focal adjustments
[WORK IN PROGRESS]
The abstractions involved, as we will see, cannot be merely images, sensations, or sentences at all, or be reduced to them. Abstraction is, instead, a constant activity of ours that transforms the particular. It is not a making up, but more like an x-ray. Sometimes I compare focused abstraction to fluoroscopy and sometimes to magnification, but not to mirroring or to sonograms that are intermediates.
Abstraction is not representation, but departicularization. That requires a focus, like a lens adjustment, to determine what is disclosed. I am not proposing to explain reductively how we do that, but instead why we have to be able continuously to do that in order to do what we know we do, like read this very sentence.
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The phantasm, the unified sensory response about which Aristotle speaks is not an intervener but an enabler, a focal adjustment of polarized awareness. By “polarized awareness” I mean object awareness of what is not itself a part of one’s subjectivity. I think we perceive by means of supplemented (and instinctive) sensory modalities (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.) that are the signum formale quo, the enabling adjustment of awareness. If you imagine your expected lunch with your eyes open, you can “see” a ghostly sandwich, but that is not a picture of one. In direct perception the “ghostly” is absorbed in the vivid objects/ events. But in correcting misperceptions one can sometimes just catch the ghostly misconstrual flitting away. Genuine, open-eyed imagination is something like a holograph, but denser. Imagine a route you would travel, and the noisy traffic passing, to a nearby store. That is not like mere pictures of objects. Even if you notice how a long hall looks as if it converges, you are still attending to how the real hall looks,29 not to an intervening presentation. Abstraction is from things presented, the way we can attend to how the hall seems to converge. On the difference of phenomenal geometry from projective geometry of the physical space, see Hatfield 2008.
Our conceptions, as I said, operate like automated multiple focal adjustments of an elaborate lens (say for color correction, night-time distortion, and field of vision distortion). That makes our awareness both particular and abstract at once. There is the same double presence for the merely imagined, remembered, and mistaken as well. We edit presentations and suffuse them with emotive and cognitive fillers, both instinctual and learned. In reading for sense, sometimes whole words are added (a missing “is” or “with”) or omitted (an extra “it” “it”). Some of us are poor proofreaders because we are biased to read for sense. Paul Kolers (1968) showed multilingual persons can’t consistently identify the language in which a message was read or heard; for them the sensible presentation is just a means for perception not something intervening or perceived, and often, not even recallable.
Abstraction is constantly focused by conceptions to regulate expectation in action, for instance, how tightly we grip a coffee cup or a milk bottle to lift it, how far to turn a steering wheel to guide a car, how far to lean forward climbing a hill versus stairs.30 You see something in the woods, take it to be a dead animal, and feel repelled. On a reluctant second glance, it is tangled leaves. Those are construing abstractions enabling judgments. Judgment is usually an all at once sequel to abstraction, almost instantaneous, though we may hesitate or check the entirely unexpected, or the anomalous.
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It is by imagination as medium for memory that the stability of objects, the density of solids, the weight of cups, and the steepness of stairs are expectations and reliances displayed in and modifying action without being articulated consciously. To climb stairs is a work of the imagination as well as of the limbs. The commitments involved operate as adjustments of action, awareness, and readiness. Objects and events have perceptible dimensions not presented to sense but relied on in action; and the more sophisticated the person is, the more dimensions not currently presented are part of one’s operative reliances.