=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=None
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-883/abstract1.pdf
|volume=Vol-883
}}
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<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-883/abstract1.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
Vagueness and hysteresis: a case study in color
               categorization

                        Paul Egré and David Ripley

                      Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS), Paris



  Abstract. This paper presents the first results of an experimental study
  concerning the semantic status of borderline cases of vague predicates.
  Our focus is on the particular case of color predicates (such as ‘yellow’,
  ‘orange’, ‘blue’, ‘green’), and on the influence of context in the catego-
  rization of color shades at the border between two color categories. In an
  unpublished study, D. Raffman and colleagues found that subjects have
  no difficulty in categorizing the same color shade as ‘blue’ or ‘green’ de-
  pending on the direction of the transition between the two categories,
  suggesting a phenomenon of hysteresis or persistence of the initial cate-
  gory. Hysteresis is a particularly intriguing phenomenon for vagueness for
  two reasons: i) it seems to comport with the tolerance principle, which
  says that once applied, a category can be extended to cases that dif-
  fer very little ii) it seems to suggest that borderline cases are cases of
  overlap, rather than underlap between semantic categories (see Raffman
  2009, Egré 2011, Ripley 2012). In our first study, we probed for hysteresis
  in two different tasks: in the first, subjects had to perform a task of color
  matching, namely to decide of each shade in a series between yellow and
  orange (respectively blue and green) whether it was more similar to the
  most yellow or to the most orange kept on the display. In the second
  task, subjects had to decide which of the two color labels ‘yellow’ or
  ‘orange’ was the most suitable. Shades were presented in three different
  orders, random, ascending from yellow to orange, and descending. While
  we found no order effect in the perceptual matching task, we found an
  effect of negative hysteresis in the linguistic task in each color set, namely
  subjects switched category at a smaller position rather than at a later
  position depending on the order. In a second study, we used the same
  design but asked subjects to report agreement or disagreement with var-
  ious sentential descriptions of the shade (viz. ‘the shade is yellow/not
  yellow/yellow and not yellow’). No order effect was found in that task.
  These findings raise two particular issues concerning the boundaries of
  vague semantic categories, which we discuss in turn: the first concerns
  the interpretation of negative, as opposed to positive hysteresis. Another
  concerns the sensitivity of order effects to the task.

  This is a joint work with Vincent de Gardelle.

</pre>