Philosophy Speaker Series - Don Dedrick (University of Guelph)

Bornstein's paradox redux: some (new) thoughts about learning colour concepts.

Abstract: Suppose that there is a pre-linguistic disposition to conceptualize clour: a disposition for infants to group non-perceptually matching colour samples into hue categories such as red, yellow, green, and blue. Now suppose that a language expresses those colour categories lexically. Is it reasonable to believe that the pre-linguistic disposition should facilitate linguistic development? In 1985 the cognative psychologist Marc Bornstein proposed that the answer is "yes". "Bornstein's paradox" arses from the fact that such facilitation seems not to occur. Children have a difficult time learning colour names, even in languages that possess so called "basic colour terms" such as "red", "yellow", "green, and "blue". I argue that there is no paradox, even if some colours concepts are pre-linguistic.The psycholgist Susan Carey's idea of "core cognition" is extended to colour categorization and it is argued that if colour is a domain of core cognition the development from initial infant colour experience need not be continuous with linguistic experience. This argument makes reference to work by Casey and others on counting which the author views as analogous to colour naming. The ability to construct and deploy a number sequence may be viewed as [a] a socially constructed representation/ability that [b] utilizes prelinguistic resources. A more general question discussed at this talk: What is the relationship between pre-linguistic concepts, and related linguistic concepts, developmentally speaking?