ABSTRACT
Perception plays a primary role in knowledge acquisition, but ‘perception’ and its relationship to ‘knowledge’ has puzzled philosophers for centuries. This is where we begin our journey towards a new semiotics. We briefly summarise the main philosophical and psychological approaches to perception from Plato to cognitive psychology, and show how all their approaches—platonic, Aristotelian, rationalist, empiricist, idealist, behaviourist, and cognitive information processing—treat perception as the involuntary result of the passive reception of sensory input, something that happens to you. We show that, far from perception being passive, it is an action, so we prefer to use the term perceiving from this point on. Artists must learn how to see in order to make representative images, then learn how to produce illusions. Viewers then have to learn how to read those illusions as recognisable representations. But turning illusions into recognisable images is also your normal way of perceiving the world: your eyes are constantly moving, presenting numerous points of light to the retina, and from babyhood you are actively searching and learning how to perceive. If you accept perceiving as something you do, and reject perception as something that happens to you, the nature of semiotics will become clearer.
