“Shared Understanding of Color among Sighted and Blind Adults”, 2021-08-17 (; backlinks; similar):
We learn in a variety of ways: through direct sensory experience, by talking with others, and by thinking. Disentangling how these sources contribute to what we know is challenging. A wedge into this puzzle was suggested by empiricist philosophers, who hypothesized that people born blind would lack deep knowledge of “visual” phenomena such as color. We find that, contrary to this prediction, congenitally blind and sighted individuals share in-depth understanding of object color. Blind and sighted people share similar intuitions about which objects will have consistent colors, make similar predictions for novel objects, and give similar explanations. Living among people who talk about color is sufficient for color understanding, highlighting the efficiency of linguistic communication as a source of knowledge.
Empiricist philosophers such as Locke famously argued that people born blind might learn arbitrary color facts (eg. marigolds are yellow) but would lack color understanding.
Contrary to this intuition, we find that blind and sighted adults share causal understanding of color, despite not always agreeing about arbitrary color facts. Relative to sighted people, blind individuals are less likely to generate “yellow” for banana and “red” for stop sign but make similar generative inferences about real and novel objects’ colors, and provide similar causal explanations. For example, people infer that 2 natural kinds (eg. bananas) and 2 artifacts with functional colors (eg. stop signs) are more likely to have the same color than 2 artifacts with nonfunctional colors (eg. cars).
People develop intuitive and inferentially rich “theories” of color regardless of visual experience. Linguistic communication is more effective at aligning intuitive theories than knowledge of arbitrary facts.
[Keywords: color, intuitive theories, blindness, language]