How Can We Understand Colors Better?
Have you ever wondered how we make sense of the qualities of our conscious experience? In particular, what exactly are colors?
The color we perceive is heavily influenced by context and interpretation, including factors such as lighting conditions and background, along with wavelengths and how they affect retinal cell ratios. Because of this, individual differences in perception also play a role in shaping our experience of color.
This variability and subjectivity in color perception can be confusing, raising essential questions about the nature of subjective experience and consciousness.
Nevertheless, combining two well-known methodologies of categorizing mental qualities can assist in resolving such confusion.
Introduction to Transcendental Phenomenology and Quality Space Theory
Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is a philosophical approach that explores the structures of consciousness and the essential features of our experiences by systematically examining and describing the contents of our conscious experiences from a first-person perspective. It provides the basis for eidetic reduction, a method for uncovering the essential features and meanings of mental qualities — qualities in virtue of which distinctions can be made concerning mental states.
In the eidetic reduction process, practitioners undergo rigorous training to suspend their preconceptions and beliefs about a particular quality, allowing them to focus on the underlying essential structures and meanings. By engaging in this process, we can better understand mental qualities, encompassing their subjective, cognitive, and cultural dimensions.
David Rosenthal’s quality space theory, which adopts a third-person approach by emphasizing perceptual aspects, provides a framework for organizing and categorizing mental qualities based on their relationships and similarities.
It posits that the qualities of conscious experience can be organized in a multiple-dimensional space, with each dimension representing a different aspect of the quality, such as hue or valence. In this context, Just-Noticeable Differences (JNDs) are crucial as they represent the most minor perceptible difference between two stimuli.
By combining quality space theory with the concept of JNDs, we can develop a way of categorizing and individuating mental qualities based on their similarities and differences, offering a powerful tool for investigating the nature of conscious experience from a third-person perspective.
While these two methods may seem quite different, they are complementary and work well together methodologically.
Quality space theory provides a framework for organizing and categorizing mental qualities, while eidetic reduction offers a way of uncovering the essential features and meanings of those qualities. By using both methods together, we can better understand the nature of mental qualities and their relationships within quality spaces.
This approach can be applied to various phenomena, from colors to emotions. For example, we can use JNDs to measure the slightest perceptible difference between two shades of red and then use the eidetic reduction to investigate those shades’ essential features and meanings.
By doing so, we can create a taxonomy of red that reflects both its perceptual and phenomenological dimensions, providing a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the color and its different qualities.
The following steps constitute an example of applying the eidetic reduction and JNDs to get a clearer picture of colors in quality spaces.
Step 1: JNDs for Red
Using JNDs, we can measure the most negligible perceptible difference between two stimuli that differ in hue, saturation, or brightness. For example, we might present participants with a series of red stimuli that vary in hue (e.g., crimson, scarlet, vermilion, burgundy, and cherry) and ask them to judge whether the two stimuli are the same or different. Then, we can determine the perceptual thresholds for different shades of red by systematically varying the stimuli and recording participants’ judgments of similarity.
In this example, let’s say we find that the smallest perceptible difference between two stimuli in the quality space of red is 0.02 units, as measured on a 0–1 scale. This means that any two stimuli less than 0.02 units apart are perceptually indistinguishable from each other.
Step 2: Eidetic Reduction for Red
Using the eidetic reduction, we can investigate the essential features and meanings of different shades of red. This might involve suspending our preconceptions and beliefs about the color red and focusing on the essential qualities of red, such as its emotional associations, cultural meanings, or subjective qualities.
In this example, let’s say we uncover the following essential features of different shades of red:
• Crimson: often associated with passion, power, and intensity
• Scarlet: often associated with boldness, excitement, and energy
• Vermilion: often associated with warmth, vibrancy, and creativity
• Burgundy: often associated with sophistication, depth, and elegance
• Cherry: often associated with playfulness, brightness, and freshness
Step 3: Combining JNDs and Eidetic Reduction to Generate a Taxonomy of Red
Using both JNDs and the eidetic reduction, we can generate a more comprehensive and nuanced taxonomy of the color red. For example, we might create categories of red based on their perceptual distances from each other, as measured by JNDs. We could use the JND threshold of 0.02 units that we found earlier to create categories of red that are perceptually distinguishable from each other:
• Crimson: 0.00–0.02 units
• Scarlet: 0.04–0.06 units
• Vermilion: 0.08–0.10 units
• Burgundy: 0.12–0.14 units
• Cherry: 0.16–0.18 units
We could then use the eidetic reduction to refine these categories based on their essential features and meanings. For example, we might create subcategories within each category based on their emotional associations or cultural meanings:
• Crimson: passionate crimson, powerful crimson, intense crimson
• Scarlet: bold scarlet, exciting scarlet, energetic scarlet
• Vermilion: warm vermilion, vibrant vermilion, creative vermilion
• Burgundy: sophisticated burgundy, deep burgundy, elegant burgundy
• Cherry: playful cherry, bright cherry, fresh cherry
In the above step-by-step example, the subcategories were created based on the essential features and meanings uncovered during the eidetic reduction, which suspends judgment concerning their nature. These subcategories are not directly translated into units; they are qualitative distinctions derived from the phenomenological investigation. However, we can still relate these subcategories to the JND units by considering them subranges within the established JND-based categories.
Let’s assume we have the following JND-based categories for shades of red:
• Crimson: 0.00–0.02 units
• Scarlet: 0.04–0.06 units
• Vermilion: 0.08–0.10 units
• Burgundy: 0.12–0.14 units
• Cherry: 0.16–0.18 units
Suppose we have three subcategories for each category based on the essential features and meanings derived from the eidetic reduction. To distribute these subcategories within the JND-based categories, we can divide the JND range for each category into equal intervals.
For example, for the Crimson category:
• Passionate crimson: 0.00–0.0067 units
• Powerful crimson: 0.0068–0.0134 units
• Intense crimson: 0.0135–0.02 units
Similarly, for the Scarlet category:
• Bold scarlet: 0.04–0.0467 units
• Exciting scarlet: 0.0468–0.0534 units
• Energetic scarlet: 0.0535–0.06 units
And so on for the other categories.
It is important to note that these subcategories and their corresponding unit ranges are not strict boundaries but rather serve as a guide to help us understand the relationship between the perceptual and phenomenological aspects of color.
The subcategories help contextualize the JND-based categories by incorporating additional information about the essential features and meanings of each shade of red.
Using the eidetic reduction and JNDs together, we have generated a taxonomy of red that reflects both its perceptual and phenomenological dimensions.
From Husserl’s perspective, the eidetic reduction is a method that allows us to explore the essential structures and meanings of mental qualities from a first-person perspective. In the case of colors, this means examining and describing the contents of our conscious experiences related to different shades of color. By suspending our preconceptions and beliefs about a particular color, we can focus on its essential qualities, such as emotional associations, cultural meanings, or subjective qualities.
In our example, we applied an eidetic reduction to different shades of red to uncover their essential features and meanings. By doing so, we identified subcategories within the broader JND-based categories of red based on the essential features and meanings derived from the eidetic reduction.
For instance, when examining the Crimson category, we might uncover the following essential features:
• Passionate crimson: often associated with strong emotions, such as love and desire; evokes a sense of passion and intensity.
• Powerful crimson: often associated with power, strength, and authority; evokes a sense of dominance and assertiveness.
• Intense crimson: often associated with heightened sensations and vivid experiences; evokes a sense of depth and richness.
By identifying these essential features and meanings, we can refine the JND-based categories to create more nuanced and comprehensive categories of color that capture both the perceptual and phenomenological dimensions of our conscious experiences.
In this way, Husserl’s eidetic reduction is a complementary method to the third-person approach of JNDs, providing a complete understanding of the nature of mental qualities and their relationships within quality spaces.
This taxonomy-generating process can be used to better understand the nature of red and its different shades and to develop more effective interventions for conditions that involve disturbances in color perception, such as color blindness or synesthesia.
