If that’s the case, then they should be the approximately 450-495s and the approximately 520-570s, but there are lots of languages where green and blue are one color. See also history of blue; for anecdata see the link I posted in my original post in which the child who wasn’t taught the sky is blue regularly calls it colorless or white.
That would have been terrible writing. I know that language is imprecise, but that doesn’t mean that facts don’t exist, it just means that it can be hard to express them.
There’s a second point to the fable, which is that “Blue” and “Green” have had extra connotations snuck in by history:
Society is still divided along Blue and Green lines, and there is a “Blue” and a “Green” position on almost every contemporary issue of political or cultural importance. The Blues advocate taxes on individual incomes, the Greens advocate taxes on merchant sales; the Blues advocate stricter marriage laws, while the Greens wish to make it easier to obtain divorces; the Blues take their support from the heart of city areas, while the more distant farmers and watersellers tend to be Green; the Blues believe that the Earth is a huge spherical rock at the center of the universe, the Greens that it is a huge flat rock circling some other object called a Sun. Not every Blue or every Green citizen takes the “Blue” or “Green” position on every issue, but it would be rare to find a city merchant who believed the sky was blue, and yet advocated an individual tax and freer marriage laws.
Part of the point of the fable is that these positions have nothing to do with each other and also nothing to do with the color of the sky, and when you go around teaching people that the Green and Blue points of view are equally valid, you’re also teaching them not to try to settle any of these other questions (while reinforcing the implicit premise that any of the “Blue” positions above have anything to do with the sky being blue and dually for green).
Anyway, the fable isn’t actually about color. Feel free to substitute something you feel is more objective if it helps you understand the fable better (e.g. whether the air on the surface is safe to breathe).
In that case, feel free to substitute any issue in which there is a technical definition for a word that varies distinctly from culture to culture, can change dramatically over time, and discusses issues of subjectivity as applied to rationalist koans.
I’m assuming it’s something about how the assertions in the story are “the sky is blue” and “the sky is green” instead of “the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 460 nm” and “the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 540 nm”, since there can be an honest cross-cultural confusion between just what real-world colors “green” and “blue” translated to the respective languages correspond to.
What about if the parable had red instead of green then? There are no human cultures that conflate red and blue according to the cultural color term chart.
But there can’t be any cross-cultural confusion, because it is written in English. Vietnamese or Japanese people either know what the English words “blue” and “green” mean, or they don’t speak English at all and wouldn’t be reading this story.
And if the story was written in Vietnamese, it would use “xanh lá cây” which means green and “xanh dương” which means blue, rather than just “xanh”. Just because people normally use the same word to describe two different colours, doesn’t mean they can’t see the difference between those colours, and don’t have ways of describing the difference when they need to.
If that’s the case, then they should be the approximately 450-495s and the approximately 520-570s, but there are lots of languages where green and blue are one color. See also history of blue; for anecdata see the link I posted in my original post in which the child who wasn’t taught the sky is blue regularly calls it colorless or white.
That would have been terrible writing. I know that language is imprecise, but that doesn’t mean that facts don’t exist, it just means that it can be hard to express them.
There’s a second point to the fable, which is that “Blue” and “Green” have had extra connotations snuck in by history:
Part of the point of the fable is that these positions have nothing to do with each other and also nothing to do with the color of the sky, and when you go around teaching people that the Green and Blue points of view are equally valid, you’re also teaching them not to try to settle any of these other questions (while reinforcing the implicit premise that any of the “Blue” positions above have anything to do with the sky being blue and dually for green).
Anyway, the fable isn’t actually about color. Feel free to substitute something you feel is more objective if it helps you understand the fable better (e.g. whether the air on the surface is safe to breathe).
In that case, feel free to substitute any issue in which there is a technical definition for a word that varies distinctly from culture to culture, can change dramatically over time, and discusses issues of subjectivity as applied to rationalist koans.
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make here.
I’m assuming it’s something about how the assertions in the story are “the sky is blue” and “the sky is green” instead of “the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 460 nm” and “the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 540 nm”, since there can be an honest cross-cultural confusion between just what real-world colors “green” and “blue” translated to the respective languages correspond to.
What about if the parable had red instead of green then? There are no human cultures that conflate red and blue according to the cultural color term chart.
But there can’t be any cross-cultural confusion, because it is written in English. Vietnamese or Japanese people either know what the English words “blue” and “green” mean, or they don’t speak English at all and wouldn’t be reading this story.
And if the story was written in Vietnamese, it would use “xanh lá cây” which means green and “xanh dương” which means blue, rather than just “xanh”. Just because people normally use the same word to describe two different colours, doesn’t mean they can’t see the difference between those colours, and don’t have ways of describing the difference when they need to.