Consciousness or awareness is possessed by a wide range of higher chordates. Genuine discursive consciousness is possessed, at least in its complex forms, only by human beings. Aspect-seeing centrally involves doing something: mastering a technique and acting according to it (or extending it), as a result of "taking to" joint attentional interactions. Wittgenstein's treatment of aspect-seeing offers us a way of thinking about human discursive consciousness that is neither mentalist, nor materialist, nor social constructivist, nor any kind of explanation. It is rather an elucidatory redescription of what we do when we employ concepts within acts of seeing. Wittgenstein is defending both the priority of practice over theoretical representation and the irreducibility of agency to material processes. Neither conceptual practice nor anyone's actively "taking to it" can be reduced to independent and self-subsistent material or mental processes.

In the midst of Wittgenstein's discussion of aspect-seeing he warns us of what he calls an enormous danger. Wittgenstein's fear of wanting to make fine distinctions goes to the heart of his philosophy. Giving in to the desire to make fine distinctions may plausibly be interpreted as permitting yourself to be drawn into the deep disquietudes from which it was Wittgenstein's goal to release us. When Wittgenstein names the enormous danger, he remarks almost parenthetically, "the primitive language-game which children are taught needs no justification; attempts at justification need to be rejected". The implication is that the roots of the enormous danger rest in that old epistemological earth: the demand for justification, in particular, the demand for a justification of the difference we want to draw between seeing the figure as a duck and as a rabbit.

This chapter explores how Wittgenstein's investigations of aspect-seeing and related topics in Part II, Section 11 of Philosophical Investigations contribute to our understanding of his views on the nature of philosophical conflicts and confusions, of his diagnosis of our "tendency to sublime the logic of our language", and of his own critical methods. In the course of examining the role of images in the perception of aspects, Wittgenstein points out that seeing aspects require a capacity for imagination, for example, for relating the object seen to other objects not currently in view. Wittgenstein, then, delivers no direct answers to the questions we want to pose about meaning-blindness. The meaning-blindness may prove incapable of modifying familiar concepts, or of improvising on novel occasions, or even of making judgments that involve projecting a word with its customary meaning into new, non-stereotypical situations, of seeing new uses as extensions of old ones.

The mystery of why Wittgenstein takes an interest in the concept of aspect-seeing may be trumped only by the enigma of why he introduces the concept of aspect-blindness. We can find our way with aspect-blindness most easily if we begin by noting what aspect-blindness is not. The experience of having an aspect dawn, or of being struck by something, or of seeing the familiar in a new light, is thus as intimately and pervasively joined to the human form of life as talking. In this chapter, the author suggests that Wittgenstein's interest in the concept of aspect-blindness develops out of a preoccupation (found in Part I of the Investigations) with our attraction to the familiar philosophical ideal of perfect, mutual intelligibility that is the prize we would gain with the "solution" to the problem of meaning.