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Albert A. Munsell first published A Color Notation in 1905. “Cramped by the poverty of color language,” Munsell classified and numbered 320 colored swatches according to their hue (color), value (light to dark), and chroma (color strength).¹⁹⁷ When presented in a two-dimensional array as it was by Berlin and Kay in their research,^§MS1.3.1a hues (red, yellow, green, purple, blue, and intermediate chroma) are numbered 1–40 across a horizontal axis. On a vertical axis, values each have a letter, B–I. (A is reserved for white and J for black, in a parallel grayscale that has ten gradations.) So, at hue number 17, a green, we have 8 green values: 17C is a light green, and 17H a dark green.¹⁹⁸

Munsell’s purpose was to “standardize” color and to rectify the lack of clarity in spoken color language, as if there could be a standard measure: a “normal” viewer viewing light reflected from a “standard” light source. The question of course immediately arises whether there can ever be a standard or a normal when viewing is forever subject to the vagaries of context and viewer. These will generate infinite variety of empirical color experiences such that no two experiences are ever quite the same.

However, we don’t want to accept defeat, and to assume as Hardin^§MS1.3.1b does in his critique of the ostensibly normal viewer that color is no more than a figment of our minds.¹⁹⁹ Rather, we want to claim that it is possible to create a complex account of such variabilities. This we do in our notion of design as active meaning-making. Every color is uniquely designed in its creation and viewing; however, the patterning of the design can be accounted for, both in its conventionality and its unique modulations in the moment.

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¹⁹⁷ A.H. Munsell, 1905, A Color Notation, Boston, MA: Geo. H. Ellis Co, pp. 9, 14–15; A.H. Munsell and T.M. Clelland, 1921, A Grammar of Color, Mittineague, MA: Strathmore Paper Company, pp. 13–17; A.H. Munsell, 1915, Atlas of the Munsell Color System, Boston, MA: Albert H. Munsell; Anna Wierzbicka, 2006, “The Semantics of Color: A New Paradigm,” pp. 1–24 in Progress in Colour Studies, Volume 1: Language and Culture, edited by C.P. Biggam and C.J. Kay, Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins, p. 18.

¹⁹⁸ Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, Susanne Vejdemo, and Carl-Henrik Ek, 2014, “Comparing Distributions of Color Words: Pitfalls and Metric Choices,” PLoS ONE 9(2: e89184), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0089184; C.L. Hardin, 1988, Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, pp. 159–62.

¹⁹⁹ C.L. Hardin, 1988, Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, pp. 76–80.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 151-152. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Alfred Munsell’s Color Notation §MS1.3.1g