A Discussion of W. A. Adams’ Leonardo Article Entitled Problems of Pictorial Perception

Leonardo, Vol. I I , pp. 55-58. Pergamon Press 1978. Printed in Great Britain A DISCUSSION OF W. A. ADAMS’ LEONARD0 ARTICLE ENTITLED PROBLEMS OF PICTORIAL PERCEPTION 1. David R. Topper* Either I have totally misunderstood William A. Adams’ article [I] or the argument contained in it is completely muddled. Here I shall assume the latter. He begins with an assessment of several well-known hypotheses that have been put forward to explain pictorial perception. He states: ‘Philosophically, the question is: What does it mean to say that X represents Y? Empirically, it is: What are the perceptual properties of the display X that lead to the apprehension of the subject X? The resemblance hypothesis, to which Adams first directs his attention, asserts ‘that display X depicts object Y if X resembles Y.’ Undoubtedly, this hypothesis is fraught with difficulties; nevertheless, I believe that Adams has dismissed too quickly the ‘functional’ or ‘substitute’ approach to the resemblance hypothesis. E. H. Gombrich, for example,has shown that the hypothesis can be quite fruitful, at least for weeding-out commonly accepted myths about art [2, 31. Because a picture of a hamburger is not edible does not necessarily imply (as Adams contends) that the substitution hypothesis must be wholly rejected. Surely those merchants who sell hamburgers are aware of the fact that an appetizing picture of one can elicit a response from a hungry viewer. Substitution, as defined in the hypothesis, does not imply identity of all qualities-only those relevant to a specific function. An example used by Gombrich [3] reveals another feature of the substitution hypothesis. A snowman, he asserts, is seen as a substitute for a man. It just stands there immobile, something real men seldom do. Yet one refers to it as a ‘snowman’, not as an ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’of a man. In his words, the snowman is ‘a member of the species man, subspecies snowman’ [3, p. 1001.The act of seeinga ‘man’in a pile of snow is an act of including ‘snowman’in the class of objects called ‘man’. Animals perform a similar act. Sea-gulls, for example, have been known to accept pebblesassubstitutes for eggs. Children, usually more so than adults, also overgeneralize [4]. Consider, for example, the followingverbal acts ofclassification gleaned from a week in the life of a 20 month old boy: calling both a pea and a cherry seed a ‘ball’,an eggplant a ‘grape’and a rather long and slender sweet potato a ‘carrot’. This act of over-generalizing (to which I shall return, below) is not unlike the manner in which one sees pictorial depictions of objects. Of course, this does not explain why certain objectscan function as substitutes for other objects. Thus, Adams is indeedcorrect in asserting that ‘functional substitution of *Art and Science Historian, Dept. of History, University of . . _ _ Winnipeg, Winnipeg R3B 2E9, Canada. X for Y does not constitute a very articulate explanation of how X resembles Y’. Nevertheless, the substitution hypothesis does reveal something about one’s attitude toward objects that function as substitutes, even if it does not reveal precisely why the substitutes work. When he deals with J. J. Gibson’s invariants hypothesis, Adams is lesscritical. In fact, Adams utilizes Gibson’s terminology in his own way. Gibson’s hypothesis, when applied’to the problem of how one perceives real objects in the environment, is a major step forward in understanding perception. Specifically, he distinguishes between two ways in which objects are seen. ‘When one sees an object, one does not ordinarily see its front surface in perspective. One sees the whole of it, the back as well as the front. In a sense, all of its aspects are present in the experience.’Thus one sees‘theformlessand timeless invariants that specify the distinctive features of the object’[5, p. 311. He refers to this way of seeingas the ‘naive attitude’. The other manner of seeing, that is, seeing ‘the projected forms as distinguished from the formless invariants’, he refers to as the ‘perspective attitude’ [5, p. 321. Gibson also refers to the perspective attitude as ‘perceivingwith a point-of-view,’and the naive attitude as ‘visualizingwithout a point-of-view...