INTRODUCTION The career of Benjamin Lee Whorf might, on the one hand, be described as that of a businessman of specialized talents— one of those individuals ...

This paper deals with the truth-Conditions and the logic for vague languages. The use of supervaluations and of classical logic is defended; and other approaches are criticized. The truth-Conditions are extended to a language that contains a definitely-Operator and that is subject to higher order vagueness.

Naturalistic experiments of color perception are critically evaluated. The review concludes that they fail to confirm a natural determination of color perception. Rather than demonstrating universal sensitivity to focal colors, the experiments actually yielded enormous cultural variation in response. This variation is interpreted as supporting a sociohistorical psychological explanation of color perception.

Complete URL to this document: http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/93-Principles.html.

In this target article the following hypotheses are discussed: (1) Colour is autonomous: a perceptuolinguistic and behavioural universal. (2) It is completely described by three independent attributes: hue, brightness, and saturation: (3) Phenomenologically and psychophysically there are four unique hues: red, green, blue, and yellow; (4) The unique hues are underpinned by two opponent psychophysical and/or neuronal channels: red/green, blue/yellow. The relevant literature is reviewed. We conclude: (i) Psychophysics and neurophysiology fail to set nontrivial constraints on colour categorization. (ii) Linguistic (...) evidence provides no grounds for the universality of basic colour categories. (iii) Neither the opponent hues red/green, blue/yellow nor hue, brightness, and saturation are intrinsic to a universal concept of colour. (iv) Colour is not autonomous. (shrink)

There are many entry points into the problem of categorization. Two particularly important ones are the so-called top-down and bottom-up approaches. Top-down approaches such as artificial intelligence begin with the symbolic names and descriptions for some categories already given; computer programs are written to manipulate the symbols. Cognitive modeling involves the further assumption that such symbol-interactions resemble the way our brains do categorization. An explicit expectation of the top-down approach is that it will eventually join with the bottom-up approach, which (...) tries to model how the hardware of the brain works: sensory systems, motor systems and neural activity in general. The assumption is that the symbolic cognitive functions will be implemented in brain function and linked to the sense organs and the organs of movement in roughly the way a program is implemented in a computer, with its links to peripheral devices such as transducers and effectors. (shrink)