It is in the nature of colour

The nature/nurture debate about human perception has a long history. As far as analysis of natural language is concerned, the issues debated are essentially those that concern what kinds of concepts are encoded or not encoded by languages, what the ontological referents are, and in what universal and language-(culture)-specific linguistic meanings consist. Linguistic theories have strongly challenged the idea that perception is rooted in natural bases by claiming on the contrary that it is entirely determined by culture. The current controversy also concerns the extent to which linguistic categories affect perceptual operations in the colour domain: it is alleged that colour naming is determined by culture, and that lower-level perceptual tasks are also dominated by linguistic competence. For instance, sorting colours into groups follows familiar linguistic categories more than low-level perceptual characteristics, understood as the early processing of information. There is a large body of theoretical and experimental literature on colour perception, produced both by the supporters of the universalist point of view, and by the supporters of the relativist one. Albertazzi’s study corroborates the view that perceptual categorization does not require linguistic categories, and simple tasks like ordering colours on the basis of their similarities evince well-structured perceptual categories, defined relatively to visual perception and independently from experience, language and higher-level cognition. The independence of these categories would be an argument for their naturalness, and hence for their universality, and for their role in shaping language itself. On the other hand, the influence of language on colour perception would come about by facilitating perception-controlled behaviours. The ordering procedure which rests on perceptual similarity yields a colour system in which perceptual categories are implicit and yet clear and stable. In fact, it shows that whatever speakers in whatever language community share the same experience of colour. The arguments presented favour the universalist thesis and are important in regard to both the research methodology and interpretation of the experimental data. The study’s distinctive features are the interdisciplinary nature of its approach, the Gestalt theoretical and methodological conception adopted, and the concept of the naturalness of colour advanced and discussed.