Organizing Principles

One organizing principle is context: we interpret and perceive things based off of the situation they're in. An example in the packet of context is when a world-reknowned violinist played in a metro unannounced, barely anyone noticed or recognized him. If he had announced his planned concert in a large concert hall though, the context would change, and people would then perceive him as a famous, talented musician, whereas the people in the metro perceived him as a nobody violinist. My own example of context often takes place in my HL English class when we are analyzing excerpts from novels. We received a passage recently from a novel that none of us had read, and we had to write a commentary on it. When I first read this excerpt, I perceived it quite differently than after when I learned it was about a soldier with shellshock. My interpretation of the passage completely changed once I learned of the context of the story.

Abel's Man is Measure, Chapters 3&4

3. To see, 'what is the case', what is required?  Please define each term.

 To see "what is the case," requires context, inference, concepts, experience, and interpretation. Context is the circumstances and situation-what's going on, inference is the use of logic to try and understand a situation, concepts are what are gained by inference-general ideas about the context, experience is the act of taking in a situation with your senses, and your interpretation is your final idea and feelings about a situation.

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?

What Nietzsche means by "the fallacy of the immaculate perception" is that everyone perceives things differently-each act of seeing and perceiving something isn't necessarily the only one or the correct one. Psychologist Joseph Jastrow proves this point by using a common drawing of either a duck or a rabbit, depending on one's interpretation. We did this in class during the TOK perception test.

7. What does Abel mean when he says, "to perceive is to solve a problem"?

When Abel says "to perceive is to solve a problem" is that when we perceive things it's a lot for our brains to process and take in, and what we do end up perceiving is culmination of what our brain expects and the patterns it put together through sense perception-so we solve the problem of what we are actually perceiving. 

8. What is the role of social conditioning in determining how things 'naturally look'?

The role of social conditioning in determining how things "naturally look" is that there are certain conventions in society that are familiar to us-"each society relies on its own visual schemata." Additionally, if something, like a common image in art, is passed down through a culture it can appear natural to those of that culture, but very unnatural to those foreign to it.

9. What is significant about the Durer rhinoceros story?  How was the influence of 'convention' influence perspective drawing?

What is significant about the Durer rhinoceros story is that Durer was able to make a woodcut of what he thought a rhinoceros would look like based off what people in his culture said it looked like, and his own imagination. The influence of "convention" was influencing perspective drawing because artists had a lot of trouble drawing in perspective until they applied conventional knowledge like geometry to it. 

11. What does Abel mean when he write, "believing is seeing"?  How may this point be seen in the study of the natural versus the social sciences?

When Abel writes "believing is seeing" what he means is that sometimes a belief or hypothesis is so intense that it leads to certain perceptions-like if someone believes something hard enough, they begin to see it. Also, if someone is told to expect something, they perceive it the way it was expected rather than how they would have originally perceived it. This point may be seen in the study of the natural versus the social sciences because if something previously had previously occurred in nature, scientists are bound to believe it could happen again-and can perceive things that aren't actually there because of this belief (like the supposed Vulcan sighting), and in the social sciences researchers have been found to have a bias-so they expect things of certain people after subconsciously judging them, causing them to perceive their subjects' actions differently than if the researchers were completely objective.