Shadow

Kevin and I had a running joke about the Chinese color name 青 for … well, probably a decade by now. And now he got some new insight from Su-Ling Yeh, who I also met a few years back in Taiwan. Things might be clearer to him, but not for me.

So I guess qing (青) really is blue…

I went to a very interesting talk yesterday by Su-Ling Yeh of National Taiwan University on Chinese character processing. One of her studies seems to have addressed something I’ve always been confused about. In Wenlin, the character 青 is defined “green (blue, black)” and this is a problematic concept for me. In 青天 (blue sky) it’s clearly blue (although having lived in Beijing, green is also a possibility, I suppose), but in 青菜 (green vegetables) it should be green.

Su-Ling Yeh has a neat result showing that you can find effects of color name radicals in characters on Stroop tasks. So if you have the character 猜 (cai, guess) written in red, you have  interference  for naming the color of  ink, and facilitation if it’s written in blue.

Funny that as a native Mandarin speaker, I have always felt that 青 is a color that I can visualize as vividly as any other color, except that I can’t say or pinpoint what it is. It’s a color that I felt like describing with the word 青, I guess. It is not a color that is either green, or blue, or black, or somewhere in between.

It turns out philosphors had anticipated this problem. Kevin mentioned that Su-Ling cited Nelson Goodman’s coinage "grue":

Goodman, Nelson (1906-1998 )

American philosopher. In The Structure of Appearance (1951) {at Amazon.com} and Ways of Worldmaking (1978) {at Amazon.com}, Goodman defended an extreme nominalism according to which things, qualities, and even similarities are entirely the products of our habits of speaking, without any ontological foundation in reality. The "new riddle of induction" introduced by Goodman in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1954) {at Amazon.com} uses the color-predicate "grue" to raise significant doubts about our ability to project natural predicates into the future. Goodman’s Languages of Art (1969) {at Amazon.com} proposes that art-forms are properly understood as symbolic systems that establish inter-related networks of meaning without attempting to represent reality.

Source: http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/g9.htm#grue 

You knew I was going to log on to wikipedia, didn’t you? Here’s what they have to say:

Grue and bleen defined

The word grue is defined relative to an arbitrary but fixed time t as follows: An object X satisfies the proposition "X is grue" if X is green and was examined before time t, or blue and was not examined before t.

The word bleen has a complementary definition: An object X is bleen if X is blue and was examined before time t, or green and was not examined before t.

Some popularizations of the concept have described it in a slightly different way: an object is grue if it is green when examined before time t and blue when examined afterwards (and likewise for bleen). That version is different because it envisions the same object as appearing green or blue at different times, while the original definition means that the object is always green or always blue, but which one depends on when the object was first observed. This article will deal only with the original definition.

Note. When Goodman originally presented his "riddle", he used concrete times t in his definitions, such as "January 1st, 2000", dates that at the time were far in the future but are now in the past. For understanding the problem posed by Goodman, it is best to imagine some time t in the future.

The new riddle

The problem is as follows. A standard example of induction is this: All emeralds examined thus far are green. This leads us to conclude (by induction) that also in the future emeralds will be green, and every next green emerald discovered strengthens this belief. Goodman observed that (assuming t has yet to pass) it is equally true that every emerald that has been observed is grue. Why, then, do we not conclude that emeralds first observed after t will also be grue, and why is the next grue emerald that comes along not considered further evidence in support of that conclusion? The problem is to explain why.

Responses

The most obvious response is to point to the artificially disjunctive definition of grue. But, said Goodman, this move will not work. For if we take grue and bleen as primitive, we can define green as "grue if first observed before t and bleen otherwise", and likewise for blue. To deny the acceptability of this disjunctive definition of green would be to beg the question.

Another proposed resolution of the paradox is that "x is grue" is not solely a predicate of x, but of x and the time — we can know that an object is green without knowing the current time, but we cannot know that it is grue. If this is the case, we should not expect "x is grue" to remain true when the time changes. However, one might ask why "x is green" is not considered a predicate of the current time — the more common definition of green does not require any mention of the time of observation, but the disjunctive definition given above does.

Ok, clear?

The color of 青 was 青 before Kevin asked me the question 10 years ago. And now it’s all messed up. It’s not blue, or green, or black, it’s

Bleeck

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Odds'n'Ends, Linguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.