what if everyone saw colors differently?
for instance- i see orange. ive learned that that color in my mind is orange, so i call it orange. you see what i see as green, but in your mind its also orange. we would never know that were seeing different colors because weve learned it that way. how do you describe colors without other colors or objects? it would be impossible. think about that.
Never taken a philosophy class I take it?
My psych prof posed this exact question like day 3 of class. Says there is an orange chair in the corner of the room, we all look at it and now see the color orange because he declared it as such. Said that colors may not exist, only assigned by our minds. Physics disagrees.
Also, we have what we need to describe other colors. It's frequency range.
Colors exist. I hope your Psych prof was just trying to prove a point. Hunter S. Thompson wrote about how we ascribe meaning to words (a theoretical framework called phenomenology which is grounded in constructivist theories researched/created by Jean Piaget and John Bowlsby). He wrote famously the line "are we human or are we dancer"? He was referring to the fact that humans live choreographed lives and the noun dancer equally applies to what is meant by the human condition (thus dancer and human are synonyms). I think your psych prof was just trying to prove this point that culture/people shape the words you use to describe phenomenons. It doesn't necessarily mean you actually perceive something differently, you just aren't describing it similarly.
I am a contextualist grounded in theories created by Lev Vygotsky (sociocultural perspective) and Urie Bronfenbrenner (bioecological models). I believe phenemons are tangible (exist) and perceptions are stable across people (to some extent anyway). I do, however, believe that genetics/environment interact with culture/time/place (growing up in the depression era in the US is much different than growing up in the 1980s). Take an 11 year old child. For them, 9/11 always happened. For me, I lived it and experienced the change. It is in my professional experience that perception is similar across people, but the memory and ability to describe a memory varies greatly from person to person. Behavior and motivation behind behaviors is even more complex. Take winning a national championship as an example. If the Cats won (when they win) the national championship in football, our fanbase is going to flip their collective crap. When Alabama wins a national title, it is expected and the fanbase doesn't react the same as ours would. The event is the same, but the behavior and memory of events will differ greatly from person to person. Some Alabama fans will remember what they were wearing and eating on that day...others will be ho hum as memory of the event will not be as vivid and behavior mild.
I could go on and on. What got me into psychology was learning and memory. I always found it fascinating that most of my memories are in the third person and I tend to look the way I am today in those memories. So cool. /end Blumperz effing awesome off-the-top of the head ramblings.
