Opinion: colour clashes in sport highlight the difficulty of accurately describing the subjective experience of how we see colours
Recent news stories have focussed on problems concerning colour blindness. We've seen World Rugby introduce a rule preventing red/green kit clashes in an effort to help fans, players, and referees. The same issue has also cropped up for many other sports such as Liverpool vs. Man Utd in soccer and Cork vs. Limerick in the All-Ireland hurling final.
It's a story that struck a chord with me, because I am a deuteranope. This means that I have a specific form of red/green colour vision deficiency of exactly the kind that causes problems for viewers of Ireland vs. Wales in rugby, Cork vs. Limerick in hurling or Cork City vs. Cobh Ramblers in soccer. For that reason, I'm personally happy to see a growing awareness of the problem. But I'm also professionally interested, because I think that this topic shines a light on some bigger issues, both philosophical and practical.
Colour vision deficiency is an inherited genetic condition that affects roughly one in 12 men, and one in 200 women. That means that there's likely to be at least one colour blind student in every primary and secondary school classroom (or, one player on every team). The gene responsible is carried on the X-chromosome (which is why the proportion of men affected is much higher), and there is a very wide range of different difficulties that result.
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From Bright SIde, how colour blind people see the world
My friends and family are curious, but baffled. It's difficult to describe accurately how the world looks to me. I don't see in greyscale. I can tell the difference between "stop" and "go" at the traffic lights. Strawberries, grass, and chestnuts do in fact look "red," "green," and "brown" to me. The best I can say is that these colours are harder for me to distinguish under certain conditions (in low light, if I'm not paying attention or if the objects are moving about in the periphery of my visual field). Their differences don't "pop" or "jump out" as obvious.
The difficulty of accurately describing such subjective experiences (sometimes called their "ineffability") is notorious amongst philosophers of mind; it's why consciousness has been labelled "the Hard Problem" by David Chalmers. Even if we know everything about the brain, the nervous system, and the genetics that cause colour blindness, there remains what philosophers have called an "explanatory gap" in connecting it all to our lived experience.
Other philosophers such as Thomas Nagel have argued that something counts as "conscious" only when there is something it is like to be that thing. There is nothing it is like to be a rock, but there is something it is like to be a human, or a dog, or a cat. Perhaps there are borderline cases: what is it like to be a bat? Or a spider? Or a plant? The challenge in answering these questions stems from the essential difficulty in describing conscious experience. And that's exactly the problem I face in explaining what it is like to be colour blind.
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From Serious Science, David Chalmers on the hard problem of consciousness
I've found that colour blindness is a useful example when I teach perception to my first year philosophy class. I find that there are about a dozen students in the class each year with some form of colour vision deficiency. Frequently, a few of them didn't already know. Childhood diagnosis in Ireland is at best haphazard, even though it can be done easily.
This is a worry. The topic of colour vision deficiency thereby also raises more general concerns about disability and discrimination, and how to address them with measures towards accessibility and accommodation. Nobody holds a personal prejudice against, or hostility towards, colour blind people. But sometimes, impersonal features of our social environment can exacerbate the difficulties that people face in education and employment as well as in entertainment. This is exactly what is meant by "structural discrimination": obstacles to achievement can arise almost accidentally as a result of social structures and patterns, even if nobody intends or endorses them.
A greater awareness of the hidden difficulties faced by people with colour vision deficiency is very welcome to those of us that live with it
A child may struggle with a geography exam when a map is drawn with clashing colours. A doctor or nurse may have difficulty in reading a medical chart when the red and green lines represent different things. These problems are very easily fixed with a more appropriate choice of colours, or patterns, or written labels, if only we design exams and charts more carefully.
A greater awareness of the hidden difficulties faced by people with colour vision deficiency is very welcome to those of us that live with it. But it can also help to highlight the often unnoticed challenges faced by people with other (much more significant) disabilities. Let's hope, therefore, that World Rugby's moves towards accessibility will have a knock-on effect (pun intended) by encouraging similar inclusiveness and accommodation in other areas.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
