For new born babies the surrounding environment is often apprehended as chaotic with many new impressions. They have difficulties keeping up with the information given to them through their receptors that has to be registered, categorized and excluded. The difficulty for a baby is to select which impressions are important and which are not in order to perceive an accurate image of the world around him/her.
Learning how to see, as in the case of the infant, is really learning how to associate certain sense data (e.g. sound and colour) with objects and through this learning we develop a filter through which all our impressions go through. This filter is built up of experiences based on everything we have done and everything that has happened to us, emotionally and so on. So to understand how our filters are working we have to be familiar with all experience we have gained throughout our life.
If I go on vacation to Spain and there meet some Spaniards which are really impolite and unfriendly these experiences will be saved in my “filters”. Next time I meet a Spaniard, or someone who looks like or seems like it, the impressions will be go through my filters and since I from experience registered them as impolite and unfriendly I will regard them as that now as well even if they might not be like that.
For a grown-up person the process of perception is automatic, he/she has learned how to filter the sense data, i.e. selecting which impressions are relevant or not, to see the thing perceived by the sense receptors.
Each and every person have different filters, this is why we perceive the exact same thing/event differently. If two persons saw a car accident on a street and where to retell the story for a policeman, the two stories received would not be alike. This since the information received to the two individual persons
But the things we perceive might not always bee correct since we often see what we expect, or want, or are used to see – so forth the filters in this case do not fulfil their function of giving a picture of how things really are and even if we know that this is the case of the perception it is hard to identify when we use our filters in this way, i.e. we can not understand our filters.
To say that the grass is green is not a fair statement, this because the statement is subjective and relative – it varies with many conditions which are extrinsic to the object perceived4.So when you look at the grass at night it does not look green, but since we know that grass normally has a greenish colour, from experience, we will see it as green and therefore we ignore the impressions filtered because we are used to it as being green.
1Dictionary of Contemporary English, 3rd edn Longman, Essex, 1995, p. 519
2 Reuben Abel, Man is the Measure, The Free Press, New York, 1976, p. 41
3 Reuben Abel, Man is the Measure, p. 24
4 Reuben Abel, Man is the Measure, p. 29
