Читать книгу An Introduction to Intercultural Communication - Fred E. Jandt - Страница 112

The second step in the perception process is Organization. Along with selecting stimuli from the environment, you must organize them in some meaningful way. When you look at a building, you do not focus on the thousands of possible individual pieces; you focus on the unified whole, a building. Turning a picture upside down, for example, can trick you into focusing on individual components rather than your unified concept of the object in the picture.

How are perceptions categorized? One argument is that you somehow grasp some set of attributes that things have in common. On that basis, they are grouped together in a category provided by language that gives the conceptual categories that influence how its speakers’ perceptions are encoded and stored. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, concluded that there need be no such set of shared characteristics (see, e.g., Wittgenstein, 1953/2001). Our language provides the symbol to group perceptions of any kind together.