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abstract: "Is there a universal biolinguistic disposition for the development of \"basic\" colour words? This question has been a subject of debate since Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's BASIC COLOR TERMS: THEIR UNIVERSALITY AND EVOLUTION was published in 1969. NAMING THE RAINBOW is the first extended study of this debate. The author describes and criticizes empirically and conceptually unified models of colour naming that relate basic colour terms directly to perceptual and ultimately to physiological facts, arguing that this strategy has overlooked the cognitive dimension of colour naming. He proposes a psychosemantics for basic colour terms which is sensitive to cultural difference and to the nature and structure of non-linguistic experience. Contemporary colour naming research is radically interdisciplinary and NAMING THE RAINBOW will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and cognitive scientists concerned with: biological constraints on cognition and categorization; problems inherent in cross-cultural and in interdisciplinary science; the nature and extent of cultural relativism."
altloc: []
chapter: Intro
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creators_name:
  - family: Dedrick
    given: Don
    honourific: ''
    lineage: ''
date: 1998
date_type: published
datestamp: 1999-01-17
department: ~
dir: disk0/00/00/03/78
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    given: Not a
    honourific: ''
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eprint_status: archive
eprintid: 378
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keywords: 'colour-naming, Berlin and Kay, colour, cultural relativism, biological reduction, cross-cultural research, perception, cognitive universals.'
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:53:52
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metadata_visibility: show
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pagerange: 3-9
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publication: 'Naming the Rainbow: Colour language, Colour Science, and Culture'
publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers
refereed: FALSE
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rev_number: 8
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status_changed: 2007-09-12 16:27:06
subjects:
  - comp-psy
  - phil-sci
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title: Introduction
type: bookchapter
userid: 240
volume: ~
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