From Brightness to Hue: An Explanatory Model of Color-Category Evolution [and Comments and Reply]

by Robert E. MacLaury Berlin and Kay's (i969) "basic color terms" are the simplest forms of broadest meaning that most speakers of a language will routinely apply to colors in any context. They number from 2 to i i in languages throughout he world. Yet in language after language speakers choose the same colors as the best examples or foci of basic color terms; the favored colors comprise less than 30% of the total assortment contemplated during interviews. This suggests that foci are constrained by universal visual physiology. Further, the meanings of the basic color terms of a language are predictable from their number, implying that everywhere they evolve in a highly restricted order. It appears that basic color-term evolution also is constrained by neurology. Kay and McDaniel (I978) have accounted for some of the universals with the refined version of Hering's opponent-process model of human color-vision physiology (De Valois and De Valois I975, Hurvich and Jameson I957; cf. MacLaury I987a). Although vision researchers dispute details, almost all agree that precortical response to wavelength is processed via opponent neural channels (Hardin I988, i992). The opponency determines universal foci and predicts that certain pairs of colors, such as red-green or yellow-blue, will never be named by the same term as members of one category. After more than 2o years of empirically grounded research, Berlin and Kay have brought their hypothesis to a crossroads. They report languages that name with one basic color term all of yellow, green, and blue, and they implant the newly recognized category within a revision of their evolutionary sequence (Kay, Berlin, and Merrifield iggi). This new finding, however, contradicts the Hering opponent-process model. Inserting a category of yellow-green-blue into the sequence casts doubt upon the presumed connection between panhuman visual physiology and the widely observed regularities of color categorization; it calls into question the very notion of color-category universals. Beyond the immediate concerns of color ethnographers, there are two issues at stake. First, the empirical approach shows signs of strain after an initial success. How long can we allow the data to "speak for themselves" before we must interpret hem within a theoretical design? Second, discussants on both sides of the anthropological debate between universalists and relativists have often drawn upon color data to support their claims. Berlin and Kay (i969) originally entered the debate on the side of universalists, and relativists have articulated cogent counterevidence (e.g., Tornay I978). I have suggested a range of ways, from trivial to critical, that color data might support the relativist view (MacLaury iggia). Since the yellow-green-blue category represents the extreme, dropping it into the universal sequence concedes the debate to the relativists. The reversal hinders the interests of both sides, because it postpones the day when universalists and relativists will talk to each other over the fence. The two issues are linked, because it was Kay, Berlin, and Merrifield's straightforward application of the empirical approach that led them to make the concession. Recent cross-cultural surveys of color categorization have produced several systems that seem to depart from the elegant scheme of universal evolution proposed some 2o years ago by Berlin and Kay. Rather than concluding that color categorization is a relative matter after all, I suggest that the many novel findings can be integrated by an explanatory theory that preserves the debate between universalists and relativists in the domain of color by specifying how their interests interact.