[tshaddox]

> Picking a color from a pallet of similar colors is explicitly rejecting the nearby colors on the swatch.

> It is exactly the opposite of a weak vote for nearby colors.

Surely that is demonstrably false in cases where you could experimentally prove that two adjacent colors are below the voter's threshold of color discrimination.

[brudgers]

To riff on Hume, all colors are indistinguishable in total darkness.

Or to be Wittgensteinian, that’s not how “of different colors” is used in ordinary language.

In terms of additive color science, different combinations of RGB (or XYZ) light can produce the same color perception.

In part because the human visual system (green cones) has a negative response to a particular frequency band and additive light can’t have negative green values.

At the edge of current color science is accounting for tetra-chromatic perception…not to be confused with tetra-chromatic response which occurs in about 1% of humans.

Which is all to say that there’s a lot of baggage to a logical argument based on voting.

[tshaddox]

I'm not sure how any of that contradicts what I said, which is simply that when someone selects one option from among multiple options that they themselves cannot distinguish from one another, that does not constitute explicit rejection of the options which were not selected.

[brudgers]

The premises of your position contradict themselves.

The premises that several colors can be different despite humans believing the colors are the same color requires that color is an independent property of external objects.

The premise that voting is a way of studying color requires that color is a property of human perception.

The discipline of color science operates on the second premise because the discipline of color science is scientific.

The first premise has been the road to philosophical skepticism in Western philosophy for more than two millennia.

Although it appears in physics courses everywhere, there is nothing special about the visible spectrum except that it happens to be what we see...which is to say that partitioning the universe into infrared, visible, and ultraviolet is not based on properties independent of humans in the way that mass, force, and frequency are.

Because color only exists in the context of the human visual system from a scientific perspective. Or to put it another way, color is derived from human physiology. And that's why it is scientific to vote on it.

Of course for the same reasons we talk about the sun rising and setting, the tides flowing in and out, and the ancients distinguished between Hesperus and Phospherus, ordinary non-scientific language treats color as a property of things similar to mass because tedious pedants aren't much fun at parties.

In ordinary language it is also the case that choosing a color involves explicit rejection of closely related colors that are a little too warm, I-think-it-will-be-too-dark, or something-a-bit-more-red.

Choosing a color involves high discernment. When you find the right shade of blue, you have condemned all other shades as wrong.

Fortunately, nobody cares.