Ludwig Wittgenstein
Why is there no transparent white, and no reddish green? Late in life he filled notebooks with such puzzles.
- Lived
- 1889–1951
- Color notes
- Written 1950–51, published 1977
- Big idea
- Color puzzles are about our concepts
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher of logic and language, and in the last year of his life much of what he wrote was about color. The notes, published in 1977 as Remarks on Colour, grew out of reading Goethe's Theory of Colours and a letter by the painter Philipp Otto Runge that Goethe printed there.
The puzzles are easy to state and hard to answer. Why can't there be a transparent white, when there is transparent red and green glass? Why is there no reddish green, though there are reddish yellows and bluish greens? Is green a mixture of blue and yellow, or a color in its own right? These don't feel like facts learned by experiment, and they don't feel like mere definitions either.
His answer, roughly, is that they belong to the logic, or 'geometry', of our color concepts: the rules of the game we play with color words. Physics explains wavelengths; it doesn't tell us why 'reddish green' makes no sense. Vision science now offers part of an answer, opponent channels in the eye (see complementary colors), but the conceptual puzzle remains.
His earlier image of a 'beetle in a box', each person's private sensation that no one else can inspect, from the Philosophical Investigations (1953), is often linked to the puzzle of whether your red is my red (see qualia). He suggested that what can't be shared, even in principle, plays no part in what our words mean.
Swatches
- White · no transparent white
- Red...
- ...and green: no 'reddish green'
Colors
Sources
- Wittgenstein, L. (1977). Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. L. L. McAlister and M. Schättle. Blackwell.
- Westphal, J. (1991). Colour: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd ed. Blackwell.
- Biletzki, A. & Matar, A. 'Ludwig Wittgenstein', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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