Truth-Conditional Variability of Color Ascriptions

Abstract

Abstract Recent experimental work has shown that the truth-value judgments regarding color predications (e.g., “the leaves on my tree are green”) are influenced by the context of utterance (Hansen & Chemla, 2013; Ziółkowski, 2021). Most explanations of this phenomenon focus on the semantics of color adjectives. However, it is not clear if these explanations do justice to the nuances of the empirical data collected thus far. In contrast to the adjectival explanations, Agustín Vicente (2015) argues that the context-sensitivity of color predications can result from the polysemy of the noun. We present the results of three studies designed to test this hypothesis: a traditional survey experiment (Study 1), an exploratory correlational study inspired by the semantic integration paradigm (Study 2a), and a follow-up experiment (Study 2b) that was designed to mitigate possible shortcomings of Study 2a. The results of our studies present preliminary evidence against Vicente’s theory.