Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Metaphorically, the spectrum may be likened to the letters of a "color language" in which we all know how to communicate, be it in ways that are imperfectly understood. In addition, it is the prosody, syntax, and pragmatics of this color language that is the subject of the original and imaginative study by Zhu Jingqing and Li Jiaquan—two former "sent-down youths" from southwest China—from which the content of this issue of Chinese Studies in Philosophy has been translated. Our use of colors, they argue, does not merely manifest our human aesthetic sensibility, but serves social needs of communication as well.