In the laboratory this fine distinction can only split hairs. I should supply a larger example that will bear the division better.
Drawing is self-reporting of a kind. Proposition: if you accept the standards that cognitive psychology uses to judge the self-reporting of perceptions, then you must also accept that people who draw perceive the world as they draw it to be; which is absurd, because they could not survive. When you draw a stick figure, that does not justify the conclusion that stick figures are what you see.
Some objections present themselves.
1. If drawing is a manual skill, then non-artists may simply lack enough control to make the pencil do what they want.
There is certainly room for manual skill in drawing; but it is not required. Anyone who can negotiate the angles and curves of the alphabet has all the control required for a sketch.
2. Non-artists do not perceive the world as they draw it, but the way they draw distorts what they see, the same way memory in general distorts what they experience.
There is an obvious comparison between how memory and drawing both exaggerate emotionally significant aspects of perception; between how memory artfully fits experience to narrative, and how drawing unartfully fits vision to outline.
Consider outlines. Outlines exist nowhere but in non-artists’ drawings. Nature defies outline; vision nowhere finds it. Nonetheless when non-artists draw, invariably they first attempt an outline – even cave painters, who were artists when they drew, still loved to outline their hands on the rock. Outlines are not incompatible with art – the Egyptians made high art of shaded outlines – but they are prior to art. Abstract outlines do not depict anything: their value is that, being abstractions, they preserve the symmetries and topologies of what they anonymize – they are mathematical in character and, for simple shapes, the origin of mathematics in the promise of geometry.
The comparison with memory and narrative is obvious. We need not invoke the world-cone diagrams of physics to understand that in anything that happens, an imponderable diversity of causes conspire, and that for anything that happens, an innumerable diversity of effects result. Every event is part of the fabric of the whole world.
Narrative, like outline, is unreal but useful; patterns of events, like shapes, though potentially infinite in variety, tend to approximate simple forms with predictable properties.
But drawing cannot distort information in the same way as memory. However badly someone draws, they do not ever act as if they see the world that way. To walk or sit, to touch or pick up, proves that a non-artist does not bungle seeing the world in same way as rendering it. Even in dreams no one sees as badly as they draw. The brain does not retouch value into outline before storing it; the reduction to outline is a loss within the brain.
3. If someone does not draw in a style that resembles Western art, that person is not therefore a non-artist. High cultures elevate as art what Westerners might regard as mistakes. Non-artists may not exist. Could it be that everyone distorts their perceptions artistically when they draw, most in more dramatic ways than the subtle ones traditionally valorized in the West?
Western art has its conventions, but to say that photography and the kind of art that obeys the same laws of optics and projection is essentially a cultural convention requires more gall than I have. Human eyes only work one way. The anecdote says that a pygmy brought out of the forest could not tell buffaloes on the horizon from insects. Assume the anecdote is true; what does it prove? It proves that there exists such a thing as a myopic pygmy. Or should we believe that pygmies never look up into the crowns of trees? That they cannot tell that the bird overhead is the same as the bird in the bush? To prize optic validity as artistic quality is cultural; but the validity itself is physiological.
So if for the first 3500 years or so of human history no culture or civilization held the goal of art to be to represent just what was seen, then of course we are readily distracted by other goals, and must be induced by long training to give them up for this one particular goal of realism.
But I am unwilling to credit that the artistic way is ever the easy way. The artists of the cave walls, of Egypt and Sumer, of India and Persia, were no lazier than the artists of Venice, Florence, and Amsterdam. They were not primitive; they were not innocent. Assimilating natural errors to artistic traditions they happen to resemble represents a more ridiculous pedestal for Western art than any academy ever proposed.
Too, perspective and foreshadowing are not utterly alien to the brain; I suspect that even those whose arts reject these values, do in fact dream with them.
