ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to clarify, develop, and defend the E. H. Gombrichian account of pictorial experience, drawing on resources from contemporary vision science. It provides motivation for Gombrich's use of the duck–rabbit analogy by situating it in the context of his attack on a historically influential conception of the appearance–reality distinction in visual perception. The chapter aims to reconcile the claim that pictorial experience and seeing face-to-face are psychologically continuous with the observation that the former experience does not typically dispose the perceiver to believe that its objects are real. Pictorial experience is only weakly onefold, however, in that it typically attributes certain combinations of properties to the two-dimensional pictorial surface and to objects in phenomenally three-dimensional pictorial space at the same time. The pictorial arts provide an especially useful arena for probing the role of the beholder's share in perception.
