Abstract
Gestalt switch diagrams have perhaps most often been used as paradigmatic examples of entities which can be perceived in completely different ways without their changing, and without there being a change in the perceiver’s physical relation to them. N. R. Hanson, pursuing Wittgenstein’s remarks concerning seeing and ‘seeing as’,1 has employed gestalt switch figures in this sort of way in considering cases relevant to the philosophy of science. In the chapter of his book Patterns of Discovery entitled “Observations”, for example, he has followed this line of thought, suggesting that where “Tycho and Simplicius see a mobile sun, Kepler and Galileo see a static sun.”2
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References
Cf. Wittgenstein (1953), IIxi.
Hanson (1958), p. 17. It may be noted that this is perhaps the most extreme thing that Hanson says in this regard, and that he devotes more space to a discussion of the differences between a layman’s and a scientist’s ways of seeing a piece of scientific apparatus.
Cf. Kuhn (1962), pp. 85 & 113 ff.
Feyerabend (1965 b), p. 247. See also Feyerabend (1977), p. 365 n.
Cf. Hanson (1958), p. 87: “Consider the bird-antelope in fig. 12. Now it has additional lines. Were this flashed on to a screen I might say ‘It has four feathers’. I may be wrong: that the number of wiggly lines on the figure is other than four is a conceptual possibility. ‘It has four feathers’ is thus falsifiable, empirical. It is an observation statement. To determine its truth we need only put the figure on the screen again and count the lines. The statement that the figure is of a bird, however, is not falsifiable in the same sense. Its negation does not represent the same conceptual possibility, for it concerns not an observational detail but the very pattern which makes those details intelligible. .... “
Andersson’s and Furberg’s treatment of the gestalt switch phenomenon thus differs from the one to follow in the present chapter in that they do not consciously present it as a basis for an alternative conception of science: cf. Andersson & Furberg (1966), Chs. 5–7.
Wittgenstein (1953), p. 194.
Ibid.
This has sometimes been misleadingly expressed by saying that gestalt figures are ambiguous. But where we might say of some linguistic entity such as a phrase or sentence that it is ambiguous, it would at least be metaphorical to say the same of gestalt figures.
As expressed by Kuhn: “Though most people can readily see the duck and the rabbit alternately, no amount of ocular exercise and strain will educe a duck-rabbit.” (1977), p. 6. Note also that a treatment of the question as to why the duck-rabbit has the particular features it does is perhaps best handled by a psychologist; at any rate, such a treatment lies beyond the scope of the present study.
Following Wittgenstein, in this study such terms as “picture-duck” will often be dropped in favour of the simpler formulation “duck”. In all cases however these terms are meant to have reference only to the duck-rabbit figure.
Cf. Andersson & Furberg (1966), p. 49: “the antelope head looks to the right, the pelican head to the left; the antelope head but not the pelican head has clearly distinguishable horns; etc.”
Similarly, Wittgenstein says, though with different emphasis: “But the impression is not simultaneously of a picture-duck and a picture-rabbit.” (1953), p. 199.
This notion of contradiction should be that which philosophers generally intend when they employ the term. Cf. e.g. Aristotle De Int. 17a 31–33: “every affirmation has an opposite denial, and similarly every denial an opposite affirmation. We will call such a pair of propositions a pair of contradictories.”
Cat. 5b 39–6a 1; cf. also Cat. 14a 11–13, and De Int. 24b 8–9: “contrary conditions cannot subsist at one and the same time in the same subject.” Note however that for Aristotle contrary qualities are exemplified by such entities as the colours black and white, which differ most widely within the same ‘class’ or sub-category. Cf. e.g. De Int. 23b 22–24.
The difficulties involved in conceiving of the present sort of case in terms of contradiction will be further explored in the next chapter.
Note that this usage of the terms “referent” and “reference” is independent of any linguistic connotation they might normally have.
In this study categories will be treated as abstract entities, i.e. as entities which are of the sort to which predicates or concepts, rather than properties, belong; thus we will speak of the category: ‘colour’, rather than of the category: colour.
As expressed by Andersson and Furberg: ‘‘Which way of seeing fig. 3 is the more correct, that of the person seeing it as an antelope, or that of the one seeing it as a pelican?” (1966), p. 54.
Cf. also Andersson & Furberg (1966), p. 55: “The correctness of seeing a phenomenon under a certain aspect is supported then, if new perceptions of other parts of the phenomenon (or of the same parts but in new ways) strengthens the phenomenon’s falling under the concept in question. When the seeing of an aspect allows a perceptual filling out in this way, its correctness can be tested in about the same way as can that of a scientific theory.” Note however that here reference is being made to scientific theory in order to help clarify the nature of seeing under an aspect, and not vice versa, as in the present study.
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Dilworth, G. (1986). The Gestalt Model. In: Scientific Progress. Synthese Library, vol 153. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2966-6_9
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