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argumzio comments on Examples of the Mind Projection Fallacy? - Less Wrong
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Odd, human-centric example:
I used to think that everyone had the same favorite internal color-experience and we all just grew up calling the colors different names, blissfully unaware that your "red" is in fact my yellow, or your cousin's green. After all, how could someone NOT like my favorite color as much as I did? Clearly, they all liked purple and just grew up calling it a different color...
It's weird how I managed to both avert and run smack right into the mind projection fallacy in the same thought. I realized that everyone could, in theory, have a different internal experience and attach it to the same outer word or thing, and yet I still insisted that the "favorite" attribute was universal.
I don't believe it anymore, but I still think about the mind projection fallacy in terms of it. There really are attributes for colors that are near-universal, for humans. Red has very good reasons for being associated with passion and aggressiveness, being the color of blood. But think if my pet theory had been true, and someone else experienced it as a calm sky blue? It wouldn't BE calm for them--they'd have the same ingrained emotional reaction for it that I have for my version of red. So however much it feels like red is a passionate and aggressive color in and of itself, the passion and aggressiveness really only comes from me.
Colors-as-near-universal-attributes is really a false claim. Consider examples of the varieties of color blindness, tetrachromacy, and cultures in which certain colors go by names that other cultures distinguish as being different. Your last paragraph seems to indicate that you still hold to the Mind Projection Fallacy which you had assumed to have overcome by realizing your favorite isn't everyone's favorite. Well, even their "blue" might be your "green". Generally, this goes unnoticed because we tend to acculturate and inhabit more or less similar linguistic spaces.
When did I say that color was a near-universal attribute? I said that there were near-universal attributes associated with certain parts of the visible light spectrum, not that colors themselves were universal. You are right though--for that claim to make sense colors also have to be assumed to be near-universal. And near-universal is probably too strong a term to describe the kind of weak color assocations I'm thinking of. Any studies that showing such effects (like red and yellow being associated with hunger) were probably Western-culture-based and should be taken with a grain of salt and a Big Mac.
I do know about the examples to the contrary that you mentioned. Color perception can vary from person to person, and naming conventions for colors are REALLY not universal. However, notice how color blindness and tetrachromacy are considered exceptions to the norm. These exceptions are largely the reason I specified near-universal for humans rather than simply universal for humans. And while different cultures divide their bleggs and rubes by different rules, it does not diminish their ability to perceive the variations of shades within the individual blegg and rube bins.
Unlike color-blindness. Colorblindness will diminish that ability.
Here's what indicated as much:
An "attribute for color" is not much different from showing that a name is an attribute for a color. Again, you were making the same mistake by thinking that a name for a color is an absolute. Definitely not the case, which you recognize:
To continue –
– I further pointed out that humans do not live in a mono-culture with a universal language that predetermines the arrangement of linguistic space in connection to perceived colors. That is the norm, such that the claim of near-universality does not apply. (And were such a mono-culture present, all it would take is a small deviation to accumulate to undermine it. Think of the Tower of Babel.)
The objection I posited covers all cases, even the exceptions. It's really the mind-projection fallacy, such that one human regards their "normal" experience as the "normal" experience of "normal" humans, more or less.