Norwood Russell Hanson’s theory

About the interpretation present in observational description from the visual experience

Abstract

In the history of philosophy, different theoretical approaches and authors discuss the relationship between perception, interpretation, and language, each assigning different interpretative functions to observation and observational description. One of those authors is N. R. Hanson, whose focus on perceptual and descriptive processes is interpretative and subjective, recognizing the context of observation as interpretatively influential in visual experience. Although his perspective has been subjected to many criticisms, it has been more widely accepted in recent decades, constantly refined by current theorists in the philosophy of perception, psychology, and neuroscience. Given the relevance of this theme and author, my objective is to investigate how Hanson argues that linguistic observational description is shaped both by the choice of words and by the way we perceive and visually experience the world. That is, we will seek to present how the author stands out from others by using observational description as a tool that expresses both the internal interpretation of the subject and observation, as well as the interpretation related to the construction of linguistic utterance itself. In this sense, we will examine the presence of interpretation in observation through observational description, detailing two interconnected groups: one related to interpretation during observation and the other to the choice of words to represent visual experience. With this in mind, we will consider a thought experiment involving two characters from the history of the philosophy of science, Kepler and Tycho Brahe. In the thought experiment, there will be supposed two distinct and contradictory observational descriptions of the same sunrise, one from each character. And, based on this experiment, we will exemplify how interpretation connects to observation and observational description according to the author.