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"The idea that our perceptions are only as good as our words and language is important to understand."

Nelly, this is such a profound statement; it illuminates the very essence of the human perceptual experience in a way that I hadn't quite processed until now. I want to reflect on this by sharing my own story. I have these pajama shorts that I really like to wear in the springtime. My friends and I always have arguments about its color; I am certain that they're black, others insist that they're navy blue, and still another is sure that they're a dark purple. Assuming that my perception was somehow defective, I eventually conceded and gave into the theory of the majority-- that the shorts were navy blue. To this day, every time I wear something that I think is black they'll ask something like “what color are your pants?" and I'll give an absurd answer like "tickle-me-pink;" we'll all laugh, but I don't answer because I am really unsure of what answer to give and I hate being in the wrong. I find that this is not limited to just my pajama shorts, but to several instances in which the question "what color is ‘x’?" is asked. But what is defective perception anyway? We are constantly evolving, thus it would follow that perception too should evolve and that with its evolution should come a large degree of variation in the way we see and understand our world.

So back to the shorts—I wonder, do my friends and I really see different colors when we look at them? Is our dispute simply due to different understandings of said colors, or am I/you/all of us truly lacking the vocabulary to better describe what we see?