Colour Vision Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Colour and knowledge-Thoughts on a history of perception or evolution of colors In his book The Appearances of Colors (1911), David Katz states that the causes of the existing distortions within the science of colors are primarily "the variety of viewpoints from which one can approach the problem of color (the physical, technical, physiological, psychophysical, psychological, aesthetic perspective) " 1 Katz thus names a problem that was not only known at the beginning of the 20th century, but a dilemma that continues to this day, namely the apparent blurring of the subject area "color", which means that up to our time no clearly defined color science with clear Could develop scope and well-founded methodology. Would you be able to imagine one for a moment-what would it look like? Would it be more oriented towards physics or physiology, psychology or even ecology? Would it be a pure science at all or would a science of color not have to integrate concepts from the humanities, art, culture and language sciences as well? Wouldn't it be an impossibility at the same time, a homeless chimera of unclear affiliation and methodology, a disciplinary bastard whose epistemological approaches would have to question the sovereignty of the sciences that produced it? Yes! The essay at hand attempts to characterize the seemingly inherent disobedience, which to this day prevents a firm disciplinary attribution, as a human-related, twofold anthropological illusion and thus to resolve it. The colors, understood as human experiences, penetrate to the very foundations of epistemology and thus the sciences, because they literally show us the evolutionary-ecological condition of our sensual approaches to the world. Just as no biologist would come up with the idea today of wanting to explain the form and function of an organism without using its evolutionary and ecological history, it makes little sense to make human perceptions independent of the both sensory-physiological and ecological roots of their development consider. Accordingly, the essay wants to understand perceptions and thus also color as an inner phylogenetic echo of certain information from an external environment and includes in this conception the evolutionarily proven ways of acting of living beings. In a second step, this approach of perception-specific limitation to the question of what is possible for us to understand is to be applied before the consequences of this can be illustrated by some scientific-historical considerations. I. Information, Environment, Perception "How is it that we know this world?" 2 Gerhard Vollmer in his article ‚Between biology and philosophy' and answers this question with reference to the ‚Evolutionary epistemology'. Accordingly, "thinking and recognizing are achievements of the human brain, and this brain originated in biological evolution." 3 As simple and obvious as this consideration may be, it is difficult, indeed impossible for us, the limitations of our own perception and thereby also recognizing what is possible for us to recognize. If thinking and knowing should have arisen in a historically unique and different process for each species, we still have to ask ourselves what we can actually perceive from the world around us and how "true", in the sense of objective, we allowed to hold this perceived? From an evolutionary perspective, the question of "what" inevitably leads to the question of "why" we perceive the world in this way and not in a different way, thereby emphasizing the importance of the information we perceive for our species? In perceptual psychology, perception means "the activity of taking up (and processing) information about objects and events in the environment into the brain of a living being" 4. However, this inconspicuous definition harbors one of the basic epistemological problems of philosophy since