Perception: Connections Between Art and Science
R. H. Brady,
NetFuture,
Dec 03, 2002
Everybody is reading Michael Polanyi these days, and nobody is reading Norwood Russell Hanson. Too bad, because Hanson's 1958 Patterns of Discovery has more to say about recognition (and the famous duck-rabbit picture used in this article) than Polanyi ever did. In any event, a good introduction to the thought (if not the reference) behind Hanson's philosophy of perception may be found in this article. In a nutshell, the point is that perception is learned, and even relatively straightforward examples of empirical observation are inextricably theory-bound. Another way of saying the same thing (with a different slant) is that the language we use affects our understanding of what objects exist in the world.
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