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Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder (2024)

Here we are, blissfully going about our lives, saying fancy things like "pass me the ketchup, please" and "the projections for our year-close budget ain't pretty, folks," and we're satisfied with that

Second, I’ll try to make the point that, regardless of how precise or imprecise our language is, our habit of distinguishing things from one another doesn’t seem to be justified by how reality is built. If you grew up speaking English (or a similar language) you might believe that there are indeed six or so distinguishable groups of colors, and that they are somehow properties of the world that we simply “read out” with our retinas, subject to some physiological limitations. You hear of languages that have words for weirdly specific things like “the effect of sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, creating a dappled pattern of light and shadow” ( komorebi from Japanese) and “the roadlike reflection of moonlight on water” ( mångata from Swedish).

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