TOK notes 2-20-02 Wednesday

The question discussed in class this time:

How does the artist take advantage of the subjective nature of perception,
while the scientist views it as an obstacle?

We talked about techniques such as perspective that artists learn to make
people see things that the artist wants them to see. Even though the
actual drawing is 2-d and lines end up meeting, the viewer sees a 3d image
with parallel lines. There are other examples, such as how artists learn
to draw shading and lighting, that exemplify an artist taking advantage
of the way human vision works.

Now the scientist on the other hand, is not helped by this deception. 
Instead, he/she must try to account for it and obtain accurate results
inspite of possible inaccuracies in human perception.

We ended up talking about how our perception lead us to wrong conclusions
in the past and how we corrected those conclusions. We talked about

1) flat vs. round earth
2) sun revolving around the earth vs. the other way around
3) spontaneous generation

In each of these cases, without the aid of technology or a well designed
experiment, we didn't have the ability to percieve the inaccuracy in our
initial models. But once we had good enough measures of certain things,
we were able to find the inconsistencies in the first two models listed
above.