…because sometimes I just like to get up in arms about something completely mundane and pointless
My almost-four-year-old and I were talking the other day, and I said something like, “What color would you like, orange or black?” She informed me, “Black is not a color! It is a shade of grey.”
Turns out that her babysitter, let’s call her Babette, has been teaching her that black and white and grey are not colors. This appears to be the result of Babysitter being taught in third grade that combining colors together in a prism makes white, so white is not actually a color.
To me, this is not just faulty understanding of color physics / the difference between spectral colors and what our eyes see as color on Babette’s part (if white = red + blue + green isn’t a color, then magenta = red + blue shouldn’t be either, I feel) but also is going to be problematic for my daughter: is she really going to go to kindergarten and inform her classmates when they pass out construction paper that white isn’t a color?
My husband refuses to have an opinion either way. He points out that, in addition to the spectral definition, black and white (and shades of grey) are often referred to as distinct from color, and that there are some artistic mediums (e.g., watercolor) where there is a difference.
However, I’m not giving you the option (to have no opinion) in the poll: you have to choose one or the other! (At least, I hope so. This is the first time I have tried to make a poll, so bear with me.)
Technically, I’d say no. I’d dork out and say that “white” is reflection of all wavelengths of the color spectrum, while “black” is absorption of said wavelengths. With that out of the way, if you’re asking me what color dress you should wear, then black and white are definitely colors.
For all intents and purposes, they’re colors. And in the case of white being a shade of grey, well, just as we call certain shades of light red, pink, so too are certain shades of grey, white.
It’s complicated, but if I had to choose I’d say no. Black is definitely not a color, but white is a mix of the primary colors, as are many things identified as colors.
there are colors of light and colors of pigments, they are not the same.
if there is a paint, chalk, crayon, pencil that produces that color then it is a color for pigments.
if colors of light can combine to give white then i certainly would call it a color of light, splitting it with a prism shows the colors it is made from.
If you’re just talking in the normal everyday sense, they’re definitely colors.
The funny thing is, if you mix all the colors in terms of light, they become white. If you mix all the colors as pigments (like paint) they become black. So you could say neither is a color, or both are a color, depending on how you go about it.
In the end, I prefer to think of colors in terms of pigment as opposed to light as it removes the “what is a color” ambiguity. After all, white comes in the form of a pigment and you can use it to color things that are not originally white. It is absolutely a color then, as you can color with it. Same for black, though black is a mixture of pigments.
Tints and shades reference what you can do with the pigments black and white. If you add white to another color, you have made a tint. If you add black to another color, you have made a shade. A shade of purple is a dark purple. A tint of green is a pale green.
Color is only that which your brain manifests as the interpretation of light.
Black, which is what your brain paints for the absence of light, is a color just as much as any other interpretation of information coming from your eyes.
Yellow, for instance, is not perceived - it’s your brain guessing when green and blue receptors are mildly buzzing. It decides there’s probably a light wave “between those” two in that spot.
Colour is entirely about perception, not physics. If your eyes and visual cortex worked just as they do now, and also detected the smell of onions and provided a unique perception when onions were in the area, “onions” would be a colour, too.
It depends on the context, but in some contexts the answer is definitely Yes.
For those of you who say No: If your vehicle is black or white, and you’re filling out a form where you’re asked for the COLOR of the car, what do you write down?
I’d say it depends. If you are talking about painting a white canvas, white is not a color that is added to the painting to show space between objects. If you taking a picture, blacks serve the same purpose. For sports teams, blacks and whites are their “colors.” On a typical computer monitor, black means the pixel is off, not that it is lighted with a black color. But, you can also buy black and white paint for your house.
Overall, I’d say white and black are there to show an absence of color, with many exceptions where they are added.
And what ‘technical scientific meaning of the term “color”’ would that be? :dubious: (Hint: “Science” does not teach that “color” means “spectral color”.)
You think stuff is visual because it is processed in your visual cortex, do you? :dubious:
No. It is the other way around. It is your visual cortex because it is (largely, but far from exclusively) devoted to processing visual information (i.e. information about the local disposition of light).
If the incoming nerve signals triggered by the scent of onions happened to be processed in that part of your brain, even (as is not impossible) by some of the same neurons that process color information, it would still be, and be experienced as, a scent and not a color. The subjective qualities of our experiences are not determined by which part of the brain is most involved in processing the relevant inputs.
Tactile-visual substitution systems (sensory prostheses designed for blind people) get their input from a TV camera, but get it to the brain by nerves of touch in the skin. The information is processed (initially, at any rate) through the somatosensory regions of teh brain that normally deal with touch information, but the subjective experience of using them is agreed to be much more like seeing than like feeling something. This is not because the information is being processed in the visual parts of the brain, it is because it is visual information (information about the configuration of light, as gathered by the camera) that is being processed.
My answer’s not in the poll: no, but I’d tell a preschooler they were. Black is a shade and white is a tone (or maybe it’s the other way around), but that’s too complicated for a small child.
I’ve always thought black was a color separate from gray. While I understand that white is actually the absence of color, traditional convention leads me to call it a color in everyday interactions. For all practical purposes, I call them colors.
