According to Rita Felski, literary studies have for too long been restricted to what Paul Ricoeur famously called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It should now return to the text itself as a locus not only of power, interest, and domination, but of literary value, inviting engagement intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively. Via a reading of Wittgenstein’s work on aesthetics, including his conception of aspect-perception, this chapter reflects on Felski’s proposal, arguing that its opposition between suspicion and humanism might be too simple. While Wittgenstein offers a powerful defense of a humanist view according to which a literary text encourages responsiveness to expressive meaning, it is argued that his view can be extended to include meaning constituted in various historical contexts as well. As a result, the text, as Adorno and Said claim, can never escape its dual determination as both worldly and inherently meaningful.

Kuhn used the duck–rabbit figure as a metaphor for revolutionary change in science. The two aspects of the drawing stand for two ways of perceiving the world, before and after a revolution, while the drawing itself represents the world that, paradoxically, both changes and remains the same. I argue that Kuhn, aiming to bring about a revolution in philosophy of science, did not want to eliminate the paradox, but rather to exploit and underscore it to challenge what he saw as the dominant epistemological paradigm. I also argue that Kuhn rejected the two-tiered view of perception, first observing and then interpreting raw data, in favour of the theory-ladenness of observation that echoed Wittgenstein’s account of ‘seeing’ rather than Hanson’s assimilation of scientific observation to ‘seeing as’. According to Wittgenstein, ‘seeing as’ is parasitic upon regular seeing and, in that sense, cannot illuminate the general case of perception in science. Finally, I show that the analogy between the dawning of an aspect and novelty in science, informed Kuhn’s views on creativity. In his view, advances in science emerge when a system of beliefs is transformed by new patterns of organization.

This essay contextualises Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-seeing in connection with his reading of Wolfgang Köhler, and thereby within a wider discussion of seeing. Most commentators devote little attention to the use of ‘see’ with which aspect-seeing is contrasted. It tends to be interpreted in the literature in two contrasting ways which, the author suggests, could be lined up with Köhler’s distinction between ‘analytic’ and ‘normal’ modes of perception, corresponding to a distinction between ‘seeing shapes and colours’ and ‘seeing things’. It is argued that Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect-seeing’ use of ‘see’ contrasts differently with each of these. Moreover, it is argued that these three uses of ‘see’ work differently in the context of looking at pictures and looking at the world. Finally, it is suggested that understanding Wittgenstein’s claim that seeing an aspect is ‘seeing a meaning’ is an invitation to contemplate what would be missing from the life of the aspect-blind; and it is suggested that seeing a thingis likewise ‘seeing a meaning’.

The argument of this chapter proceeds in the form of constructive criticism of Charles Travis’s recent work on perception. Travis has presented a powerful argument against the idea that perception, as such, provides us with true-or-false representations of the world. The representationalist view, Travis argues, fails to respect the fundamental Fregean distinction between "the conceptual" and "the nonconceptual." According to Travis, what perception presents us with is nonconceptual; hence, perception is indeterminate as far as representational content goes. Travis argues that determinate representational content, on the other hand, is only created when things are judged to be some particular way or another. In this chapter, Avner Baz finds himself in substantial agreement with Travis, but argues that something important also goes missing in the latter’s account, namely what Baz calls "the phenomenal world"; that is, the world as perceived and responded toprior to becoming the object of true or false judgments. In particular, Baz shows how Travis consistently represses the phenomenal world in his account of perception whenever he attempts to explain the perception of what Wittgenstein calls "aspects"; for any respectable account of the perception of such aspects, Baz argues, ought to bring the phenomenal world into view.

In section 308 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein talks of the first step in philosophizing being ‘the one that altogether escapes notice ... that’s just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter’. In this essay, Michael Beaney explores some of the connections between conceptual creativity and the kind of first steps of which Wittgenstein spoke. Beaney argues that a good example of such a first step is Frege’s use of function–argument analysis and the associated conception of concepts as functions, which led to almost all his characteristic doctrines. And Beaney shows that, while it is tempting to see the conceptual creativity involved in this case—that is, in Frege’s reconceiving concepts as functions—as originating in some ‘Eureka!’ moment and as catching on when others can exclaim ‘Now I can go on!’, all this needs careful description to avoid mythologization.