"This is not a pipe"

René Magritte, The Treason of Images (1928-9)

I have removed my posting "How we see the world influences how we think of the world" from September 2. Bob Abramms of ODT maps objected to my posting which used copyrighted map images from that site.

I would make the basic point again that images which we take very much for granted can influence the way we think about the world and indeed about very important issues. There are many various projections that allow one to map the spherical surface of the earth on a flat map. The world map that is most familiar to us uses the Mercator projection, which happens to make areas look bigger the farther they are from the equator. As a result, most of us think Europe and the United States are relatively larger than they are in comparison with countries on the equator such as Brazil or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I think the point I am making is very similar to that made by René Magritte in the image above: the image of a thing is not the thing itself. I remember reading in the past of the surprise of people in Africa, who on showing photographs to very isolated indigenous people discovered that they could not "read" a photograph. They could not relate the small image on paper to the larger objects in the round that they represented. I also recall an ornithologist mentioning that indigenous people helping him to find birds in the forest thought of those birds in terms of their songs and the way that they fly, and found his use of pictorial images "unintuitive". We are so familiar with photographs, and think so commonly in "photographic images" that we can forget not only that they are not that which they represent, but that others do not so perceive reality. (Moreover, we also fall easy prey to photoshop falsifications posing as photos.)

Indeed, I suspect that this phenomenon is but one aspect of a more fundamental phenomenon. Our culture involves lots of tacit knowledge which we learn without examining the epistemology of that knowledge. Such cultural knowledge influences how we perceive issues, and our thinking about those issues is thus subject to biases of which we are unaware.

We always select what information to present, and the presentation of that information is not value free. Those of us with Western educations may too often assume that our knowledge is more culturally free than it indeed is. But economists draw on images (such as demand and supply curves) that they have been acultured to in order to present their theories. I recall in my early days in a college of engineering finding "engineering drawing" difficult: it was quite difficult to figure out how to represent three dimensional objects in orthogonal sets of two dimensional projections, although we take those two dimensional drawings to be obvious.

Indeed, I suspect that not only are our readings of our perceptions different according to the culture we have learned so unconsciously, but our brains differ from one another according to our cultural development. Musicians who have practiced music since early childhood have more of their brains devoted to music than do those of us not so privileged, and often can perceive the notes of music more accurately than can the rest of us.

I happen to have read of the Daly schools of Celtic Ireland, created by my ancestors, which trained people to remember public events and to report on them in verse. The students were kept in dark rooms for years on end in order to learn to depend on verbal memory rather than on visual memory. I too have that kind of mind, depending on remembering what I hear more than on what I see. That kind of mind is quite difficult for some of my friends to understand.