The senses of the Martians

Grice was fascinated by Martians. Not that the ever saw one. But his example in "Some remarks about the senses" (in Butler, Analytic Philosophy, 1965) is said to have started the idea of the Doppelgaenger experimente that made Putnam smile.

In any case, Grice's example concerns a Martian that is like us, except with 'an extra pair of eyes', to look like:

O O
o o

I

~


Grice wants to ask what would happen about our word 'see', if applied to "Martian perception". He fails miserably in that in the long run he ends up asking the Martian. The Martian speaks a version of English that is too transparent.

I read from today's World Wide Words by M. Quinion, reviewing a book by Deutsche:

"Many societies
have a curious lack of colour words,
often limited to"

1. black,
2. white
and
3, red,

"where the first two are used generally for dark and light
colours respectively."

"Their speakers have perfect colour vision,
but in the environment in which they live they don't need colour
descriptions that are more complex."

I'm surprised they need 'red' -- Red is possibly overused, including by Cole Porter, who has this song, "Red, hot, and blue". I find that either 'red' or 'hot' are redundant, in THAT collocation.

Quinion goes on:

"The reverse of the Sapir-Whorf
view is therefore certainly true - that one's environment and
culture control one's language. Recent research has demonstrated,
however, that colour concepts in one's mother tongue
do interfere
subtly with the way the brain processes colour."

It's different with the father tongue. Mimi Miller once shared with me an anecdote to the effect that males' colour vision is miserably impaired. Her son wanted a blue shirt for his birthday. Mimi got him a nice 'greenish' blue shirt -- which her son refused to accept on the basis that it was miserably green.

In general, the Anglo-Saxons were richer in the language expression of colour than the Anglo-Normans. They had names for colours that have now disappared: not the colours, but the names. There is a study of some of the adjectives they used.

In Anglo-Saxon, 'blacc' is possibly related to French 'blanc'. Oddly, one means 'white' and the other means 'black' -- but the idea must be the same. Etymologically.

For Locke, and for Grice, and for me, a colour is a secondary property. Possibly the word 'colour' itself is a second-ORDER secondary quality. Surely things don't come in colour. They come in specific colours. So one wonders how the general description of 'colour' should be given.

You try to talk these things with physicists but they refer you to boring stripes in the spectrum, rather than the qualia that the philosopher should be interested in.

It's all possibly a brain fraction, as J would suggest?