Chapter 1
The colours and the spectrum
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.
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Cited by 1 other publications
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