Sunday, April 22, 2012

The scintillating conversation is free.

Last evening The Izzy stopped in and I was showing him the bottle of Duck-Rabbit beer I'd tried and wrote about yesterday.  He said, "do you know the duck-rabbit paradigm?"

"You mean like Bugs Bunny?"

No, he patiently elaborated, but the visual paradigm as utilized by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

 "A perceptually ambiguous figure originally introduced by the Gestalt psychologist J. Jastrow, and published in his book Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900). It can be perceived either as a duck or as a rabbit. However, it cannot be perceived as both simultaneously. The duck-rabbit figure is best known in philosophical circles as an illustration of aspect perception or interpretive “seeing as” and is utilized by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) in his influential Philosophical Investigations (1953)."

I said, "So do you think Warner Brother knew this and purposely  created the animosity between Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny as a metaphor for a single being divided against itself?" 

And Izzy said, "Probably." 

Because we both agree those were some pretty smart cartoons.