Sense Perception and Knowledge of the External World

To see 'what is the case' context, inference, concepts, experience and interpretation are required. Context is the events around you experience that cause you to come to the conclusion. Inference is assumed knowledge used to come to the conclusion while experience is knowledge that has been confirmed through past experiences. Concepts are mental representations that help you come to your conclusion. Interpretation is how you use all of these resources and your senses to come to your own personal conclusion.

By 'the fallacy of immaculate perception' Nietzsche means that there is no "innocent eye" or that no one's ind is a complete clean slate when coming to a conclusion therefor multiple different conclusions can all be correct. Joseph Jastrow proves this by using the well-known optical illusion of a duck and rabbit--the person viewing the drawing can only see one animal at a time. In class we have done this when we took the test on the power point and looked at optical illusions; there are multiple answers but they can never all be seen at the same time.

When Abel says "to perceive is to solve a problem" he is talking about how we look for constant patterns so that we can see slight differences, which has survival value. In determining how things 'naturally look' social conditioning is very important. Social conditioning is how the world around you trains you to naturally perceive things. Your first impression of something may very depending on were you live and your culture.

Durer's rhinoceros story is significant for this point because he gave his own perception of a rhinoceros. Because he was not influenced by culture, since he had never seen the animal before, his perception was extremely different from someone who had been exposed to the idea of this animal for their whole life.  

When Abel writes "believing is seeing" he means that believing in something strongly can influence what you think you see. It has been proven that results in social experiments may be influenced by the unconscious bias of the scientists performing them.