A Suffusion of "Yellow"
When a man sets himself to the task of science, philosophy, or any other task of rational thought, he immediately begins with the disassembly of any mistaken prejudices. It is clear that not all which one has learned can be believed without question, so faulty biases must be "renounced and put away with a fixed and solemn determination" (Bacon 15). As the axioms he is testing become more basic in nature, he gradually approaches the validity of his own methods of inquiry. The question of the best way to use rational thought has been debated intensely since mankind first became aware that he thought. There are those, like Galileo Galilei, who maintain that objective knowledge can be obtained by simple observation, by being "a witness of the sober truth" (Galilei 3). However, Francis Bacon presents the would-be scientist with the warning that preconceptions and prejudiced false notions can "so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance" (Bacon 13). Rene Descartes upholds that even when one clears one's mind of bias, mere perception is not enough to find the truth, that "to possess a keen mind is not enough; the principal requirement is to use it correctly" (Descartes 22). With precision in experimentation, with clarity of the mind, and with perfection in logic, even then, claims Blaise Pascal, there is the need for a place to begin thinking; for initial axioms to be taken upon trust. "All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling" (Pascal 53). It is by constantly keeping these four views in mind that we can answer the question that is the focus of this paper: "What is yellow?"
It is apparent that the crux of this inquiry lies in definition. It would be convenient if the answer could be found in the traditional source for definition: the dictionary. The third edition of The American Heritage College Dictionary provides many definitions of the word "yellow," one of the most appropriate to this paper being "any of a group of colors of a hue resembling that of ripe lemons" (Heritage 1563). The Galilean view would support this as a valid description of the color yellow. One can simply look at a ripe lemon or a sunflower's petals and say "that is yellow." Bacon's warning reminds us here that the choice of this definition relies solely upon our discourse with other humans. The common usage of words is not sufficient for the purposes of science, for "words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding" (Bacon 14).
Perhaps another definition offered would be more satisfactory: "The hue of that portion of the of the visible spectrum lying between orange and green, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approx. 570 to 590 nanometers" (Heritage 1563). This is a hard and scientific, albeit impersonal, definition. Galileo himself may have had some difficulty accepting this modern scientific advancement as he was used to simple experiments, verifiable by the common man, but he was aware of the impossibility for one man to perform all possible tests and in favor of making records for others to draw from. Now while this appears to be a rigid definition of something, it remains to be shown that what it defines is precisely what we mean when we use the word "yellow." This may seem to be a pedantic point, the Cartesian method of rational thought instructs us to carefully "avoid haste and prejudgment, and to accept nothing as true except what was presented...so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all possibility of doubt" (Descartes 23).
Perhaps a Galileian backyard experiment is in order to verify the connection between the mind's perception of "yellow" and the value of the wavelength of light that produces that sensation. As well as being an impractical and expensive experiment, the precision and background information required to produce an accurate result and extract a meaningful answer from that result would simply require far too much time than is convenient to answer this simple question. After all, what would it be like if every human had to be a physicist and rebuild the entire structure of modern electromagnetic theory before he could say "That lemon is yellow," to say nothing of the words "red," "blue," "green," and "fuchsia" (there will be no mention of the "plaid" concept here). As Descartes put it, when referring to the many experiments that he deemed necessary to build a valid system of scientific proposition " are such and so numerous, that neither my hands nor my income, though it were a thousand time larger than it is, would be sufficient for them all" (Descartes 30).
Here is where one must make a leap of faith, or at least one of trust. Logic tells us that one cannot accept anything by heresy, yet it also tells us that it would be impossible to verify everything through personal experimentation and observation. At this point, something else must step in and bridge the gap. It is acceptable for reason "to submit, when it judges that it ought to submit" (Pascal 53), so long as we recognize that this step is not made by logic, but by common sense, intuition, or "gut" feeling. If reason later implies that this assumption was incorrect, it will be necessary to retrace the steps of logic and make a new decision here, but for the sake of practicality and achieving a meaningful answer to our question, we will trust this assumption for the time being.
The question "What is yellow?" is not completely answered here. The word "yellow" came into emergence along with the English language, yet it wasn't until Faraday showed the inherent link between the two phenomena known as static electricity and magnetism that this scientific definition would have meant anything to anyone. Is it true, then, that the word "yellow" meant absolutely nothing until modern science discovered (or invented, as the case may be) the electromagnetic spectrum? Perhaps a more accurate answer to the question at hand can be discovered in a connection between the two definitions presented, one contextual and ambiguous, the other concrete and technical.
Anyone who has taken an elementary physics course in junior high school is aware of the distinction between the scientific definition of a term and the popular usage of the same word. For example, in everyday language the word "mass" is used to indicate size, weight, or a combination of the two (e.g. "The little boy stuffed a mass of sticky cotton candy into his mouth and smiled happily."), yet the scientific usage of the word implies a direct measurement upon an object indicating the amount of matter present. The technical term is related to the popular meaning in that an object of the same size and larger weight, has more mass and vice versa (provided, in both cases, that the same gravitational frame is maintained). In the case of mass, the measurements required to at least provide a demonstration of the connection in most cases are easily performed, and thus easily accepted.
When a child first learns a word such as "mass" or "yellow," no one comes up to him with a balance scale or a chart of the electromagnetic spectrum to spell it out in clean, scientific terms. The word is simply heard in context and eventually an idea of its usage is picked up. Thus language, by nature, is chaotic and ever-changing. In order to be learned by someone who knows no language yet, it must be so. Our primary form of communication was not set down and decided upon, rather, it has evolved from previous languages, which in turn also emerged as an evolutionary process. Evolution has no purpose, it is simply the statement of the fact that those who survive will procreate, be they animals, plants, or concepts. Many of the uninformed have fallen into the fallacy of describing natural processes in human terms, "that they have inclinations, sympathies, antipathies" (Pascal 48). Those elements of language that happened to survive and reproduce are those same elements that are in the modern languages. It may seem that by saying that a linguistic element can "reproduce," one is assigning human properties to a mere concept, but what is intended by the phrase "reproduce" is a simple description of the act of that element being learned by a new person. When a child first recognizes the meaning of the word "yellow," it quickly finds it useful for describing lemons, sunflowers, and crayons, in this manner, the word can be said to procreate. The same is said when a word from one language begins to be used by speakers of other languages. This is what is usually known as a language "borrowing" a word. The simple consequence of this is that the words, grammar, idioms, and slang that best transfer between people are those same elements of language that survive.
An important method of ensuring transferral is by being useful to the speaker of that word. If a primitive culture has two very similar words for two different concepts, perhaps "nice big bush of ripe berries" and "large, predatory animal with long fangs," then the speakers of those words may not survive long enough to teach anyone those words. Though usually in less extreme forms than the preceding example, this is how language evolves; through natural selection of the most efficient elements. Language has been optimized for practicality and easy transferability ("addictiveness," if you will), not for logic or sense. It is because of this that man is left with a useful, but misleading, realm in which to express his ideas.
Language is not logical, yet it is our only method of communicating logic. Because of this we must find some way of reconciling logic with language. By simply attaching the rules of logic to the words we use every day, we quickly run into problems. When we make a broad statement about an ambiguous word, such as: "All mountains are big," we quickly find that when we attach ourselves to a word like "big" as a solid, rational concept, "it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever" (Pascal 47). But it is not the concept itself that is at fault here. It is the usage of vulgar language to refer to a scientific concept rather than defining the concept itself in the terms that are "the simplest and easiest to know" (Descartes 23). When common words are taken as solid, they "force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fantasies" (Bacon 14).
Here one enters into the realm of the scientific definition. Scientists choose the common word that best fits the description of what they want to talk about and assign it a different, more solid definition. This is how science reconciles logic with language; in a sense, it creates its own language, a language of mathematics and technical jargon, with an altogether more solid and rational structure. If one wishes to lay down deterministic laws and rules in an attempt to describe the universe objectively, then the language with which he states those laws must also be deterministic. In order to deal with the realm of science, men "must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts" (Bacon 13).
If this artificially constructed language of science is so much more rational and so much less confusing, then why does anyone still speak English? The answer to this question lies in the way that scientific terminology is able to be logical. The language of science is limited to the realm of science. Just as the extremely logical programming languages required to communicate with a computer are limited to aspects of computers, scientific terminology is only capable of referring to the elements of science that it was designed for. Have you ever tried to order a Big Mac in C++? There is enormous power in the infinite boundaries of popular language. The dictionary may only contain 100,000 words or so, yet every day that passes since its publication sees the creation of new words to describe new concepts, be they technical, mundane, or vulgar. It is necessary for a language to be capable of expressing the impossible (e.g. "This sentence is false.") in order for it to be capable of expressing the inconceivable. James Joyce had not foreseen the discovery of sub-baryonic particles when he wrote Finnegan's Wake, yet his nonsense word "quark" has become a household term. "What a chimera, then, is man...what a contradiction, what a prodigy!" (Pascal 57).
It is time to return to the initial focus of this paper, the question "What is yellow?" Two vastly different definitions were provided, one in terms of context, reference, and relativity and another in terms of science, technology, and mathematics. The technical definition is, by nature, more "accurate," as it presents a precise and logical, if convoluted, method of determining whether an object is "yellow." The referential definition does not define "yellow" in more basic terms as the scientific definition does. Instead, it offers a pointer to a common object and makes the statement "Yellow is this color." It didn't have to be a lemon; the definition would work just as well, had the object in consideration been a sunflower petal. This definition points to an entire web of relations between objects and concepts via this one word. There is no exact thing that yellow is, in this sense. But because of this irrationality, the language is open to concepts never before conceived. People can be yellow-bellied, catch the yellow fever, or even flip through the yellow pages. Who knows, perhaps some day it will mean something when someone answers "a suffusion of yellow."