69249454-chandler-semiotics

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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
• symmetry – symmetrical areas tend to be seen as figures
against asymmetrical backgrounds;
• surroundedness – areas which can be seen as surrounded
by others tend to be perceived as figures.
All of these principles of perceptual organization serve the overarching
principle of prägnanz, which is that the simplest and most
stable interpretations are favoured.
What the Gestalt principles of perceptual organization suggest
is that we may be predisposed towards interpreting ambiguous
images in one way rather than another by universal principles. We
may accept such a proposition at the same time as accepting that
such predispositions may also be generated by other factors.
Similarly, we may accept the Gestalt principles while at the same
time regarding other aspects of perception as being learned and
culturally variable rather than innate. The Gestalt principles can be
seen as reinforcing the notion that the world is not simply and objectively
‘out there’ but is constructed in the process of perception. As
Bill Nichols comments, ‘a useful habit formed by our brains must
not be mistaken for an essential attribute of reality. Just as we must
learn to read an image, we must learn to read the physical world.
Once we have developed this skill (which we do very early in life),
it is very easy to mistake it for an automatic or unlearned process,
just as we may mistake our particular way of reading, or seeing, for
a natural, ahistorical and noncultural given’ (Nichols 1981, 12).
We are rarely aware of our own habitual ways of seeing the
world. We are routinely anaesthetized to a psychological mechanism
called ‘perceptual constancy’ which stabilizes the relative shifts in
the apparent shapes and sizes of people and objects in the world
around us as we change our visual viewpoints in relation to them.
Without mechanisms such as categorization and perceptual constancy
the world would be no more than what William James called a ‘great
blooming and buzzing confusion’ (James 1890, 488). Perceptual
constancy ensures that ‘the variability of the everyday world becomes
translated by reference to less variable codes. The environment
becomes a text to be read like any other text’ (Nichols 1981, 26).