Quote:
Originally Posted by blindreper1179
That doesn't help answer how she knows purple is purple.
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I don't think a person who can see could possibly begin to fathom how a totally blind person interprets color. But there is an interpretation, and it's very, very different from your interpretation. As a person who can see and who could not possibly begin to fathom how a totally blind person interprets color, I will take a stab at how I think it works...
Color is a visual construct, thus cannot be truly understood by someone who cannot see. But color is a pretty common topic if you associate with non-blind individuals, so naturally you learn to make connections between color and emotion .. or smell .. or sound .. or other sensory perception. (Example the sound of a fireplace makes you think of what color? Red? Orange? Yellow? How about the feel of something hot? Probably red right? If you closed your eyes and put your hand near a hot stovetop you would most likely imagine in your head a "red" hot surface. Similarly with cold things, you would imagine lighter blues and whites perhaps a bit of purple. A few examples I can think of off the top of my head that associate color with non-visual senses: (Think of what color you associate for each example and highlight the whited out text to see if your answer matches mine.)
The taste of tomato soup :
Red
The smell of a lemon:
yellow
The feel of a cool breeze:
light blue
Hot sand underneath your feet:
orange/gold
Pain:
Red
Safety:
Blue
Fear:
Red
Joy:
Yellow
Your answers may have differed from mine, but that's okay because none of these things actually have a color, it's just a color you have associated with it. This, I believe, is how a blind person interprets color. They don't have a visual representation of color, so they only have the other four senses and emotions to interpret them. When I say the word yellow you can picture the color yellow in your mind, where a blind person might feel joy or feel the sun on their skin instead of visualizing the color yellow like you would immediately do, but they can tell you that a tomato is red and the sun is yellow without giving it a second thought. Blind people have lived their entire lives interpreting color this way.
It is because of this, I believe, that certain sounds such as a person's voice can remind a blind person of a particular color even if they have never seen color before.
Disclaimer: I probably have no idea what I'm talking about but hopefully this helps explain my point of view on it???