‘How does one play the game: “It could also be this”?
[…] “I see (a) as (b)” might still mean very different things.
Here is a game played by children: they say of a chest, for example, that it is now a house; and thereupon it is interpreted as a house in every detail. A piece of fancy is woven around it.‘
— aphorism 205 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Philosophy of Psychology” from Philosophical Investigations
It could be this and I see (a) as (b) point to different ways in which one could interpret a material object. That object alone has limited value, if any at all. In a sense, the material aspects of the object are arbitrary compared to the conceptualization of the object on the whole. What is conceptualized of it, i.e. how it is understood, depends on its place in its environment – what use it is to its environment. When children are playing house, they are playing a game. They see a chest as something to use in a game which mimics the game the child sees its parents playing daily and of which they are a part. They do not see it as something with material, mechanical parts as the builder might see it (that is what it would mean simply to see, though the builder may see the bigger picture as well.) They ask “What can we do with this?” and understand the chest to be a house, having already established, and taken for granted, the rules for what constitutes a house.
It does not end there. Playing the game of house is itself a very sophisticated perceptual process. Our ability to formulate and make use of abstraction is perhaps what separates human perception from the perception of other animals – not in terms of form, importantly, but in terms of degree. A cat, for example, will definitely see the chest as something other than a bundle of wood and nails assembled in a particular way. It will almost certainly see it as a scratching post or a place on which or in which to sit or sleep (depending on whether the chest is open or closed and on how tired the cat is), but the cat lacks the ability to conceptualize the chest as anything more than that with which it is afforded these very basic “cativities”, if you will. The reason for this, from an evolutionary standpoint, is that these cativities are all the cat needs to achieve its potential. So, the cat’s abstraction is of the same sort but of a much lower degree than that of the child. The cat’s abstraction is more like that of an infant’s than the young child’s, for an infant, like the cat, only seeks in objects the fulfillment of very basic needs. The only difference between the cat and the infant is the potential of growth and development.
One still might ask “what objective or quantifiable relation is there between a chest and a house?” One should see now, unless one is blinded by a materialist view of reality, that this question now becomes arbitrary because one cannot speak of perception in this example without qualifying the individual subjects’ understanding of it. Perception as we experience it does not seem to be a mere material process. One does not need to understand anything about brain matter to understand something. In fact, it is that understanding that is indeed the goal. One could say that in the cat’s mind there is very little understanding taking place at all, while in the child’s mind there is no limit, especially since the child’s capability for abstract thought will continue to develop. The child understands much more than the cat does. To understand an object, I should say, is to make an abstraction of it – an abstraction that has utility in the greater context of its environment – to allow one to be successful at a game. To see-as, then, is to understand, and vise versa.
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