Error, Objectivity, and Collective Psychology as Professional Habit

Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, Hans Van Meegeren forging Johannes Vermeer, 1942

Greta Garbo, circa 1942

Let's start with these pictures above, and a quick story about the greatest forgery in history. One picture is Greta Garbo, one of the most well-known stars of classic cinema, circa 1930's. You could also refer to her as one of the most publicized women in the world at that time. Also, look at her eye makeup.

The other picture is a forgery of a Vermeer painting. The painting never existed, so it's not just a fake copy; it's totally made-up. The guy who made it up was Hans van Meegeren. He fooled the entire art world with this painting. Everybody, experts, everybody.

I'm an art history major, I recognize that. But you don't have to be; look at that painting -- look at Jesus. Look at those eyes. Chiaroscuro like a mf. And now look at Greta Garbo. Look at her eyes.

You don't have to be an expert to see this. At the dawn of celebrity culture, she was recognized by the world over, and so was her makeup. That was how people looked at that time. It was all around you. You didn't think about it because you were in it, immersed, consumed. Van Meegeren was immersed in it, and so were the art historians and critics who validated his painting as a lost masterpiece of Vermeer.

Why is it so easy for you and I to see this as a total sham? Because we don't live in 1930. We don't live in a world where Greta Garbo is really popular, and where everyone's eye makeup looks like  that. We therefore notice the uncanny similarity.

Today, we know this painting is a forgery. It took a long time, first to figure it out, then to finally admit it. But now it's pretty damn obvious. And the greatest forgery in history should leave you wondering how this is even possible, that so many people could be so blind... . I can't say it better than this guy:

“There is one time-related art historical principle that VanMeegeren could not account for or combat – namely, the fact that works of art often bear the stamp, the characteristics of their own era. [Because of these tendencies for contemporary features to creep into forgeries] the style of VanMeegeren’s paintings is like that of Vermeer only superficially. The important resemblances to such Symbolist artists as Toorop are much more important. Characteristics that mark an era may be those that are most universally appreciated at that time. They seem also to be the qualities that become “dated” most quickly. The generation for which these qualities are in fashion tends to be blind to them, but to the next generation they may become painfully evident. This is certainly true of the VanMeegerens. What was lauded in the 1930’s looks superficial and thin in the 1980’s. No doubt we are as blind to the telltale appearance of our own taste and fashions in contemporary forgeries.” (p2)

-1. Rudolph Arnheim, “On Duplication”, pp232-245
-2. Hope B. Werness, “Han VanMeegeren fecit” pp1-57
in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art
Denis Dutton, ed.
Berkeley, 1983

***

Consider this phenomena -- it is possible, and perhaps common or even expected, that we are blind to things that are actually all around us. Such that the more prevalent something is, the more blind we would be to it. This is true in art, but also in science. And this is where we come back to Ludwig Fleck, as he explores the process by which knowledge is created.

Comparing visual descriptions of bacteria cultures from different scientists, author Ludwig Fleck outlines the development of the idea of Streptococci, and of epidemiology in general:

1. The material offering itself by accident (hmmm, what's this?).
2. The psychological mood determining the direction of the investigation (well that is some crazy sh**!).
3. The associations motivated by collective psychology, that is, professional habits (Tim from accounting says this sounds like some crazy sh**).
4. The irreproducible "initial" observation, which cannot be clearly seen in retrospect (what the heck, why can't I do that again?).
5. The slow and laboring revelation and awareness of "what one actually sees" or the gaining of experience (ahhh, now I see...).
6. That what has been revealed and concisely summarized in a scientific statement is an artificial structure, related but only genetically so, both to the original intention and to the substance of the "first" observation need not even belong to the same class as that of the facts it led toward (p89)

In other words, what you discover isn't a resolution to your initial anomalous observation, but in the process, you discover something useful nonetheless.

***

Again, using comparative descriptions of an organism in a petri dish by different scientists, Fleck enumerates the errors in the description:

1. Assumptions are already incorporated within the choice and limitation of the object of investigation.
2. It is altogether pointless to speak of all the characteristics of a structure. ... and it depends on the habits of thought of the given scientific discipline.

He concludes that observation without assumption is impossible.

But he does focus on two types observation apparently worth investigating:
1. The vague initial visual perception.
2. The developed direct visual perception of a form (which requires being experienced in the relevant field of thought, yet at the same time we lose the ability to see something that contradicts the form). (p91-92)

So there is something about the curse of wisdom that inhibits us from seeing things that don't fit into our schema, even if and especially if they are new things, new observations that might even contradict our theory.

***

Before we leave this, I have to relate it to a moment in Jared Diamond's 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's a book but also a film by PBS. The book talks about seemingly small facts, such as the difference in protein per gram for rice vs wheat, or the difference in the predominance of a land mass to be east-west vs north-south, or the distribution of medium-sized domesticable animals throughout the regions of the world. These things make the Fertile Crescent, and then Western Europe, and the Americas, to be the top of the global food chain. It's not because they're better or smarter; it's because of initial conditions that snowball over time to put one place on a wildly different trajectory compared to others.

Kind of unrelated to this thesis, there is a moment in the film where the indigenous people of the New World see Christopher Columbus's ships approaching on the horizon. Only they don't actually see them. They have never seen a ship, not like this, and so they actually can't see it. A shaman among them is the only one who can see it, because that's what shamans do (and that's what artists do), they see things that barely even exist yet, and prepare their people. The shaman tells the people what it is, and all of the sudden they can see it.

This moment is similar to the one Fleck describes above, the process of acquiring knowledge, the genesis and development of a fact.

And let's end with a quote that's hard to resist in this context:

"In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature." (p35)

Notes:
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland).
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

On Hindsight and Blindness
Network Address, 2012
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/12/on-hindsight-and-blindness.html