Colors are vague

Did you choose the same shade going forward and backward? If not, you're not the only one. And there may be a reason why.

Psychologists Paul Égré, Vincent de Gardelle, and David Ripley were curious about how we interpret colors, and ran an experiment similar to the one you just played. Depending on which direction the switch occurs, the effect goes by two different names:

• If you cling to whichever color you started with, taking longer to give it up, in both directions, that's called hysteresis.
• If instead you're quicker to abandon whichever color you started with, that's called enhanced contrast, or negative hysteresis.

Égré, de Gardelle, and Ripley found a statistically significant enhanced-contrast effect, but only when people had to name the color out loud. When they ran a version with no language involved at all, just matching a shade to a visual of its nearer neighbor (pure blue vs. pure green), the effect disappeared entirely! That split is the interesting part. Whatever's happening here isn't really about how blue and green look. It's about what happens the moment we're forced to put a word on it.

Now, it's interesting to see the psychological origins of this experiment. But what I find more interesting is the philosophical side. How did I make it to 22 years old and yet I still don't have a clear idea of what makes blue different from green? If I don't even agree with myself, can the general group at least come to a consensus? Tipping points, or the average of the two shades where each person switched, are one way we could explore that.

What I've thought about is that if there really were a defined tipping point sitting out there (a true, fixed boundary), you'd expect everyone to converge on more or less the same shade. We use these labels constantly, and we've had years of practice (colors were one of the first things we ever learned!). And yet, some spread always remains. A common answer does emerge, but it never quite collapses to a single point, and that persistent variation is what led me to wonder whether there's a real boundary to find in the first place.

Naturally, I went down a rabbit hole and found a few competing theories:

1. There's a real, sharp boundary, we just can't find it. On this view (Williamson, 1994), blue and green really do have a precise cutoff, we just lack the knowledge or tools to ever find it. If you're curious how this ties to chaos theory, Roy Sorensen's SEP entry on vagueness digs into it in section 3.
2. There's no boundary to find, just a gap. On this view (Fine, 1975), the space between clearly blue and green isn't a hidden fact waiting to be discovered. It's a real gap: some shades are simply neither blue nor green, period. Philosophers call this indeterminacy.
3. The categories overlap. On this view (Hyde, 1997; Smith, 2008), it's not that there's nothing there. Instead, borderline shades genuinely count as both colors at once, two categories overlapping rather than leaving a gap between them.

Which explanation makes the most sense to you?

As is true with most philosophy, there are many possible answers and no consensus in sight. Personally, I land somewhere between the theories that there's a sharp boundary that's out of our reach (1) and the idea that edges simply overlap (3).

And how do you operate in a world this vague? While I'm not entirely sure, the possibility that edges do overlap leaves me hesitant to ascribe labels to anything. I find it's natural to want to categorize everything, from people to aesthetics, but I've come to feel that impulse misses a lot of the nuance that makes life interesting. The more we treat the world as static and binary, the easier it is to end up boxed in, where change starts to feel impossible.

So while I still haven't figured out where the boundaries lie for colors (or quite literally anything else), I've decided to just sit in the uncertainty, and try to see the world as fluid instead. And I'm not sure if that's necessarily the best way to look at it. But for now, it's a lens that lets me live with a little more curiosity and a little more grace toward everything that stays undefined.

I hope you enjoyed this little essay! Definitely not perfect, but a first attempt at turning the ideas in my brain into something tangible, and hopefully the first of a few.

This deep dive started after I began noticing all sorts of fuzzy boundaries in miscellaneous parts of life. Music particularly always struck a chord (haha), and I began bending over backwards trying to figure out where one genre like 'Pop' ultimately becomes another like 'Rock'. As you may guess, I have yet to reach any sort of answer... so next, I hope to continue this series by following that music tangent, and exploring the boundaries (or lack thereof) between different genres and sounds.

Thank you again for taking the time to read this, and if you have any feedback please feel free to let me know!

Best,
Olivia