How do we know that grass is green?

Question

What I mean is, we are not born knowing the colour of anything, we assume that things are a particular colour because our parents have always told us that something is a particular colour, as indeed thier parents did etc. But there must have been a point in evolution where the human race had no concept of describing colour, so who decided that green was the colour of grass, could easily have been any other colour.?

Answer 1

Green, blue, yellow, it's just light refracting that appears to be a color. Green, for all intents and purposes doesn't exist.

I remember reading a science book in the 3rd grade saying that the sky wasn't really blue and it just appeared to be so. Thus began the great grade school debate of 1987.

Emotions ran high, kids revolted against the idea that everything they had cherished as being blue had fallen into some type of "grey area" (like the pun).

It's an interesting question though. It brings up the notion everything we have known may just be an illusion. That perception is important, but especially more important when one or more people perceive the same thing. The word "green" doesn't exist in China.

We invent words to convey ideas. I.e. Communication

Answer 2

if u meditate .. u can go deep down in your mind and can find that first of all a life is of rock... from that it changes to plants then water animals then land animals in last a cow and then it is human being...
but how we know that the green is green is a question having a very stupid answers..because if from the very bigning you had been told that grass is red.. you would have percieve it that way.. but these are the fixed patterns made by society to let a thing be catogrised.. it doen not have any relation with the perception .. because when u perceive a thing. it gives u the effect of colour then the mind interfere and it gves it a name.. otherewise it is just a colour.. not the green colour..make it clear and the meditaion is the only way

Answer 3

How do you know that your parents are actually your parents? Because you have been told they are. Same as you have been told that grass is green, the sky is blue (sometimes), and red is the colour for danger. Only the colour-blind can argue that grass is not green! For in their eyes, they may see it as another colour.

Answer 4

A point in evolution where the human race had no concept of describing colour is a hard one to imagine. But I imagine that the human would be percieving coloural differences just like we do, only not having any ability to explain them to other people. The coloural differences would be grouped in body by the part of this human that a certain colour stimulates.

Answer 5

I seriously had this question pop into my mind when I was a kid! But I think some folks have it right: Grass is Green because we all agree that green is green even though someone elses green might be our purple, we still call it green because that's what we were taught. It makes life easy but at the same time difficult, becasue if your green is acutally my purple, then your grass looks like my purple and still clashes but looks so good together!

Answer 6

Well, you look at the grass and you see that it's green. It couldn't have been any other color because grass is grass. It doesn't change color based on what humans think that color of grass is. Even if we decided right now that the color of grass is red, the grass's not gonna turn red. If we decided to describe the color of grass as "red" instead of "green", then all things that were described as "green", would now be called "red". But nothing's gonna change color. I'm really not sure if I understood your question, but whatever.

Answer 7

Language came out of our need to have words for things, including colours. Thus a dog was called "dog" but it could just as easily have been named "cat". The usage of dog for "dog" continued and to this day, we call a dog "dog".
"Green" was decreed the name of the colour of grass or leaves, and that word stuck. It could just as easily have been called "blue", but we kept that word to describe sea and sky.
It suited mankind to retain the meaning and significance of these words, thus: language.
We don't "know" that grass is green. We simply use the word "green" so that everybody knows what we mean.

Answer 8

It's our perception, but ask a million people and most would agree it's green (some would say it's red if they were colourblind!!). I suppose someone or a group of people had to put a name and description to everything. Where do you stop? Who named the notes in music? Who named the countries of the world? Who decided to name the parts of the human body? Someone has to start things going at some point in time!

Answer 9

Grass is a colour and it is the same colour as everything else we call green. Think about it you can't call it, lets say blue and a then go on to call cabage green it wouldn't make sense.

Answer 10

G'day Plato's Father,

Thank you for your question.

Indeed, in many other languages, it is called another name. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first usage around 700AD so it came over with the Anglo-Saxons. Other languages would have developed words to describe colours at some early point in their evolution.

Regards