Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with an interdisciplinary research tradition which has argued that there are biological and/or perceptual constraints upon human color naming practices--constraints that are universal in character. In the dissertation I have three main purposes. To provide an integrated discussion of the relevant empirical research: in anthropology and linguistics; in cognitive psychology and psychophysics; in vision science and neuroscience. To argue that the aforementioned constraints must be very weak in nature--so weak, in fact, that they are not incompatible with the views of many "relativists" who claim to reject universalist theories of color naming. To advance a conceptual account of color naming that is compatible with universalist and relativist presumptions as to the nature of cultural inquiry