CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Nola Semczyszyn, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Seeing Through Imaging: An Exploration of Technology and Transparency
Computer-based imaging and visualisation has radically changed practice in science and medicine in the last 50 years. From Ultrasound to CT and MRI, new technologies have given us greater access into the body than we have ever had. We may make diagnoses in utero, perform minimally-invasive surgery, and see changes in tumour size using imaging technologies. These technologies seem to grant us perceptual access to a previously invisible world, but if this is the case it presents a radical challenge to traditional philosophical positions regarding scientific observation and perception.
My paper will defend the claim that these technologies are in fact an extension of our perceptual processes. I argue that the best way to account for how imaging is used is that it is akin to perception. Drawing on accounts of depiction in the philosophy of art, I present the thesis that images can indeed engender ways of seeing things.
I examine arguments in the philosophy of science that draw a distinction between the observable and the unobservable at the limits of human vision, and show that this is an ill-conceived boundary. Our epistemic limits are not defined by the limits of our perceptual systems. I give a historical examination of the development of imaging in terms of perception. I argue that these technologies were developed as useful because they preserve perceptual information that allows us to make the kinds of perceptual discriminations we could make were we looking at the subject in question.
I then examine arguments from the philosophy of perception that images can satisfy the explananda for an account of perception. We see ‘through’ images and while this is a new way of seeing, because the systems of image production are new, it is not different in kind from ordinary seeing. I defend my view against arguments that seeing through pictures lacks defining characteristics of perception, ego-centric information, action affordance and an uninterrupted flow of light from stimuli to sense.
I close the paper with a brief discussion of the cultural impact of imaging as it relates to my view, and why I think that this position offers exciting potentials that outweigh some of the points of contention.