Aspect Seeing

The focus of the essay is the question of the consistency of human cognition, and especially the issue of relations between the everyday and the scientific experience. It has been presented the dichotomous solution (L. Chwistek, W. Sellars), according to which it is impossible to reconcile both forms of experience. After giving a criticism of this stance we arrive at a solution based on Wittgenstein’s conception of “seeing as”. The solution is that both forms of cognition are entirely complementary, and what differs them from each other is only the cognitive significance.

In ethics, Wittgenstein, early and late, emphasized changes of attitude over questions about how to act. He once told his friend Rhees: “One of my sister’s characteristics is that whenever she hears of something awful that has happened, her impulse is to ask what one can do about it, what she can do to help or remedy. This is a tendency in her of which I disapprove.” Instead, he says elsewhere: “If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important & effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us […].” Such attitudinal changes involve a kind of clarity of thought for Wittgenstein, and his understanding of them can be explained in part by reference to his later discussion about aspect-perception. Moral problems can disappear in a way that resembles the disappearance of the rabbit-aspect of Jastrow's duck-rabbit when the duck-aspect dawns. I compare moral clarification to logical-philosophical clarification. Both cases involve propositions that say nothing, but rather shed light on what other propositions say—tautologies, grammatical remarks, and philosophical elucidations on the one hand, clarificatory moral remarks like ‘think of her as someone’s daughter’ on the other. I argue that this gives a practical edge to Wittgenstein’s moral thought, a tool with which to think through moral difficulties.

Between 1937 and 1951 Wittgenstein had numerous philosophical conversations with his student and close friend, Rush Rhees. This article is composed of Rhees’s notes of twenty such conversations — namely, all those which have not yet been published — as well as some supplements from Rhees’s correspondence and miscellaneous notes. The principal value of the notes collected here is that they fill some interesting and important gaps in Wittgenstein’s corpus. Thus, firstly, the notes touch on a wide range of subjects, a number of which are only briefly addressed by Wittgenstein elsewhere, if at all. The subjects discussed include: explanation, ethics, anarchism, contradiction, psychoanalysis, colour, religion, concepts, classification, seeing-as, evolution, the relation between science and philosophy, and free will, amongst others. Secondly, the notes contain references to, and brief remarks about, philosophers of whom Wittgenstein otherwise says very little, if anything — such as Brentano, Heidegger, Aquinas, and Marx, amongst others. And thirdly, the notes provide us with valuable examples of Wittgenstein’s use of some key ‘Wittgensteinian’ terms of art which are surprisingly rare in his written works, such as ‘surface-’ and ‘depth-grammar’, and ‘centres of variation’.

An exploration of the connections between two ideas that beguile us in their relative proximity but which stand stubbornly apart, if only because of the considerable distance between their respective purveyor’s styles of thinking:  Proust’s idea of involuntary memory—represented by the Madeleine—and Wittgenstein’s  idea of aspect-perception— represented by the famous Duck-Rabbit drawing.  Both are unassailably real, from a psychological point of view, or at their least basic experiences are real, if not their theoretical interpretation on the part of Proust and Wittgenstein.  I consider the consequences and ramifications of the assumption that these two ideas—or sets of ideas— are indeed very close, that they form no less than the basis of the human life-world and the nature of art.  

When Wittgenstein claims that "the expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being unchanged" (Wittgenstein 1953: 196), he expresses a paradox that Gombrich (Gombrich 1960) modifies in this way: (a 1) the observer x perceives a picture P under a new aspect; (b 1) if x perceives P under a new aspect then x's perception of P has changed; (c 1) but x's perception of P has not actually changed. I argue that the Gombrich's version of the paradox has become the core of the problem of the pictorial representation. As I will explain, different approaches to depiction solve the paradox by denying one among (a 1)-(c 1). Gombrich rejects (c 1). Wollheim rejects (a 1). The so-called psychological theories of depiction also reject (a 1). Every theory of depiction should face what I call the Fictional Issue (FI) and the Representational Issue (RI). Attempting to solve FI and RI, I shall explore an alternative, Wittgensteinian solution, which implies to reject (b 1). To do this, we have to interpret the seeing-as as made of two kinds of perception: a simple perception and a representational perception.

...The subject - we want to say - does not here drop out of the experience but is so much involved in it that the experience cannot be described.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar [1931–2], I:VII:§107.

Wittgenstein gave rigorous philosophical treatment to the tradition of theorising subjectivity. He did this by making the subject aporetic, showing that investigations of subjectivity rely upon linguistic concepts. Conceptual missteps such as the prevalence of dualism in psychology, the physical sciences and philosophy are a motif for Wittgenstein’s remarks on the problematic splitting of inner (mental) and outer (physical). Reductions of the subject solely to the physical, to behaviour will miss first-person phenomena in exchange for a general concept. Likewise in mentalism: exchanging the outer for a Cartesian mental picture amounts to an absurd exclusion of criteria for the verification of mental concepts.

Wittgenstein considers an alternative which dissolves dualist dichotomies through the ‘dawning’ or ‘lighting up’ of an ‘aspect’ (Aufleuchten eines Aspekts). Having an aspect – perhaps a political philosophy that informs an entire worldview for example – is an integral part of ‘aspect-seeing’ behaviour in human beings. This paper will examine the usefulness of a non-dualist identification of aspect-consciousness in relation to understanding a subject intertwined with modern and historical events.

Although the use of “intermediate cases” (Zwischengliedern) and “perspicuous presentations” (übersichtliche Darstellungen), which signals Wittgenstein’s new method in the Investigations, is originally meant to counteract what he calls Frazer’s “spiritual narrowness,” the transcription of the almost exact text from the notes on Frazer to the Investigations suggests that it is our inability to see beyond the literalist stance typified by Frazer that motivates Wittgenstein’s later method, and it reveals that what is at issue here is not just a local or merely anthropological issue, but a general philosophical problem that will become central to the later work. I show in this paper that the generalized blindness involved in Frazer’s stance and extended by Wittgenstein to traditional philosophy is a main concern behind the exploration of “seeing aspects.” In fact, seeing-as is the name the later work gives to the kind of seeing that recovers the existential depth that Frazer was missing. And the task it demands, of rethinking our conceptions of inner experience and subjectivity, is one that Wittgenstein undertakes in the Investigations and radicalizes in his discussions of aspect-seeing

I defend the view that aspect-perception—seeing a face as courageous, or  as a duck, etc.—typically involves the application of concepts. This might seem obvious, but it has recently been contested by Avner Baz—to my mind one of the most important commentators on the phenomena of aspects. He writes: “aspects may not aptly be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts […]” In opposition, I claim that they may. Indeed, in many cases there is no other way to identify aspects.

I review the development in Baz’s view, from his early criticism of Stephen Mulhall’s account of aspect-perception, to his more recent recruitment of the discussion about aspects to criticize John McDowell’s conceptualism, and his claim that: “the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects  reveals our power to perceive unity and sense that  are not aptly thought of as conceptual.”

I accept many of Baz’s claims against Mulhall and McDowell, but argue that his arguments go too far. I argue that aspect-perception involves a special kind of application of concepts, and that denying that is denying much of what is important and of interest in the phenomena of aspect. The world revealed in aspect-perception is thus not the conceptualized world of science; but it is also not the pre-conceptualized world we normally have in perception that Baz wants to bring into view.

The account of pictorial representation introduced in an earlier paper of mine is extended to photography and sculpture, and the beginnings of an extension to film is sketched.  The published version is open-access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/theo.12242

This paper examines the puzzling phenomenon of self-directed implicit bias in the form of gender “stereotype threat” (ST). Bringing to light the empirical undecidability of which account of this phenomenon is best, whether a rational or an associationist explanation, the paper aims to strengthen the associationist approach by appeal to a new account of seeing-as experiences. I critically examine “alief” accounts of reason- recalcitrant ST by bringing to bear arguments from the philosophy of emotion. The new account builds on the insights and overcomes the weaknesses of “aliefs” by (a) employing associations that are imaginative and unreliable; and (b) proposing non-conceptual seeing-as experiences.

In the conclusion to The Imaginary Jean-Paul Sartre draws attention to the centrality of imagination in human life, describing it as a constitutive structure of consciousness. Imagination, according to him, is not a contingent feature of consciousness, but one of its essential features. This essay re-examines Sartre’s notion of imagination, arguing that current interpretations do not exhaust its meaning. Beginning with a consideration of dichotomies that dominate his theory of imagination—such as those between present, material objects and absent images, or real entities and fictional creations, as well as interpretative responses to them—the essay moves on to explore the possibility of locating a different sense of imagination in his work, one which is irreducible to such oppositions. Focusing on Sartre’s example of the work of an impersonator, this essay advances the idea that the playful activity of impersonators and actors enables the spectators who are watching them to explore novel and often unfamiliar connections between objects in the world. Imagination, according to this interpretation, enriches and augments perception, rather than suspends or replaces it with mental images. This new interpretation of Sartre’s notion of imagination places him in proximity to Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘aspect-seeing’ in Philosophical Investigations. However, whereas Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘aspect-seeing’ can lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to draw a line between perceiving and imagining, the notion of imagination operative in Sartre’s example enables us to maintain and explain the differences between ordinary and ‘imaginative’ perception.

This is the introductory essay to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, a book of essays on the importance of seeing aspects in Wittgenstein's later work. We place the discussion of this topic within the history of the interpretation of the Investigations and refer to the various essays in the volume that address the question from diverse perspectives.

A fourfold use of Wittgenstein's later philosophy in order to tackle fundamental conceptual misconceptions in the domain of dance practice is proposed: the extension to dance of the insights of his remarks on other arts, the application to dance instructions of his method of examination of the use of language, the extension to dance of the insights of his remarks on aesthetics, and the use of some of the fundamental concepts of his later philosophy, such as "aspect-seeing", or "form of life". In the first section, Wittgenstein's paragraphs on Shakespeare are used in order to clarify the nature of representation, his remarks on archi-Resumen Propongo un uso cuádruple de la filosofía madura de Wittgenstein con vistas a abordar confusiones conceptuales fundamentales en el ámbito de la prác-tica de la danza: extender a la danza aquellas de sus observaciones perspicaces sobre otras artes que sean relevantes, aplicar a las instrucciones de danza su análisis del uso del lenguaje, extender a la danza sus observaciones sobre la estética y usar en el contexto de la danza algunos de los conceptos fundamentales de su filosofía madura, tales como el de «ver aspec-tos» o el de «forma de vida». En la primera sección, se usan los parágrafos sobre Shakespeare de Wittgenstein para clarificar

According to a widespread view in metaphysics and philosophy of science (the " Dependence Thesis "), all explanations involve relations of ontic dependence between the items appearing in the explanandum and the items appearing in the explanans. I argue that a family of mathematical cases, which I call " viewing-as explanations " , are incompatible with the Dependence Thesis. These cases, I claim, feature genuine explanations that aren't supported by ontic dependence relations. Hence the thesis isn't true in general. The first part of the paper defends this claim and discusses its significance. I argue, for example, that many mathematical explanations are apparently compatible with Dependence, so the existence of counterexamples is interesting and non-obvious. The second part of the paper considers whether viewing-as explanations occur in the empirical sciences, focusing on the case of so-called fictional models (such as Bohr's model of the atom). It's sometimes suggested that fictional models can be explanatory even though they fail to represent actual worldly dependence relations. Whether or not such models explain, I suggest, depends on whether we think scientific explanations necessarily give information relevant to intervention and control. This paper is about a certain mathematical phenomenon, and its implications for a widely held view about the metaphysics of explanation. I'll say more about the mathematical phenomenon shortly. The widely held view is this: Dependence Thesis: All explanations reflect relations of ontic dependence between the items appearing in the explanandum and the items appearing in the explanans. I plan to argue that a family of mathematical cases, which I'll call " viewing-as explanations " , are incompatible with the Dependence Thesis. These cases, I claim, feature genuine explanations that aren't supported by ontic dependence relations. Hence the Dependence Thesis—which has achieved something approaching consensus status in metaphysics, philosophy of science and elsewhere—is not true in general. The paper is organized as follows. §1 briefly describes the tension between Dependence and viewing-as explanations, and §2 presents some further examples from the mathematical literature. §3 looks more closely at the Dependence Thesis, the challenge posed by the mathematical cases, and several possible responses to the challenge. §4 considers whether viewing-as explanations are possible in the empirical sciences, focusing on the case of so-called fictional models. §5 briefly argues that the counterfactual approach to explanation also has trouble accommodating view-as cases. Finally, I offer some concluding remarks in §6.

The phenomenon of aspect-perception, i.e. the (sudden) perception of figurative shapes in natural or human-made configurations has long been discussed in the field of visual studies. Several examples of pebbles, rocks, etc. from Ancient Egypt that were partly re-worked to highlight certain figurative features, thus testifying to such experiences, are known. This paper presents two more cases of aspect-perception from Egypt that have so far not been recognised and discussed as such.

Aspect-perception is a phenomenon described in detail by L. Wittgenstein in part XI of
Philosophical Investigations. The most famous example is the duck-rabbit figure, which can be viewed either as a duck or a rabbit, but the phenomenon extends well beyond visual Gestalt pictures and permeates various fields of human life, including aesthetic, moral and linguistic experience.  Recently there have been attempts to apply the notion of aspect-perception to religious faith. It has often been observed that religious faith involves a particular way of ‘seeing’ different objects and events (recall the famous phrase from the hymn Amazing Grace, ‘I once was lost, but now am found; Was blind, but now I see’). For this reason, the attempt to use the category of aspect-seeing to analyze religious faith may appear promising. My aim in this paper to
analyze critically one such attempt, made by N. K. Verbin in ‘Religious Belief and Aspect-seeing’ and ‘Can Faith be Justified?’.
  In these papers Verbin argues for two closely related theses regarding religious belief. The first is conceptual; she proposes that we should understand ‘certain kinds of religious beliefs which we view as central to a person having a living faith’ as ‘a type of aspect-seeing’. The second follows from the first: we should modify accordingly the way we construe justification for religious belief. In what follows I expound Verbin’s conceptual claim and present arguments against equating religious belief with seeing religious aspects. Basing myself on examples of people who see religious aspects but do not reach religious belief, I conclude that the two cate- gories should not be conflated. Although I reject Verbin’s overall claim, however, I concede that aspect-seeing does play a significant role in justifying religious belief, although not in the way Verbin proposes.

In this presentation, I present the assumptions of the theory of religious beliefs as a type of aspect seeing. This theory was inspired by L. Wittgenstein's remarks from "Philosophical Investigations".
I offer some criticisms and I conclude that one cannot identify religious beliefs with seeing religious aspects of reality.

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The aim of the work is to present the possibilities of ethics in late Wittgensteinian framework. In course of the investigation will be presented: (1) early Wittgensteinian ethics, (2) late Wittgensteinian anti-foundationalism and (3) its consequences for analytical meta-ethics – it will be argued (a) against epistemologization of ethics and (b) for need of more complex understanding of ethics, by which traditional meta-ethical disputes of realism with anti-realism and of cognitivism with non-cognitivism will be overcame –, which will result in (4) development of late Wittgensteinian ethics.
Ethics will be presented as consisting in ethical ways of seeing of the world, through which various phenomena arise as ethically relevant and late Wittgensteinian ethical investigation will be developed as clarification, cultivation and enrichment of our ethical ways of seeing in overall – partially subjective and partially intersubjective – context of language, life forms and life stories from which they arise.

Jest to nieco zmodyfikowany autoreferat wygłoszony na publicznej obronie rozprawy doktorskiej w Instytucie Filozofii UJ, 29.10.2018. // This is the presentation given during the public defense of my PhD thesis on 29.10.2018, Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.


English summary



„Sources of faith. The conditions for acquiring religious beliefs in the light of analytic philosophy of religion”


The aim of the dissertation is to analyse the conditions under which people acquire religious beliefs (to describe the circumstances, in which their religious faith is born), in the light of several philosophical theories dealing with the subject of religious faith. The results of the project are twofold: first, the multidimensional, deepened understanding of how religious faith is born; second, the explanation why particular theories look at this phenomenon in their own specific way and what assumptions they make. I also point out that the description of the conditions for acquiring religious beliefs is always connected with the attempt to explain why some people do not form such beliefs
(to explain how faith arises is to explain why – sometimes – it does not arise).
In the first chapter, I reconstruct a theory of religious beliefs as aspect seeing, inspired by the work of later Wittgenstein. In the second chapter, my analyses focus on the conception which points to the experience of one's conscience as a way to know God. The third chapter is devoted to the hypothesis of sensus divinitatis, the sense of divinity, which allows one to form religious beliefs. Chapter four revolves around the conception of 'theistic natural signs', which refer the individual who experiences them to the reality of God. I show how each hypothesis about the sources of faith is intertwined with the attempt to explain the phenomenon of religious unbelief.
Chapter five concentrates on developing a fundamental vision of how religious beliefs arise; the vision which underlies all the theories analysed in chapter 1-4. This vision consists of three main elements. First, a subject forms religious beliefs as a result of contact with some object or phenomenon ('metaphysical' condition for faith), or as a result of having certain experiences ('epistemic' condition), due to the fact that it has an adequate cognitive faculty or disposition to form such beliefs ('relational' condition). Particular conceptions of the sources of faith fill these conditions in their own ways. I stress that each of the conceptions also provides an explanation for religious unbelief: according to them, religious beliefs do not appear, because one of the aforementioned conditions is not satisified. Usually this is due to the destructive effects of human sin.
In the sixth chapter, I underline the role that metaphysical fact of God's existence (or nonexistence) plays in explaining why religious beliefs appear. Basing myself on the conceptions from chapters 1-4, and, additionally, the argument from Divine Hiddenness, as presented by J. Schellenberg, I conlude that the way one approaches the question of the sources of faith and how one assessess the phenomenon of unbelief, depends on one's stance on the question of whether God exists.

Mental verbs make up one of the groups in the verb classifications of a language. Mental verbs are important in terms of expressing emotions, thoughts and perceptions of those who speak a language. Accordingly, mental verbs are classified into three categories: cognitive verbs, psych verbs and perception verbs. Perception verbs are the third category of mental verbs. Perception verbs refer to actions which we can perceive through mind and sensory organs. In this article, firstly mental verbs and perception verbs will be outlined. Then, eye verbs, which are the first group of perception verbs, in Old Uighur will be classified, being examined. In this way, the mind world of Old Uighurs will be tried to illustrate and understand.

"We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses. Concept is divorced from percept, and thought moves among abstractions. Our eyes have been reduced to instruments with which to identify and to measure; hence we suffer a paucity of ideas that can be expressed in images and in an incapacity to discover meaning in what we see. Naturally we feel lost in the presence of objects that make sense only to undeluted vision, and we seek refuge in the more familiar medium of words. ... The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened."
Rudolf Arnheim: Art and Visual Perception, 1974, p. 1

This is https://www.academia.edu/9984501/Queen_Elizabeth_I_meets_the_Boojum without text

Related: https://www.academia.edu/10429829/Seeing_Letters_Skulls_and_Faces

2015-04-10: Friendly license for using these comparisons: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)

2015-04-18: Father Time × 3

2016-05-08: Added one image (page 4)

The purpose of this article is to discuss Wittgenstein 1933-39 self-criticism of one of the most fundamental tractarian theses: There is one and only one complete analysis of the proposition (3.25). Wittgenstein’s arguments against his previous thesis can be found in some passages of the Philosophical Investigation (PI) as well as in the Big Typescript (BT). As we shall argue, Wittgenstein’s self-critique is directly related to two important ideas proposed by Frege in §§18-24 of The Foundations Arithmetic (FA) with respect to his construal of “number attributions”. Our main goal in this paper will therefore be to show how Wittgenstein's self-criticism of his old conception of the tractarian “analysis” would have been influenced by his concerns in the middle period of his work with these two proposals made by Frege in FA regarding the notion of “numerical attribution”. Our first task will then be to connect Wittgenstein’s self-criticisms to his former conception of “analysis” in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). To accomplish this first goal, we will have to briefly present a version of how such analysis would look like in TLP. Our next task will be to pinpoint some passages of the PI in which Wittgenstein rejects the completeness and uniqueness involved in his previous construal of the analytical process. We will try to circumscribe clearly a crucial notion involved in Wittgenstein’s self-critique: the idea of “seeing as/seeing aspects”. Our claim is that this notion, as well as Wittgenstein’s self-criticism, were both directly influenced by Frege’s construal of the “number attribution” presented in FA. To accomplish this second task, we will have to revisit and discuss some further concepts from an early period of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, like “internal and internal properties” and the “saying/showing distinction” in TLP. On our way towards accomplishing this goal, we will present a curious complaint by Wittgenstein regarding Russell’s, as well as Frege’s conception of generality, or more specifically, on the usage of the existential quantifier suggested by both these authors.

Contemporary philosophers of perception, even those with otherwise widely differing beliefs, often hold that universals enter into the content of perceptual experience. This doctrine can even be seen as a trivial inference from the observation that we observe properties-ways that things areas well as things. I argue that the inference is not trivial but can and should be resisted. Ordinary property perception does not involve awareness of universals. But there are visual (and aural) experiences which do involve determinate universals: following Wittgenstein, I call these 'aspect experiences'. The common view of perceptual content effectively conflates aspect experiences with mere property perceptions. Wittgenstein's later writings on the philosophy of psychology provide an alternative way to think about both aspects and properties. It also forms a contrast with Wittgenstein's own early treatment of perception in the Tractatus, the doctrine of which is much closer to the contemporary norm among philosophers of perception. In seeing how Wittgenstein moved away from his early view, we can see how we might move away from that norm.

In this article, I identify three ways in which Wittgenstein opposed an idea of epistemic asymmetry between the first person and the second-or-third person. Examining the questions of 1) absence of doubt about my own experience and uncertainty about the experiences of others, 2) ineffability of subjective experience and 3) immediacy of my knowledge of my own experience contrasted with my merely inferential knowledge about the experiences of others, I see Wittgenstein’s remarks about “inner and outer” as a many-faceted denial of the claim that people’s minds are in some deep way unknowable to others. These considerations also serve to clarify Wittgenstein’s relation to behaviorism.

The present work focuses on the normative aspects of the visual perceptual experience, as there discussed in the second part of Philosophical Investigations (PI II, xi). In these passages, Wittgenstein argues against the physiological explanations of Wolfgang Köhler and empiricist proposals that starts from the reception of sensory impressions. These considerations allow him to show that interpretation plays a relevant role in certain cases of visual perception (preeminently, the perception of aspects of objects). Going through this scenario, I´ll propose a way to extend this model to general cases of visual perceptions of objects. In doing so, I will expose the comparative advantages of this position with respect to its smaller partial alternative and I’ll clarify the commitment that it maintains with other key Wittgensteinian bets on how to understand the non-exceptional presence of understanding in visual perception.

Talk on talk on J. E. Millais' "Isabella" and on voting on what you want to see.

As for the image on the last page, see also https://www.academia.edu/11592383/The_Vanishing

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Update (2015-05-04):
Already in November 2012 Carol Jacobi wrote: "The salt cellar spilling its contents through the shadow on the white cloth in Lorenzo and Isabella, dispels doubts about whether such sexual connotations were ‘conscious’".
Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/sugar-salt-and-curdled-milk-millais-and-synthetic-subject