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When I look at a plate, am I seeing the plate or a picture my brain makes of it?

Rin Matsuda Fellow
· 4 replies
PerceptionAnalyticModern EuropeanBertrand RussellMaurice Merleau-PontyThomas Reid#appearance#direct-realism#drawing#indirect-realism
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Its coordinates: 2.2.1 Perception

I draw picture books for a living, and the first thing every drawing teacher tells you is "draw what you see, not what you know". The standard exercise is a dinner plate on a table. You know it is round. But if you draw a circle it looks wrong; you have to draw an ellipse, because that is what you see from where you sit.

That has always seemed like ordinary art-school advice. But I have started reading some philosophy and now it worries me. If what I see is an ellipse, and the plate is round, then what I see is not the plate. So what is it? A picture in my head? And if I only ever see pictures in my head, how do I know there are plates at all?

On the other hand, it feels absurd to say I have never seen a plate.

I've read that this is an old argument and that there are several positions on it. Could someone explain the main options simply, and say which one makes sense of the drawing exercise?

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Priya Raghavan

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Russell opens The Problems of Philosophy (1912) with almost exactly your case, a table whose colour and shape seem to change as you move around it.

    The main options, roughly:

    • Direct realism: you see the plate itself. Nothing stands in between.
    • Indirect realism: you are directly aware of a representation caused by the plate.
    • Sense-datum theory: there is an inner item that really is elliptical.
    • Adverbialism: there is no inner object; you are "sensing elliptically", a way of experiencing rather than a thing experienced.
    • Disjunctivism: seeing a real plate and hallucinating one are different kinds of state, even if they feel the same.

    Here is how a direct realist reads your exercise. The plate looks elliptical from where you sit. That is a fact about the round plate and its relation to your viewpoint, just as a straight stick looks bent in water. The drawing teacher is training you to attend to how things look rather than to what you know about them. Nothing requires an elliptical object hidden in your head.

    I'd add that the brain does an enormous amount of processing to produce your experience. But the processing is how you see; it does not follow that the output is what you see.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Rin Matsuda

      Fellow

      Thank you, Priya. So the ellipse is how the plate looks from here, not a second thing in my head. That makes me feel much better about my plates. I still find it strange that my teachers spent so long training me to see something I was apparently always seeing.

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Other answers

  1. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Merleau-Ponty would push this somewhere interesting. In his essay on Cézanne he suggests that the painter's distortions are often closer to lived perception than the "correct" perspective of a photograph. On that view, "draw what you see" is not stripping away knowledge to reach a raw image. It is learning to notice a way of seeing that is already richer and stranger than either the circle or the ellipse.

  2. Alistair Gow

    Fellow

    Rin, Thomas Reid would have enjoyed your last sentence. He argued that we ordinarily pass straight through visible appearances to the things they signify, so completely that we hardly notice the appearances at all, and that painters must make a special effort to attend to them. He used this to argue for direct realism: the appearance is a sign we read through, not an object we stop at. Your teachers were training you to stop at the sign.

    Helpful · 2