Abel on Perception

1. According to Abel, what is perception?
It is the result of our brain organizing the information it takes in into reasonable data, influenced by experience, prejudices, and culture.
2. What does Abel mean by “seeing as?”
It is how our brain interprets what we see from experience, prejudices, and culture.
3. To see what is the case, what is required? Please define each term.
Context (what it is that we are seeing), inference (why we are seeing what we are seeing), concepts (our idea of what we are seeing), experience (thing we have seen before that relate to what we are seeing), interpretation (what we understand about what we are seeing).
4. What did Nietzsche mean by “the fallacy of the immaculate perception?” How does Psychologist Joseph Jastrow prove this point? When have we done this in class?
No perception is perfect or correct, it is always influenced by experience, prejudices, and culture. He created a drawing that could be interpreted as two different things, making neither interpretation correct or incorrect. We did this when we took Dr. Gilligan’s test on perception and different people in the class had different interpretations of questions on the test.
5. What does Abel mean when he writes: “there is no sharp line dividing perception and illusion?”
Sometimes there are too many different interpretations in perception to be able to know what is truth.
6. Why is perception selective by nature?
Because we perceive what we expect we will perceive, or what we think is the right thing to perceive by our own standards.
7. What does Abel mean when he says: “to perceive is to solve a problem?”
He means that the things we try to perceive are issues that our brain must make sense of before we can understand them.
8. What is the role of social conditioning in determining how things “naturally look?”
What we perceive as the way things “naturally look” is determined by what our society has conditioned us to believe is the way thing “naturally look”.
9. What is significant of the Durer rhinoceros story? How was the influence of convention demonstrated when some tribes were given a photograph?
Even when the James Bruce finally saw a real rhinoceros and saw how different it was from Durer’s model of one, he still drew it similar to the model because he had always thought that that was how a rhinoceros should look. The tribes could not perceive the image of people in the photo because it was not the perception of people that their minds were used to and had always agreed upon.
10. How does convention influence perspective drawing?
Artists draw things to look the way they have agreed upon in their minds that they should look.
11. What does Abel mean when he writes: believing is seeing? How might this point be seen in the study of the natural and the social sciences?
What you have been conditioned to believe affects your perception of things and situations. This point could mean that the studies of natural and social sciences are affected by the beliefs of the scientists studying them.
12. What does Abel mean by “hearing as…”?
It is how our brain interprets what we hear from experience, prejudices, and culture.