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in his book Fact and Fable in Psychology, published in 1901. Consider the illustration of a duck-rabbit, where the picture is both a rabbit and a duck. It’s one picture with two images, though one cannot see the two images at the same time. Looked at one way, focusing on lines drawn like a very tall ‘m’ on one side of the picture, the ‘m’ becomes a bill, the picture is a duck. Looked at another way, focusing on the other side but seeing the ‘m’ now as a pair of ears, it is a rabbit. What’s interesting about the duck-rabbit is that though it’s possible to see both images, it’s not possible to see them at the same time. The same image looks now like a duck, now like a rabbit. Why is this? How is this? How can we see two different concepts, but one picture? What changes? The picture? The mind? The perception?

Wittgenstein’s lectures on aspect-change often began with him reading from Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology.146 Gestalt theory says we see two pictures, but not at the same time. The lines that are drawn in the shape of a duck’s bill and rabbit ears, distinctive shapes, cause our minds to form one picture, then another. The mind perceives a whole picture out of seemingly disparate parts.

Wittgenstein was unsatisfied with the gestalt theorist’s answer but it is difficult to say why. It could be that Wittgenstein was skeptical of claims that declared a single psychological cause for human perceptions. Often we think of something because of our surroundings, our past and present experience and perhaps also of things we don’t take into consideration, like taste or smell. In his published writings, Wittgenstein never spelled out why he thought the gestalt explanation was inadequate. He was interested in the concept of the aspect-change as something that happens in language. This he discusses in the second part of his Philosophical Investigations. He calls this ‘noticing an aspect’ an experience.147

There are two types of seeing. We see Stephen Colbert exercising on an elliptical exercise machine. And we see Stephen Colbert exercising on an elliptical exercise machine as a desperate man trying to overcome caffeine withdrawals. The first is seeing, taking in information, seeing Stephen Colbert on television in a particular skit. The second is seeing as thinking: the dawning of an aspect. The first claim to a robust philosophy of humor is that humor is an aspect change. We see the world, and then we see it as something else. The seeing of an aspect does not have to be a one-to-two correspondence, there can be many aspects seen in an object or a situation.

We see the world: a = a, what philosophers call a tautologous relation. Then we see the world differently: a = b, or a = b + c, a revealing relation. When Stephen Colbert visited the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during their primary, he noticed that one of the signers of the constitution, Gouverneur Morris, had a peg-leg:

COLBERT: He has a peg-leg.

GUIDE: Yes

COLBERT: How many of the founding fathers were pirates?148

In character, Stephen Colbert doesn’t ask how Gouverneur Morris got the peg-leg. Rather, he brings in another aspect, an association of a peg-leg and pirates and then assuming in typical Colbert fashion that he is right, asks a question regarding founding fathers and pirates. Stephen Colbert effectively created a change of aspect.

Though we have the ability to see the world differently in many ways at the same time, it is not the case that we do this all the time. There are certain things we just accept as they are:

It would have made as little sense for me to say, “Now I am seeing it as …” as to say at the sight of a knife and fork, “Now I am seeing this as a knife and fork”. This expression would not be understood.—Any more than: “Now it’s a fork” or “It can be a fork too”.

One doesn’t ‘take’ what one knows as the cutlery at a meal for cutlery; any more than one ordinarily tries to move one’s mouth as one eats, or aims at moving it.149

Wittgenstein is making the distinction here between normally