inter-
informant agreement rather than with any of the other criteria of ‘basicness’;
they ignored Lenneberg and Roberts’s major conclusion, that Zuñi has a
‘composite category’ for yellow-orange. When BCT was published, several
reviewers pointed to similar remarkable ways in which B&K dealt both
with their predecessors and sources (see Saunders 1992: Chap. 4; Hickerson
1971).
In the next section I suggest that one reason for the contradictions in B&K’s
treatment of Lenneberg and Roberts’s data is that, as scientific practices and
concepts change, phenomena manifest themselves differently. The comparison
with Lenneberg and Roberts is suggestive, as it sets B&K’s strategies in relief.
In so far as the mise en scène is set by relativism, semantic universals and evo-
lution, theoretical significance becomes self-evident through the presentation
of data as perspicuous. In addition to a colour chart (in each volume), more
than half of BCT comprises mappings, tables and diagrams which draw the
reader into a self-confirming investigation constructed so as to be ‘realistic’
and to soothe critical anxieties. With these, B&K weave together a fabric of
mutually supporting strands integral to the production of a form of knowl-
edge whose organization and modalities have much to do with the persua-
siveness of their thesis. The thesis is not, however, identical to any of these
rhetorical phenomena, whose primary purpose is to objectify it; rather its rea-
soning and meaning are constituted out of them.

Berlin and Kay and colour science

If anything has recharged the batteries of the B&K paradigm it is the frater-
nal spirit of mutual embrace with colour science (see Hardin & Maffi 1997).
Without this fiat, the paradigm would have disappeared in a morass of incom-
mensurable field data requiring a proliferation of alternative evolutionary rout-
ings (Saunders 1992). Instead, just as the Young-Maxwell-Helmholtz thesis in
the history of colour science hypothesized three primary colours instantiated
in the retina, and Hering appealed to four unique hues, so B&K may be
regarded as having taken the great step forwards in the reduction of the
multiplicity of colour words to a few physiological variables. Colour science
characterizes and validates these variables.
How did this marriage of anthropological linguistics and colour science
come about? From the beginning there was convergence. The bases of all
colour naming and colour perception research are ‘threshold’ and ‘matching’
 BARBARA SAUNDERS 89

experiments. While much of this work can be regarded as biophysics (at least
since Mach in the 1860s), there is another tradition that stands behind and
validates the instrumentalities of B&K’s approach.This is the tradition of work
inspired by Fechner in his attempt at a mathesis of ‘sensation’, and behind
which stands the larger project (to which the biophysics approach also aspires)
of naturalizing and mathematicizing the mind. The threshold experiment,
which also makes sense in biophysical and physiological terms, was given a
particular twist by Fechner in order to provide a quantitative study of sensory
processes. What it succeeds in doing is establishing a kind of ‘natural’ bound-
ary for the universal ‘colour space’, thereby providing ‘constraints’ to human
beingness to which even imaginative and sensitive Wittgensteinian commen-
tators like Brown (1974) and Bousfield (1979) must bow. The matching ex-
periment then fills in the topography with a metric and contours, which can
be done in various ways, including the use of JNDs as in the Munsell system.
Thus, threshold and matching experiments produce a quantitative function,
or at least a topological ordering, that links a stimulus series to a response
series in a law-like relation. It was Fechner’s leap to interpret ‘response’ as ‘sen-
sation’, a leap that was accepted by the Optical Society of America and the
Commission Internationale de L’Éclairage (CIE). B&K capitalize on and con-
solidate this leap with their Cartesian line of thought about basic colour terms
and categories, and it is from just such a fount of indubitable beliefs that the
justificatory status of empirical sensory data must be assumed to flow.
In what follows I try to make this approach problematic, not by querying
the constraints (which are indisputable the way the argument is set up: humans
are all at the same level of biological evolution), but by considering how these
‘constraints’ are constituted in the first place. In passing, I discuss the nexus
in which threshold and matching experiments are naturally ‘at home’; that is,
the way that scientific reality replaces ordinary reality with a ‘data-base’ of
encodings and theoretical models (Heelan 1992).

The spectral creature, phenomenological subject and normal observer

In the Helmholtz-Hering manifold16 the subject exists in three different
worlds: the outer world of physical impingement, the inner world of
psychology, and the ‘real’ world of the decontextualized ‘normal observer’.
In the outer world, the subject is responsive to wavelength and intensity
of light impinging on retinal receptors. These responses are governed by
the three types of cone filters in the retina that define the organizm as a
‘trichromat’. Human beings and honey bees are trichromats. Other spectrally
responsive creatures are referred to as dichromat (cat), tetrachromat (goldfish,
turtle), or even pentachromat (pigeon?) (see Thompson 1995; Thompson
et al. 1992).
In the inner world of Hering-phenomenology, the subject is constructed
by attributes with psychological characterizations. ‘Sensations’, ‘introspection’,
and ‘experience’ typify this subject and constitute its psychological reality.
The Hering-world shows itself in the introspective uniqueness of red, green,
yellow and blue, the opposition of red-green, yellow-blue, and in modes of
appearance, memory effects, light-dark adaptation, after-images, attention, and
preference, all of which are quantifiably defined.
90 BARBARA SAUNDERS

When the spectral creature of Helmholtz impingements and the phe-

nomenological subject of Hering opponency are tied together, a relationship
between wavelength and psychological reality results. First proposed in 1922 by
the Optical Society of America (OSA), physicists and psychologists negotiated a
definition of colour as a specific and replicable response to a physical phe-
nomenon. Inherent to this definition was the assumption of an invariant
percept-sensation common to the ‘normal observer’ (Johnston 1996). This
normal observer, the mixing of spectral creature and phenomenological subject,
becomes a trichromat-phenomenal automaton, existing out of time.
Between 1880 and 1950 a converging standardization took place. In the
wake of Helmholtz, hue, saturation and lightness (or brightness) were derived
by analogy to elementary physical operations, allowing sensations to be char-
acterized as an engineering problem (Mausfeld 1997). Though the concept of
‘saturation’ was rejected by many (including Hering, who regarded it as a mix-
up of physical and perceptual aspects), others, von Kries for example, began
to accept it. With the need for a coherent narrative, and in the light of prag-
matic results, caveats were forgotten (Mausfeld 1997). Rather, with the accep-
tance of hue, saturation and lightness as the defining parameters of chromatic
sensation came the intuitive self-evidence of the three-dimensional colour
space, which provided the a priori essence of colour. It is this that threshold
and matching experiments measure.

The inner landscape

Whenever and wherever there is exchange, quantification is possible.17 If the
landscape of exchange is psychological, then a numeric can be imposed. In
the Fechner-Munsell tradition, the relevant tradition for the B&K programme,
imposing numerical structure on the data of stimuli and response constitutes
the most powerful kind of control. Doing so requires that there is a graded
stimulus series and that objective stimulus and subjective response can be cor-
related.With a graded stimulus series, the subject responds with yes-no, more-
less. This is the essence of a scaling experiment, by which an innate capability
of the organism to respond is detected and, ideally, simulated by the relevant
metric.
Though such methods are presented as theory-neutral, they have an
implicit metaphysic (Sellars 1963) and serve to impose an atomistic theoreti-
cal model on predefined features of the reality under review. A great variety
of colour spaces have been proposed, including RGB primary space, RGB
monitor phosphor space, CIE xy space, MacLeod Boynton space. The rele-
vant one for B&K is the Munsell space, which is concerned with ‘similarity’
judgements.18 In this space three units here are as ‘noticeable a difference’ as
three units there.
According to the theory of innate similarity spaces, if one attempts to
arrange a large sample of colour patches so that the more similar ones are
always closer to one another than are less similar ones, the resulting order is
three dimensional (Clark 1993). Along one dimension there are variations in
lightness, from black to white. Along a second dimension is hue, ranging from
purple through the colours of the spectrum, and back to purple. Along the
third dimension is saturation, the distance from the achromatic centre of the
 BARBARA SAUNDERS 91

hue circle. Colours along such a radius vary from non-chromatic grey at the
achromatic core, towards purer and purer samples of the given hue.
The Munsell system is the most well-known JND-defined colour space
organized by these three dimensions of hue-saturation-lightness. To remove
inconsistencies in the JND-spacing and for conversion purposes, the system
was plotted onto the physical CIE system. In 1943 the phenomenological
‘subject’ of the Munsell system was reconfigured in terms of the CIE into the
‘normal observer’ (Johnston 1996). ‘Dominant’ wavelength, intensity and
excitation purity – the physical analogues of hue, lightness and saturation –
were calculated for nominal Munsell notations to create conversion tables,
and Munsell codes were tied to CIE parameters (Wyszecki & Stiles 1967).
Henceforth there was a common currency between physical magnitudes and
a ‘linguistic metric’. It is this model that provided Lenneberg with his
‘world referent’ and allowed B&K to talk about ‘psychological reality’ (a virtue
frequently repeated; see Jameson 1997; Jameson & d’Andrade 1997).19

The experimental procedures

Correct response to the Munsell system (the world referent) occurs when the
linguistic metric of the normal observer matches the internal landscape the
colour space defines. The normal observer, usually a student at an American
university or a family member or friend of the scientist, articulates the colour
space metric ‘correctly’. However, when the observer belongs to a remote
community in New Guinea, South America or Africa, or is otherwise on the
periphery of global modernity, this matching breaks down, and with it the
sense of ‘normality’.20 Evolutionary stages are then invoked to fit data and
restore ‘normality’. The device of choice to repair this breakdown, to tabulate
the diversity of linguistic response and to engineer it back into normality
through evolutionary stages is the Munsell system, which is the system that
defines psychological reality in the first place.
The most recent application of these circular procedures is found in the
WCS.21 It contains a large sample of early evolutionary stages or ‘composite
categories’.The ‘bare data set’ gives the colour words of each consultant elicited
with 330 individual, highly saturated colour chips, after which, on a fixed array,
the best example of each colour term is indicated. At a later stage of process-
ing, the BCTs, now confusingly called ‘glosses’ (K&B 1997: 196–201), are deter-
mined by pre-set criteria, on the basis of which stage assignments are made and
distributed into evolutionary (‘developmental’) pigeon holes.
Here is a sample of comments made by fieldworkers (from the WCS data
sheets), for Sirionó Bolivia/Ecuador (24 speakers participated):

# 4 messy informant;
# 10 grue is full of holes named by yellow;
# 11 the blue term is too weak to be considered basic; only this speaker and one other #
17 makes a distinction between echo ‘yellow’ and echu ‘yellowish’;
# 16 two yellow terms, one of which also names black;
# 20 yellow is focused on light green;
# 23 the blue term also names part of brown and fills in between terms.
Only speakers 4 & 10 are not bilingual in Spanish; speakers 11, 16, 20 are unclassifiable.
92 BARBARA SAUNDERS

When Kay and Berlin (1997) process the data for all 24 speakers of
Sirionó, it becomes: (i) aggregate naming arrays at 28% and 92% agree-
ment level; (ii) individual ‘term’ maps (erondeı̄ ‘black’; eshĩ ‘white’; eı̄reĩ ‘red’;
echo ‘yellow’; erubi ‘[blue-focused] grue’); (iii) individual speaker’s naming
arrays.
It is clear that there is an ordering principle at work by means of
which responses and data are organized. Crude data obtained in a standard-
ized experimental context are further standardized in the mould of an
ideal or exemplary language, stabilizing the contingent, historical context. The
procedure is imposed on the consultants, a common currency is produced,
and regularity is emphasized in anticipation of the imposition of the rule.
‘Nature’ is projected as law-like and mathematical, formulated a priori and
validated by empirical evidence gathered under conditions that approxi-
mate the ideal setting (the laboratory). Every ‘fact’ is set up to be regulated
and delimited in terms of this project, allowing ‘nature’ to be constituted
as a force-field spontaneously revealing its predictable order and exhibiting
itself in one predetermined way, ‘objectively.’ The system has determined
in advance the way the facts relate to one another, to the observer and to
the object of knowledge. The end products, ‘glosses’ (BCTs) and ‘develop-
ment’ (evolution), are achieved through (i) transforming and cancelling the life
world; (ii) exploiting an apparently unmediated and perspicuous presence
(Munsell, colour space, psychological reality); (iii) effacing and concealing
the metrical handiwork; (iv) ‘cleaning’ the data (see Glazebrook 1998;
Lynch 1991).
The result is the presentation of a biometric regularity. This regularity is
the attribute of human neurophysiological characteristics that grounds the
much-sought ‘universals.’ With the ‘discovery’ of this biometric regularity it
can be confidently stated that every human being possesses such universals
actually or potentially. Such universals exist simultaneously in the biological
and numerical realms, and to allow one is to infer the other (Markova 1991).
The WCS and its data processing are constituted out of this assumption that
the statistical display of BCTs is simultaneously the display of biological
universals.

Conclusion
B&K play on a system that links the physical stimulus of the Munsell chart
to the sensings of sense contents (neurophysiological responses or processes)
and thus to non-inferential beliefs (‘basic’ categorizations). In this system, both
Munsell and the sensings of sense contents are given as Cartesian epistemo-
logical foundations and as empiricist appeals to the preconceptual. Both fail.
Cartesianism presupposes inferential use of concepts; empiricism cannot
account for noticings, because to have the ability to notice a thing is to have
the concept of it. B&K’s dubious achievement is to have merged Cartesian-
ism and empiricism, to have hardwired the result (guaranteeing givenness), and
to have invoked their deus ex machina of evolution to account for ineradicable
difference.
 BARBARA SAUNDERS 93

The crudity of the thesis is built on layers upon layers of mistakes. First, to
ask how peoples’ noticings fit together in ‘basic categories’ with an OSA-CIE
defined field, is to ask a mistaken question. It mixes the framework of molar
theory with the framework of micro-noticings. Why throw out micro-
noticings in the first place other than on the assumption that there is some-
thing basically wrong with them (or maybe because they are always already
hardwired)?
Why do B&K not ask instead what would correspond in the micro-
noticings to the OSA-CIE-defined field? This might offer some explanation
for the paradoxical anomalies so frequently found in colour naming experi-
ments.Why not use the language of noticings to draw theoretical conclusions,
rather than force the data into their theoretical language? Why not find out
if there are noticings at all, before assuming a reporting language? More fun-
damentally, how might noticings and impressions be related?
Noticings and their report presuppose intersubjective discourse, and there-
fore implicate the particularities of socio-history. The reporting language
would not be a ‘code’ but would contain an explanation of ‘there looks to
me to be a little, shiny, red, square physical object over there.’ Such a report-
ing language would not be tailored to fit antecedent noticings, but to the
logic of reporting. Like Lenneberg, B&K mislocate the nature of, and rela-
tions among, impressions, noticings and reportings. They construe as data par-
ticulars which can be ‘observed’ by means of the reporting language, and
believe them to be determined by the antecedent impressions and noticings.
They then compound the error by confusing their own theoretical frame-
work with the reporting language (glossed into BCTs).
In their attempt to break out of discourse to a realm beyond discourse,
B&K presuppose a set of ideological givens: Munsell, psychological reality, the
innate colour space.Yet it makes as much sense to treat these givens as ideo-
logical, as a body of ruling ideas created by a ruling class. It makes as much
sense to treat these givens as a form of misrepresentation containing distorted
ideas about, say, colour science on the one hand, and intercultural relations on
the other. Doing so would help correct the fundamental erasure of social and
historical relations, practices and ideas, in B&K’s work, which makes invisible
historically particular impressions, noticings, reportings.
The B&K programme is a knowledge practice built on a reified cultural
image (eleven basic colour terms), a pseudo-history (seven evolutionary
stages), and a naturalizing theory and its scientific language (the theory of
BCTs). It treats as objective what is in fact theory-laden (colour space, charts
and chips, mappings, diagrams, computer printouts), and hides both its own
social location and how this affects the knowledge produced, a privileged
knowledge with a ‘natural’ relationship to ‘reality’.
But if, as I suggest, colour is not a natural thing (made of reflectances, retinal
pigments, opponent processes), but exists through noticings and reportings as
an ensemble of social relations, then to obtain it needs socio-historical and
cultural specificities. Colour then would not be simple, as in the idealist story,
but a concentration of many determinations. Divest of idealist trappings, con-
ceptualized as a concentration of determinations, it could then be conceived
as material, historical and concrete reality.
94 BARBARA SAUNDERS

NOTES

This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at ‘Anthropology and Psychol-
ogy: the legacy of Torres Strait 1898–1998’, St John’s College, Cambridge, 10–12 August 1998.
Thanks to Henrika Kuklick for invaluable insights, to Journal referees for provoking me to
rewrite the original, and to my graduate class, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, HIW, University of
Leuven, for their enthusiasm for colour.
1
As the Berlin and Kay research programme now draws legitimation from colour science,
this new state of affairs is the focus of discussion. See Saunders (1992), Saunders and van Brakel
(1997), and MacLaury (1992; 1997) for references to the earlier linguistic paradigm.
2
B&K have talked of the ‘meaning’ of a colour name as a feature of ‘mind’, but they make
quite clear (1969: 109–10; Kay & McDaniel 1978) that their quest is to characterize the bio-
logical substratum.
3
Ray’s (1953) assertion that the naming of the ‘spectral continuum’ was arbitrary was one of
the main polemical targets of Berlin and Kay. This forced-choice between ‘universalism’ and
‘relativism’ continues to obfuscate issues.
4
The ‘new data’ concern: (i) the YELLOW-GREEN category and implications for early
stages in the evolution of basic colour vocabulary; (ii) the inventory of possible composite
colour categories and why only these are found in the world’s languages. In addition,
Kay, Berlin and Merrifield (1991) presents five evolutionary possibilities at Stage III, and three
at Stage IV.
5
This assumes what has been called the ‘geneticist’ or ‘reductionist’ view of culture-biology
relations. It is a two-tier structure in which biology (or rather genetics) provides the substra-
tum upon which ideational culture supervenes, a view in which those who appeal to
autonomous culture and those who appeal to bio-reductionism collude (Saunders 1992).
Visweswaran (1998) has suggested, compellingly, that in American anthropology at least, the
term ‘culture’ is conceptually linked to ‘race’ in such a way that the one does not exist without
the other. If for example, one were to regard ‘language’ and ‘culture’ as a euphemism for ‘race’
in the Berlin and Kay paradigm then the sociobiological and evolutionary-psychology impli-
cations would be clear.
6
Hickerson (1983: 39) comments: ‘In a very general sense . . . Gladstone’s biocultural
orientation – if not his assumptions and methods – could be said to have come back into
respectability.’ Her conclusion is born out by Kay, Berlin and Merrifield (1991) and the
WCS.
7
By an ironical reversal, this article of faith was called in question in response to B&K (1969).
A Geiger-style model was reproposed by Bornstein when he proclaimed (1973a;
1973b) that differences in colour naming could be attributed to ‘yellow intraocular pigments’
which allegedly were in a preponderance in people who live near the Equator. Berlin and
Berlin (1975: 86 n. 14) commended his ‘findings’ as ‘nothing short of sensational’ and com-
mented that such high concentrations were ‘found predominantly in highly pigmented
peoples’ in whom the ‘black, blue, green confusion [is] most commonly found’. Thus,
intraocular pigments responsible for diversity of colour naming were again related to pheno-
typical features (this time, pigmented skin). This is repeated in the 1996 Encyclopedia of Cultural
Anthropology.
8
Among a variety of experiments on ‘the senses’, Rivers tested the colour naming of the
islanders in the Torres Strait and Fly River district of British New Guinea (1901a), of the Egyp-
tians (1901c), of the Inuit of Labrador (1902), of the Uralis and Sholagas of India (1903), and
of the Todas of Southern India (1905). Between 1901 and 1902 Rivers appears to have changed
his thinking about colour naming. In (1901b) he is sympathetic to Gladstone; in (1902) he is
searching for alternative explanations for the diversity of colour naming. For the intellectual
background, see Kuklick (1992) and Herle and Rouse (1998).
9
When the history of research on colour in the twentieth century is written, I am sure that
B&K’s claim will appear an exaggeration.
10
Cole and Scribner (1974) and Lucy and Shweder (1979) give brief, critical reviews of this
research tradition; Lucy (1992) discusses it at length.
11
Haraway (1989: 100 and passim) offers suggestions for the genesis of this interest. Com-
munications research in World War II had vindicated many social science concerns and leant
authority to those disciplines. As a result of the new emphasis on bio-technological thinking,
 BARBARA SAUNDERS 95

not only were there reevaluations of evolution, but the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis too seemed to
offer a particularly interesting approach to questions concerning cross-cultural communication,
conceived, as always, on the cryptographer model.
12
Collier (1973) repeated this criticism in his review of BCT. But by (Collier et al. 1976) he
had recanted it.
13
Borrowing these terms from Sellars (1997 [1956]) I treat them as if they were ‘primitive’.
Perhaps their differences can be put something like this: they are marked by different kinds of
processes – (i) some sort of corporeal effect, (ii) ‘looking’ red, (iii) reports on qualitative and
existential looking. Corporeal effect is usually related to its putative ‘cause’, something physi-
cal like the ‘redness’ that is a product of scientific or philosophical sophistication (at home in
the logical space of an ideal scientific picture of the world). With the notion of ‘impression’, I
mean a kind of minimal effect on a living organism, like that of light on a moth. But ‘looking
red’, a ‘noticing’, should not be taken as referring to the particulars of that ideal picture.
‘Looking red’ as a noticing has, rather, some propositional content and involves activity (an
awareness or attentiveness) belonging to an intersubjective discourse implicated in the partic-
ularities of socio-history. Unfortunately, this is often misconstrued as a ‘spontaneous’ response.
Reportings, however, properly belong to a realm of existential propositions which, in the case
of ‘red’, involve skills of judgement which derive from practice. Thus, physical redness need
have nothing to do with the sort of noticing that might be related to the ordinary colour word
‘red’.
14
The linguistic criteria were (B&K 1969: 5–7): ‘1. a BCT should be monolexemic: red not
“reddish”, or “somewhat red”; 2. a BCT should not be included in any other colour term:
scarlet is a sort of red, sapphire a sort of blue; 3. a BCT should be applicable to a wide range
of objects: blond applies only to hair and furniture.’The psychological criterion was: ‘4. (amongst
possible indices) a BCT should be highly salient, easily elicited, and appear at the beginning
of elicitation lists.’
15
The commitment to a priori semantic universals was not straightforwardly presented, a good
example being Berlin’s claim (1970: 5, emphasis added) that B&K (1969) were: ‘still at the stage
of indirectly formulating universals that take the form of empirical generalisations’. Here B&K failed
to make clear their criteria of universality: are these taken as semantic universals that exist always
and everywhere, or is their universality a hypothesis contingent upon empirical verification
through data gathering?
16
This manifold or ‘Zone Theory’ is the synthesis of the competing theories of Helmholtz
and Hering. It became the received view in the 1950s, after half a century of the marginali-
zation of Hering by behaviourists.
17
Simmel (1978) was inspired by Fechner in his notions of the equivalence of exchange
values and quantities of physical stimulation; Freud’s admiration for Fechner’s ‘economic stand-
point’ may be felt in the relocation of the contents of ‘the unconscious’ onto a field where
their ‘iconography’ could be formalized in linguistic terms (see Crary 1991; Foucault 1979). In
hindsight it could be argued that Marx (1844: 141) had already anticipated and challenged the
Fechnerian hegemony-to-come by proposing: ‘The forming of the five senses is a labour of
the entire history of the world down to the present.’
18
There is an influential literature on ‘similarity spaces’ deriving from Carnap, Quine and
Davidson, adumbrated by Locke, influenced by Descartes (see Carnap 1967 [1928]; Quine 1995:
12–13).
19
This characterization of psychological colour space has been challenged. Another system
based directly on Hering’s opponent processes, is the Swedish Natural Color System (Sivik
1997); yet another is based on Land’s (1986) retinex theory – a minority thesis denying
Helmholtz-Hering, and associated with the philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland.
20
It is noteworthy that in the WCS, fieldworkers were regularly driven to comment that
consultants had ‘eye disorders’, were ‘colour blind’,‘problematic’,‘messy’, or in one case, behaved
like a cretin.
21
The WCS was financed by NSF grant BNS 76–14153, money first being made available
in 1976/7 (see Burgess et al. 1983). The first ‘brief report’ (Kay, Berlin & Merrifield 1991) was
published over a decade later, and data was made available by the Summer Institute of Lin-
guistics, which had carried out part of the research. See P. Kay, B. Berlin and W. R. Merrifield,
World Color Survey Reports, microfiche available from the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
Dallas, Texas.
96 BARBARA SAUNDERS

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Un réexamen des termes des couleurs de base

Résumé
Cet article réexamine le paradigme classique de Berlin et Kay (1969). Tout d’abord, quatre
révisions substantielles sont esquissées, indiquant la position courante et faisant recours à l’évo-
lution. Deuxièmement, les travaux de Berlin et Kay sont placés dans leur contexte historique
d’érudition.Troisièmement, je montre que la tentative de rendre opérationnelle l’hypothèse de
Whorf établit un cadre théorique contre lequel Berlin et Kay ont réagi ainsi qu’une pratique
 BARBARA SAUNDERS 99

expérimentale qu’ils ont appropriée. Je montre que leur programme offre une structure dans
laquelle les résultats sont évidents alors qu’en fait ils sont déduits d’engagements précédents.
La nouvelle alliance que Berlin et Kay établirent avec la science des couleurs est ensuite exam-
inée et je démontre comment les expériences ont éliminé le monde vivant, comment une
notion de ‘présence non-médiatisée’ est exploitée méthodologiquement, comment les tech-
niques de recherche sont effacées et les informations ‘blanchies’. Finalement, il est suggéré que
la thèse de Berlin et Kay est construite sur des couches d’erreurs qui produisent des représen-
tations erronées, tant de la science des couleurs que des relations coloniales.

Institute of Philosophy, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, 3000 Leuven Belgium