Right for the wrong reason; wrong for the right reason: Gibson and Arnheim on picture perception
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although J J Gibson’s theory of picture perception was often crude and biased toward naturalism, its fundamental division between the visual world and the visual field made it a semiotic theory. Contrariwise, although Arnheim wrote sensitively on pictures, he never seemed to admit that they were signs. This paper reviews both Gibson’s and Arnheim’s theories of picture perception, and explains where Arnheim’s biases caused him to lose the possibility of framing his approach in the most basic semiotic terms. Nevertheless, using the phenomenological semiotics of Sonesson and his theory of the Lifeworld Hierarchy, I demonstrate latent semiotic elements in Arnheim’s theory, due perhaps to Alfred Schutz’s influence. Hoping to argue against the brute theory of denotation, Arnheim instead sought to delay invocation of (conventional) signs as long as possible, and his idea of iconic pictorialization assumes but does not name signification. Nevertheless, I propose that Arnheim has a kind of theory of the Lifeworld Hierarchy inside the picture. Thus, he (wrongly) does not see the picture as overtly signifying but interestingly gives hints about how to treat the objects of the virtual world of the picture based on their relationship to the overall style of the work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it