The universalist side claims that the biology of all human beings is all the same, so the development of color terminology has absolute universal constraints.
[5] Their study was intended to challenge the formerly prevailing theory of linguistic relativity set forth by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Berlin and Kay identified eleven possible basic color categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray.
Kessen, Bornstein and Weiskopf therefore claim that the ability to perceive the same distinct focal colors is present even in small children.
[6] In their paper Language and thought: Which side are you on anyway?, Regier et al. discuss the presence of a universalist perspective on the color debate in the mid-nineteenth century.
Discussed below, Barbara Saunders and John A. Lucy are two scholars who are prominent advocates of the opposing relativist position.
Everett's conclusions were met with skepticism from universalists,[14] who claimed that the linguistic deficit is explained by the lack of need for such concepts.
[15] Barbara Saunders believes that Berlin and Kay's theory of basic color terminology contains several unspoken assumptions and significant flaws in research methodology.
With regard to Berlin and Kay's research, Saunders criticizes the translation methods used for the color terms they gathered from the 78 languages they had not studied directly.
They primarily criticize the idea that there is an autonomous neuro-physiological color pathway, citing a lack of concrete evidence for its existence.
She points out that:[16] Ordinary colour talk is used in a variety of ways – for flat coloured surfaces, surfaces of natural objects, patches of paintings, transparent objects, shining objects, the sky, flames, illumination, vapours, volumes, films and so on, all of which interact with overall situation, illumination, edges, textures, patternings and distances, making the concept of sameness of colour inherently indeterminate.John A. Lucy's criticisms of Berlin and Kay's theory are similar to those of Saunders and other relativists, primarily focusing on shortcomings in research methodologies and the assumptions that underlie them.
Lucy believes that there are problems with how linguistic analysis has been used to characterize the meanings of color terms across languages.
Lucy also believes that there is significant bias present in the design of Berlin and Kay's research, due to their English-speaking and Western points of view.
He thinks the use of the Munsell color system demonstrates their adherence to the ideas that "speech is about labeling accuracy" and that "Meaning is really about accurate denotation," which he believes "...both derive directly from the folk understandings of English speakers about how their language works."
He demonstrates that "an 'adequate knowledge' of the system would never have been produced by restricting the stimuli to color chips and the task of labeling" (original emphasis).
Another significant contribution of this article is a discussion of the Emergence Hypothesis, its relation to the Yele language, and its motivation for the authors' revision of evolutionary trajectories.
Using a phylogenetic approach, Bowern & Haynie found support for Berlin & Kay hypothesis in the Pama–Nyungan languages, as well as other alternative trajectories for gaining and losing color terms.
As Stephen Levinson argues using methodology similar to that used by B&K for their initial tests and later for the WCS, there are simply regions of the color spectrum for which Yele has no name, and which are not subsumed by larger composite categories, even despite the inventive nature of color terms in Yele that fall outside the criteria for "basic" status.
Given the fact that such color naming words are extremely inventive, (a "semi-productive" mode of adjectival derivation is the duplication of related nouns), Levinson argues that this is highly detrimental to the BCT-theory, insomuch that Yele is "a language where a semantic field of color has not yet jelled", and thus one not open to universal constraint.
[21] As Levinson points out, there is evidence that supports the emergence of BCTs through physical objects and words used to signify simultaneous properties such as lightness.
(See Levinson's article for a discussion on the co-existing evolutionary tracks for color words if one accepts both B&K's position and the Emergence Hypothesis.)
Kay & Maffi (1999) incorporate the EH into their evolutionary track by removing from their model the assumption that languages begin by fully segmenting the color spectrum.
[20] In an article titled The Semantics of Colour: A New Paradigm,[25] Wierzbicka discusses three main critiques of the universalist approach: With regard to 1), she states that "the basic point ... is that, in many languages, one cannot ask the question, 'What color is it?'"
Their study proceeds to three main questions: With regard to 1), they find that color terms are not acquired any later than other relevant lexemes to distinguish objects.
Coming from these two perspectives (i.e., those outlined in the causation above, and the models of development), this leads Bornstein to conclude that "there appear to be nontrivial biological constraints on color categorization [and that] ... the available evidence seems compatible with a position of moderate universality that leads to expectations of probabilistic rather than deterministic cross-cultural correspondence", and that "in color, relativism appears to overlay a universalist foundation".
There are incursions of linguistic categorization into nonlinguistic processes of thinking, and taking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis does not necessarily entail a complete rejection of the universal components of human cognition.