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See my [1972 (a)], Appendix.
See also my section 41.
For what we experience is not merely the picture but the fact that, for example, one physical body stands in front of another.
From the point of view of development, significance seems to be the earliest element in interpretation. The baby smiles and reacts to smiles by smiling at a very early age: it somehow registers the significance of smiles. (See my section 31.) After all, the so-called imitative contraptions (cp. my [1963(a)], p. 381) to which babies and birds react, as Konrad Lorenz discovered, are probably not so much simplified shapes (of the mother bird for example) as release signals for biologically highly significant reactions. That is to say, the little bird recognizes in these shapes not so much its mother — that is, a certain physical body — but the carrier of food. Thus the significance of a visual signal seems to be prior to its physical interpretation. And we may perhaps wonder whether something analogous does not happen when we read: the meaning of a word in a sense may have priority over its spelling (which partly explains spelling mistakes).
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© 1977 Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles
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Popper, K.R., Eccles, J.C. (1977). Dialogue V. In: The Self and Its Brain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61891-8_19
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