[jstanley]

> If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors.

Perhaps you mean to say that speakers are unable to name the difference between the colours?

I can easily see differences between (for example) different shades of red. But I can't name them other than "shade of red".

I do happen to subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in the sense that I think the language you think in constrains your thoughts - but I don't think it is strong enough to prevent you from being able to see different colours.

[bkolobara]

No, if you show them two colors and ask them if they are different, they will tell you no.

EDIT: I have been searching for the source of where I saw this, but can't find it now :(

EDIT2: I found a talk touching in the topic with a study: https://youtu.be/I64RtGofPW8?si=v1FNU06rb5mMYRKj&t=889

[JumpCrisscross]

> if you show them two colors and ask them if they are different, they will tell you no

The experiments I've seen seem to interrogate what the culture means by colour (versus shade, et cetera) more than what the person is seeing.

If you show me sky blue and Navy blue and ask me if they're the same colour, I'll say yes. If you ask someone in a different context if Russian violet and Midnight blue are the same colour, I could see them saying yes, too. That doesn't mean they literally can't see the difference. Just that their ontology maps the words blue and violet to sets of colours differently.

[wongarsu]

If you asked me if a fire engine and a ripe strawberry are the same color I would say yes. Obviously, they are both red. If you held them next to each other I would still be able to tell you they are obviously different shades of red. But in my head they are both mapped to the red "embedding". I imagine that's the exact same thing that happens to blue and green in cultures that don't have a word for green.

If on the other hand you work with colors a lot you develop a finer mapping. If your first instinct when asked for the name of that wall over there is to say it's sage instead of green, then you would never say that a strawberry and a fire engine have the same color. You might even question the validity of the question, since fire engines have all kinds of different colors (neon red being a trend lately)

[JumpCrisscross]

> in my head they are both mapped to the red "embedding"

Sure. That's the point. These studies are a study of language per se. Not how language influences perception to a meanigful degree. Sapir-Whorf is a cool hypothesis. But it isn't true for humans.

(Out of curiosity, what is "embedding" doing that "word" does not?)

[wongarsu]

Word would imply that this only happens when I translate my thoughts to a chosen human language (or articulate thoughts in a language). I chose embedding because I think this happens much earlier in the pipeline: the information of the exact shade is discarded before the scene is committed to memory and before most conscious reasoning. I see this as something happening at the interface of the vision system, not the speech center.

Which is kind of Sapir-Whorf, just not the extreme version of "we literally can't see or reason about the difference", more "differences we don't care about get lost in processing". Which you can kind of conceptualize as the brain choosing a different encoding, or embedding space (even though obviously such a thing does not exist in the literal sense in our brains)

Edit: in a way, I would claim Sapir-Whorf is mistaking correlation for causation: it's not that the words we know are the reason for how we can think, it's that what differences we care about cause both the ways we think and the words we use

[JumpCrisscross]

> the information of the exact shade is discarded before the scene is committed to memory and before most conscious reasoning

I'm curious if we have any evidence for this. A lot of visual processing happens in the retina. To my knowledge, the retina has no awareness of words. I'd also assume that the visual cortex comes before anything to do with language, though that's just an assumption.

> it's not that the words we know are the reason for how we can think, it's that what differences we care about cause both the ways we think and the words we use

This is fair. Though for something like colour, a far-older system in our brains than language, I'd be sceptical of the latter controlling the former.

[pverheggen]

You're probably thinking of the Himba tribe color experiment - which as it turns out, was mostly fabricated by a BBC documentary:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970

[bkolobara]

Yes, I think this was it! Thanks for sharing the link. I had no idea that part was fabricated.

[cthalupa]

The ability for us to look at a gradient of color and differentiate between shades even without distinct names for them seems to disprove this on its face.

Unless the question is literally the equivalent of someone showing you a swatch of crimson and a swatch of scarlet and being asked if both are red, in which case, well yeah sure.