WHY WAS CLASSICAL CATEGORIZATION THEORY REPLACED?
What changed this reliance on traditional models of philosophical categorization came from the work of Eleanor Rosch (1978). In her visit to study the Dani in New Guinea, she found that the speakers of this language had only two color terms: mola for bright, warm hues and mili for dark, cold ones. After exposing the Dani to forty color chips in order to study their perceptual abilities, she confirmed that they indeed had a very different culture, a confirmation of her belief in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis . However, upon continuing her investigation, she discovered some rather surprising information. She noted that the Dani did physiologically recognize colors in a manner very similar to those of Americans. The differences in naming colors were perceptually structured in the same way others outside of this cultural milieu. They used similar strategies in the storage, remembrance, and recollection of colors. They differed in how they were categorized in their own language. Humans do not
