Is 'color' a characteristic or a property?
A red ball is still red in a dark room, right? If it's rubber, let's say, it's also red deep on the inside. It's also inherently red even if a human doesn't observe it, right? But it might be purple to the vision of a butterfly... So, is 'color' an attribute that we assign to an object or is it a property of that object?
Comments
The colors (or at least the names of the colors) of the rainbow are defined by us humans, so they would be considered an attribute (which we apply to things).
However, the wavelengths of light reflected/absorbed by objects is really a material property of the object. And so in that sense, the color of an object is a property.
So it's kinda both (leaning towards a property though).
Both. The rubber has the property of preferentially not absorbing red light. Therefore it is red. We see it as red--that is to say, the same color as other objects with that property. So does a butterfly (if it has the capability to distinguish color anyway).
Color is a property or characteristic of the perception of an object. The objective term is frequency or wavelength of the light that comes from the object. (Characteristic and property mean the same thing in this context.)