ABSTRACT
Following philosopher Kant: experience is an amalgam of prior conceptions (expectations) and present information. Abercrombie (1960) and Gombrich (1972): perceiving a picture is the result of the interaction between your thinking and the information in the picture. Abercrombie calls this your ‘judgement’ of the image, Gombrich calls it ‘the beholder’s share’. Perceiving is active: you project your preconceptions (the ‘beholder’s share’) in reading. A well-known example is the inkblot test: psychologists aim to ‘read’ your preconceptions in how you interpret a blot. Following philosopher Kant: experience is an amalgam of prior conceptions (expectations) and present information. An experiment: an illustration consisting of black and white splodges becomes a recognisable image when you are given a schema to project onto it (a schema is like a template drawn from a lifetime of experiences of a similar kind). It seems the picture has changed; you cannot ‘unsee’ the new image. You’ve projected new knowledge onto the image so seamlessly, it’s as if you’ve added nothing. You objectify the meaning as if it were in the image itself. But meaning is not in objects (or in your mind), it’s in the relationship between yourself and the object. You (individual or community) imbue with meaning the things that are significant to you by projecting and objectifying the significance.
