> there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum.
I'm not so sure about this one. Whatever it is, you can point a camera at it and you'll get colors. That places it on the color spectrum, even if its color isn't the most important thing about it.
Sure, you'll get weird readings for transparent things, and you can't do this for "justice" or "pain", but everything that is remotely similar to something that has color, also has color.
I think you're missing what I'm saying.The overall point is that the existence of a spectrum does not in any way imply that everything exists somewhere on that spectrum.
In the example of the color spectrum, I don't mean that things necessarily don't (or do) have color. Take fundamental particles, as an extreme example. They don't themselves have any color at all, though they have 1ualities in common with color. And depending on what you do to them, they can exhibit qualities of color (or not).
But the fact that something has a color doesn't mean that thing itself is on the color spectrum — color is not a necessary quality of that thing, and can change depending on other factors — for energy that could be level of excitement, or for other things it might be the level and color of light in the room. Also, the physical things you point a camera at often do not themselves have color! They show up as being a color in the picture not because of their inherent qualities, but because of what wavelengths of light they do or do not absorb. And you can, by using different types of cameras or adjusting their settings, take in more of some wavelengths, less of others, or none of some, regardless of what things look like IRL (which is based in the wavelengths of light being reflected/not reflected from those things to your eyes, and which wavelengths the cones in your eyes can take in, and then how those are processed by your brain, etc).
I think I'm understanding what you're saying, I just disagree :)
> They show up as being a color in the picture not because of their inherent qualities, but because of what wavelengths of light they do or do not absorb.
The intrinsic/perceived duality that you're setting up here isn't related to what a spectrum is. What's fundamental for spectrums is that they're expansive: whatever the measured quality is, all such things map to somewhere on a single dimension which is the spectrum.
Color has been overused. Let's consider a mass spectrometer. It gives an electric charge to a sample, hurls it through a perpendicular magnetic field, and depending on the masses of the sample (or its components, supposing the ionization process broke it up), inertia causes spatial separation. Not-very-massive over here, and quite-massive over there. This is a spectrum because all masses have a place on it (nevermind that you might not actually be able to build a large enough spectrometer for some masses).
Or to use a mathematical example, if you exclude the interval [0,1] from the real number line, what you get is no longer a continuum, and mappings of things onto it are no longer a spectrum.
It may be a misconception that all political perspectives exist on a left/right axis, but when people talk about the political spectrum they're invoking a simplification under which all people do map to some point or another on that line.
As far as I'm aware it's only the autism spectrum that doesn't work this way.
I'm not so sure about this one. Whatever it is, you can point a camera at it and you'll get colors. That places it on the color spectrum, even if its color isn't the most important thing about it.
Sure, you'll get weird readings for transparent things, and you can't do this for "justice" or "pain", but everything that is remotely similar to something that has color, also has color.