Man Is The Measure: The Task of Perception

1. According to Abel, "Perception is active inquiry, not passive reception."(34) It is questioning and interpreting what you sense, not just simply sensing it.
2. By "seeing as" Abel means that "seeing" is more complicated than just receiving an image in your eyes and brain... You have to see that image AS something, interpret what it is, and this is what leads to doubt about what people think they see (Abel uses the example of astronomers not knowing for years whether or not they were seeing canals on Mars). Different people can see things as different things or in different ways.
3. "To see what is the case requires context, inference, concepts, experience, interpretation."(35) Context is the circumstances or situation in which you see something, which can help you "see as". Inference is deriving a conclusion from facts or premises. Concepts are general ideas or understandings, especially ones derived from specific instances or occurrences. Experience is apprehension or perception... through the senses or mind; active participation in events or activities, leading to accumulation of knowledge or skill. Interpretation is the explanation to oneself of the meaning of something.
4. Nietzsche means that the fault of perception is that it is individual interpretation; most of the time there is no "correct" perception of something: there IS no perfect perception, and everyone has their own separate one. Jastrow showed this in his drawing of a rabbit/duck which can be "correctly" seen as either a rabbit OR a duck, not just one. We did something similar in class when we took the perception test and counted the number of cubes displayed in a drawing on the screen, for which there were 2 "correct" answers.
5. When Abel writes "There is no sharp line dividing perception and illusion" he means that both perception and illusion are ambiguous, they are "not always evident in an image, and cannot always be isolated."(36) Neither one is clearly defined or can be verified as true or false. How do we know the way we perceive things isn't just an illusion?
6. The reason perception is selective by nature is that we receive more images and pieces of information from our senses than we can handle and make sense of, so we pick and choose which ones to think about. And our brains usually receive "what we expect, or want, or believe, or are used to."(36) We cannot focus on and interpret everything, so we focus on the ones most familiar to us and interpret them accordingly.
7. When he says "to perceive is to solve a problem" Abel means the problem of how we see things, how we determine what they are and come to an agreement within ourselves. Nothing is "clearly" defined when we sense it, we have to give it definition and decide what it means based on our past experiences, context, etc... And how will we do that? How will each of us interpret an image? This problem is solved by personal perception. It is what you make it, life is how you see it.
8. Social conditioning, the "natural" views of a society and the "natural" ways in which they see things, think about things, and draw things, is important in determining how things "naturally look" for individuals because if you are trained by your society to think of things and see things a certain way, what is familiar to you will feel "natural".
9. The Durer rhinoceros story is significant because it shows human tendency to represent things according to tradition or as one THINKS an object should be. Never having seen a rhinoceros, Durer made a "woodcut" of one based solely on second-hand evidence and his imagination. Apparently his representation was not very accurate but Bruce, criticizing it, drew an illustration of a rhino from life that was strongly (probably subconsciously) influenced by his IDEA of what a rhino SHOULD look like. The influence of convention was demonstrated in the showing of photographs to tribesmen who, confused, viewed the pictures only as "meaningless arrangements[s] of varying shades of grey on a piece of paper." If they are not used to an object or scene being depicted in 2D form on paper, it would not mean anything to them besides marks on a paper. It is not the real house, I can't go inside it, so why should I think it's a house?
10. Perspective drawing is influenced by convention because an artist will draw distance or location of objects or something, based on what their society/their brain tells them it should look like... It is not just SEE, DRAW; it is see, try to represent according to the conventions that you have been taught. If distance means less bright colors, that's how it is drawn, not necessarily the way your eyes are actually taking the picture in.
11. Abel means that if you believe something, you can actually "see" it... your mind will literally think it saw the thing you perceived. You become so convinced that you.. see it. In social sciences, tests with people watching a fixed candle flame have reported to see it moving because they have been convinced prior to this that it is moving. In the natural sciences, astronomers have failed to notice that they were seeing a planet which they refused to believe existed... Because these people BELIEVED something, they actually saw it (or didn't see it, respectively).
12. "Hearing as" is receiving auditory information which we then interpret and add to/take away so that it makes sense to our brain and the way we perceive how language is SUPPOSED to be and sound. For example, if we hear the word "we" instead of the word "me" but our brain knows what it is supposed to be in context, out brain will probably 'correct' it so that we think we do hear it AS "me" and we don't even notice the error.