“The conflation of innate powers of perception with the culture-bound apprehension of forms helps to muddle the idea of representation as copy and the idea of representation as symbolization” (40).
“Although the aim of such argument is to establish the concept of indeterminacy by demolishing the concept of an objective reality, the validity of hte subjective-objective dichotomy is, nevertheless, presupposed” (40).
“For Gombrich, the duck-rabbit is an emblem of the principle that interpretation is a name for all acts of knowing” (41).
“…all perception is of something with respect to, in comparison with, in opposition to. That is why it makes sense to claim that recognition precedes cognition; that anticipation is essential to all construing and constructing; that any act of identification entails an act of differentiation and thus of classification” (41). **To my mind, I sense thirdness touching firstness here. “essential” here is “natural” and “inevitable” and logical?
“…we see as in order to see at all” (41-42).
“An aphorism of Paul Klee’s gives cogent form to this idea: “Art does not render the visible; it renders visible” (42).
“Seeing as, taken as a mode of deliberate interpretation, is one way to characterize invention; analogy, as Oppenheimer claimed, is the means of discovering new ideas in science. But in a deeper sense, seeing as is the necessary condition of seeing at all” (42).
“The duck-rabbit problem is often said to exemplify the beholder’s share, the constraints of context, cultural perspecrive and so on. But this is incorrect. The uncontrollable gestalt shift exemplifies the way that physiological coding works; it is representative of the operations of the sense of order which we do not have to learn, the innate sense of order which Gombrich differentiates from teh sense of order which develops in the course of our lives” (42). **And always in dialectic/simultaneity with dis-order/chaos/fog/affect… Is the virtual ‘disordered’?
“These two different sense of order function interdependently, of course; or , we might say, the innate sense is the necessary condition for all symbolic activity, for which culture provides the sufficient condition. The dialectic of the two orders which constitutes the process of perception is precisely analogous to that of the formal system of any language and the mediations of the culture in which it functions” (42).
“…seeing—perception, the sense of order we’re born with—is necessarily seeing as and…it is only in this sense that it could possibly model the activity of the imagination” (43).
“Being able to picture to ourselves what is not present is an essential condition of speech; this imagining is a capacity which entails remembrance which, in turn, is necessarily dependent on language” (43).
“In his account of seeing a rabbit and seeing the lines as a rabbit, Wittgenstein deliberately separates interpretation from recognition, but here, in insisting on seeing that, he effectively argues that they are integral, that it is as absurd to speak of a particular color without regard to the system of which it is a part as it would be to try to identify a pitch or any other kind of degree without a scale” (44). ***DEGREES
“Seeing as can describe both the sense of order we are born with and the sense of order we must learn. THe seeing as of perception, insofar as it is the brain’s work, is a matter of scanning schema which are coded in teh cortex and of the corrections which the brain makes. This sense of order we are born with is manifested in electrochemical transfers which can be described as a ‘code’ because electrical polarity is involved, but hte ‘information’ is only absence of noise in the channel. The sense of order which is learned is perception in the sense of mind work. The seeing as which is conscious recognition is a learned response in which culturally determined experience is in dialectic with linguistic forms” (44). ***LEARNING natural response
“We are born knowing how to see by seeing as, knowing how to recognize. New representations—token types, in Peirce’s terms—can be recognized without deliberate direction or control, because types discover tokens. We learn to recognize the class concept implicit in its members and thus to learn to recognize the class concept implicit in its members and thus to learn to recognize the other classes which are comparable in one or another aspect: we learn to recognize and to represent by anaolgy” (44). This is where MOntessori is operating..
“For Peirce, interpretation is learning—and he characterized Thirdness (mediation) as ‘the sense of learning.” (44) !!!!!!!!!!!
**This chapter jumps to a discussion of Foucault’s “disquisition on Magritte’s pipe” (45).
“Words, not habits, are ambiguous. Ceci in its ambiguity creates a paradox of the sort which can be resolved: if the this is taken as a reference to the image, the statement is a version of the positivistic slogan ‘The map is not the territory'” (45).
“Magritte’s joke provides what all jokes provide, a chance to feel ourselves getting it: all jokes are built on the principle of the double-take… it is a principle of all jokes to allow us to discover the ‘perspective’ in which to judge” (45-46).
“It is the chief consequence of triadicity that our knowledge is mediated by what we already know. The process of signification—of recognition, of interpretation, of making new meaning—is empowered by ‘the sense of learning'” (46).
“We learn by interpreting our interpretations, by seeing what we mean” (46).
“In the dyadic perspective, recognition becomes a kind of linear decoding rather than being seen as the dialectical interplay of the sense of order we are born with and the sense of order we must learn” (47).
“The only real protection against gangster theories; the only real solution to the problem of initial terms, of deciding what is given to interpretation; the only generative idea with the power to withstand the radical skepticism and moral terrorism of contemporary critical theory, is a philosophy of representation. We urgently need to come to terms with the issues raised in any consideration of the relationship of the linguistic process and intention; it is the end which the concept of recognition can serve. Recognition is a ‘speculative instrument’ of prime importance for apprehending how, in the linguistic process, images are stabilized so that they can support those central acts of mind by which we exercise ‘the sense of learning’” (47).
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