It would almost seem that interpretations for the above figure in particular are limited only by the limits of the observer's imagination, since it appears completely solitary with virtually no contextual clues, aside from its shape, which might rule various interpretations out. This claim is especially troubling. pt. WITTGENSTEIN ON SENSATION AND 'SEEING-AS' 353 Looking up a table in the imagination is no more looking up a table than the image of the result of an imagined experiment is the result of an experiment (PI 265). As Wittgenstein writes in the above sections, he takes 'interpretation' to be an action in which we make a conjecture or an inference, which may end up being false. And since the eyes are the only things doing the actual 'seeing', all that is left for us to do is to infer or interpret what the eyes 'see', and where this interpretation occurs, of course, is in the brain. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Wittgenstein's dictum that "we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful” (PI 109) is pertinent here: much, if not all, of what we ordinarily call seeing involves chronic aspect-seeing.23 Let us return to a person who lacks the capacity to see aspects. As Wittgenstein puts it, interpreting is an action. This sort of conceptualization of how the brain works unconsciously by way of a leap of association is the result of the personification of the brain as a conscious, sentient entity in itself. Wittgenstein’s meditation on aspect-change, seeing-as and Kippbilderis imbued with an openness and radicality that goes beyond and questions classical philosophy and its metaphysical inspiration, while also showing a strong continuity with a certain philosophical tradition, the Kantian one. As I understand Russell, to 'see' a cat, in a nutshell, is to infer that our eyes are being affected by a bundle of certain frequencies of light. My doubt, in particular, is that Russell would actually mean such silliness by his use of the word "habit." It is like describing how messages from the brain tell one foot to place itself in front of the other in such and such a fashion, in what manner the knees, ankles, and toes bend, etc., etc., and claiming that such an account of the mechanics of human bipedal locomotion is what it is to walk. V. Imagination and emotion … Let me indulge in a final cavil, then, one which I’ve already intimated. Volume I. What is it to maintain a 'Wittgensteinian' position on an issue? In other words, we are constantly inferring from what our eyes 'see' without even thinking about it. The traditional stance on this issue would, of course, be of the former persuasion. University of Chicago Press. (10). The physical, symbolical appearance and phonetic sound of word may be the same, but the meaning remains ambiguous, just as in the duck-rabbit picture, wherein the basic physical structure and shape of the drawing is the same, but the apparent picture is ambiguous. On the other hand, the customary conceptualization of the word can account for why we might think we see an airplane in the sky and it turns out to be a bird, to use Russell's example--that our conscious inferences based on our perceptions can sometimes be mistaken. Modern philosophers of the traditional vein, in their attempts to align the study of philosophy with the methodological commitments of science, have come under this aforementioned presupposition that the brain is really the "I" and the eyes do the seeing for it. We could say, as I understand Russell in his account of 'seeing' a cat, that these inferences are made out of habit, and therefore occur undetected by conscious thought. Wittgenstein’s seeing as book. Seeing and Seeing‐as in Wittgenstein's Tractatus TILGHMAN, B. R. 1983-04-01 00:00:00 B . 1981-04-01 00:00:00 Footnotes 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). I. Wittgenstein and seeing-as --pt. 3. Vol. An examination of the way in which we conceptualize 'interpretation' will do much to shed light on the way in which we conceptualize 'seeing'. And since the meaning of this statement, according to proponents of this movement in philosophy, is the mode of empirically verifying its truth or falsity, such meaning must be put in terms of the method in which statement's truth or falsity is determined. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Even if it were so that the financial bank happens to be built on a river bank, we would still only be able to mean one designation or the other at one time if we were to say, for example, "I am going to the bank." And for philosophy to fall into the trap of working from a priori presuppositions that are grounded in such misapplied scientific projects is a great mistake. At the same time, and as McGinn herself has insisted in previous work (1997), the Wittgensteinian aspect is not 'inner' or metaphysically 'private'. There does not seem to be, however, anything that we can point to in this regard. Wittgenstein puts it this way: 75. ', I could answer him only that way. Wittgenstein was born on April 26, 1889 in Vienna, Austria, to awealthy industrial family, well-situated in intellectual and culturalViennese circles. However, even though this use may have fewer ridiculous ramifications, his account still remains problematic. Modern science, particularly psychology, tries to shed light on the question of how we can be said to see, hear, taste, smell, and feel in terms of theories which explain how sensations become perceptions. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XVII. In the case of the aforementioned figure 'F', therefore, this traditional analysis has instilled in many modern philosophers the conviction that there must be some common, essential object of perception between the 'F' and the mirror-image of the 'F', which is interpreted differently in each instance. If we say 'I see this figure as an F', there isn't any verification or falsification for that, just as there isn't for 'I see a luminous red'. But all this elaborate work of induction, in so far as it belongs to common sense rather than science, is performed spontaneously by habit, which transforms the mere sensation into a perceptive experience. Each of us exists as a whole creature, as a conundrum made of physical material that is, in some enigmatic and marvelous way, much more than the sum of its parts. This is something which is done, to at least some degree, consciously and deliberately. It is known that he even repudiated the schools of thought which he himself had influenced, such as logical positivism and the "Oxford School" of linguistic philosophy. (It is in this respect that physics is superior to ignorant common sense.) The chief confusions lie in the prevailing and allegedly common-sensical conceptions of the terms 'interpretation' and 'seeing'. Such people have no need for pitch-pipes, since they can tune an instrument by simply listening to it and 'hearing' whether or not it is in tune. T The phrase “seeing as” became a staple of philosophical vocabulary, and various uses were made of it. Based upon past experience with similar bundles and through force of habit, we infer or interpret that the resulting perception is in fact that of a cat (he even refers to 'seeing' the cat as a hypothesis, and further suggests a method by which to test it!). The basic evil of Russell's logic, as also of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a proposition is is illustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then pre-supposed as understood in full generality. When we look at the duck-rabbit, without any awareness that it can be seen two different ways, we only see either a duck or a rabbit. Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein's influential discussion of "seeing as." Let it be this: When we look at the figure, our eyes scan it repeatedly, always following a particular path. It therefore causes problems for the traditional account. In the case of 'seeing', therefore, Wittgenstein is trying to clarify the concept so as to show where scientific examination would and would not be applicable. If there is, can its ultimate reality be known if all that we have to rely on is our perceptions of it derived from our senses? In other words, we each exist as a brain in a vat--and in our case our bodies are the vats. The answer is not altogether clear, because, as mentioned above, his work is of the utmost complexity. William Day & Victor J. Krebs (Cambridge UP, 2010), a collection of essays on Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-seeing. This is the introduction to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, eds. In Part II of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein elaborates: Imagine a physiological explanation of the experience. Usually the experiment succeeds; when it does not, its failure is easily accounted for without modifying the laws of physics. In the first part, the remarks are rarely more than a paragraph long and are numbered sequentially by paragraph. Therefore, it seems that in the case of such theoretical reductions of 'seeing', the usage of the term 'interpretation' is terribly confused in that it is characterized by two apparently incompatible elements somehow entangled together into one distorted concept. Therefore the brain is thought of as making interpretations on both the conscious and the unconscious level. If, on the other hand, pictorial perception involves How did this term come to be used in this seemingly improper manner? Volume I. First Published 2016. Seeing Wittgenstein Anew is the first collection to examine Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on the concept of aspect-seeing. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Second, the main features of what Wittgenstein called “seeing aspects” are briefly presented. This type of analysis is infused in Bertrand Russell's treatment of what we can be said to be doing when we 'see': In our environment it frequently happens that events occur together in bundles--such bundles as distinguish a cat from another kind of object. Click here to search books using title name,author name and keywords. Is 'seeing' something which is empirically verifiable, which can be reduced to a theoretical account? Remember that Russell, as quoted earlier, maintains that "there are in fact no illusions of the senses, but only mistakes in interpreting sensational data as things other than themselves." A scientistic viewpoint ignores this need for clarification. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. Wittgenstein wants to begin by attempting to clarify what can properly be called a case of interpreting. The idea has come to be a fundamental presupposition of many modern philosophers of mind and psychology. It does in fact seem wrong to say that the picture-duck and the picture-rabbit look the same, because they are two completely different pictures. Therefore, a theoretical account of 'seeing', such as Russell's, gets a lot of mileage out of this confused conception of 'interpretation', since it seems to use two different applications of the word at the same time. It is then the job of the brain to somehow organize this perceptual data, (there is still no scientific consensus as to how the brain is said to perform this function) into a recognizable perception. This article argues that the phenomenon of seeing-as cannot be explained by such a conception of perceptual experience. Philosophers of psychology, in their efforts to determine theoretically what it is to 'see', or to provide a theoretical account of what it means to speak of 'seeing' something, have become tied up in this empirical, scientific picture. Even some prominent thinkers misunderstand Wittgenstein's ideas, as evidenced by the fact that many perceive of him as subscribing to philosophical schools of thought with which he would want no affiliation. Ideas such as these can properly be called interpretations. 1980. pp. To interpret it as a wire frame, we imagine that the sides of the figure are not solid, and that the lines are made out of thin metal wire. Most of these are not used to represent anything. 30990675 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG © 2020 Informa UK Limited, Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation. I. . Excerpted from Russell's An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. We speak this way normally because no alternatives are relevant in such a case, since to our knowledge there are no alternative aspects to the object in question. (my italics) (2). When we see the figure one way instead of the other, we are not actively producing an interpretation of it, but rather our seeing it one way or another is an expression of our visual experience. A verificationist is committed to this type of theoretical conceptualization of 'seeing', because conceptualizing it in any other way would render such statements meaningless. (11). Is this not the way that we have come to use and understand the concept of interpretation in our everyday language game, namely that an interpretation is at least to some degree a conscious and deliberate inference which may or may not turn out to be correct? If somebody showed me the figure and asked me 'What is that? Due to this failure, he says that the book's structure "compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction." In other words, if a verificationist cannot provide an empirically verifiable, theoretical account of what it is to 'see', then the entire verificationist project is dead because the means of verification itself will be rendered unverifiable. Even the person Wittgenstein calls 'aspect-blind' would be capable of seeing the similarity between two faces thus understood (see Wittgenstein 2009, Part II, 257), . Nor would it be possible to say that they can both be viewed at the same time. Our eyes are not simply tools used by the brain which do the 'seeing' for it. 2020 Internet Infidels Fundraising Drive / $33,018.52 of $40,000.00. In respect to Russell's claim, vis-à-vis, that there are no illusions of the senses, only mistakes in interpreting sensational data, how would seeing the ambiguous figure one way or other be a mistake? To put it simply, Wittgenstein's aim is to dissolve the conceptual confusions in philosophy which lead us astray and compel us to impose certainties upon the world that do not really exist. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The meaning of what it is to 'see' is entangled in scientific explanations of how the respective parts of our bodies function. For now, however, we are concerned with one simple question. In 1908 he began his studies in aeronauticalengineering at Manchester University where his interest in thephilosophy of pure mathematics led him to Frege. (3). However, there is something about the nature of this picture which tells against the traditional, theoretical account of what it is to 'see', namely that it appears to have the effect of an illusion. For example, Wittgenstein is well known for his discussion of seeing-as, most famously through his use of Jastrow’s ambiguous duck-rabbit picture. Breadcrumbs Section. A theoretical account of 'hearing' that is along the same lines as the account of 'seeing' would thus not seem appropriate, particularly in light of this phenomenon of perfect pitch. Therefore, when modern psychology or neuroscience provides us with an empirical account of 'seeing', and tells us that the brain somehow 'organizes' visual data into recognizable perceptions, we tend to associate 'organizing' with 'interpreting', and say that it simply happens spontaneously and without conscious thought.

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