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Part of
Progress in Colour Studies: Cognition, language and beyond
Edited by Lindsay W. MacDonald, Carole P. Biggam and Galina V. Paramei
[Not in series 217] 2018
► pp. 5–22

Chapter 1
The colours and the spectrum

| Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Colours and spectrum stand in an ambiguous and perhaps awkward relation to each other. There exist formal accounts in phenomenology with non-trivial structure that do not refer to the spectrum at all, whereas in contradistinction, conventional colorimetry is a formal account that focuses fully upon the spectral description of radiation. It describes precisely the basic psychophysical facts of discrimination of radiant beams – threshold psychophysics. These accounts are often conceived of as mutually exclusive. I explore formal relations and identify instances that do or don’t require spectral notions in some essential way. This yields novel insights in colour vision, in the most general sense, from a perspective that acknowledges both phenomenology and colorimetry.

Keywords: spectrum, colours, phenomenology, parts of white, ecological physics
Published online: 26 November 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/z.217.01koe
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Cited by 1 other publications

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2020. Colors and Things. i-Perception 11:6 ► pp. 204166952095843 ff. DOI logo

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