To me vocabulary (which I think is a brain shortcut to a category/concept) is a big help in seeing. I read “Landmarks” (Robert MacFarlane) which was about specialised vocabularies and I enjoyed some of the odd words. One was “smeuse”—a hole in hedge or fence made by repeated passage of animals. The thing is, once I had read about it, I suddenly started noticing them. But to your question as where do the words come from? The vocabularies in Landmarks come from specialised needs of people in particular environments. Peat-diggers need more specialised words to describe peat bogs to survive and proper.
So observation does proceed vocabulary. Science is full of it -every field has to develop of specialized vocab to communicate observation. But once there is a vocab, then its strongly assists observation. Can this hinder seeing? Yes, that too. The brain will take whatever shortcut it can and schemata will miss plenty when the brain has more urgent things to do. Watson’s excuse for the not knowing the no. of stairs would be that he never needed to—he had more important things to think about.
But I think there are ways to employ both. Early in my career, I had do a fair amount of mudlogging from coal exploration wells—a boring but vital job. We had a standardized vocabulary for describing what we saw that was structured into a list. Working your way through it, metre by metre, kept you observing what was important even when bored out of your skull. And at the end of list was—“what is different?”. A key to make a novel observation that was outside the parameters of the list.
To me vocabulary (which I think is a brain shortcut to a category/concept) is a big help in seeing. I read “Landmarks” (Robert MacFarlane) which was about specialised vocabularies and I enjoyed some of the odd words. One was “smeuse”—a hole in hedge or fence made by repeated passage of animals. The thing is, once I had read about it, I suddenly started noticing them. But to your question as where do the words come from? The vocabularies in Landmarks come from specialised needs of people in particular environments. Peat-diggers need more specialised words to describe peat bogs to survive and proper.
So observation does proceed vocabulary. Science is full of it -every field has to develop of specialized vocab to communicate observation. But once there is a vocab, then its strongly assists observation. Can this hinder seeing? Yes, that too. The brain will take whatever shortcut it can and schemata will miss plenty when the brain has more urgent things to do. Watson’s excuse for the not knowing the no. of stairs would be that he never needed to—he had more important things to think about.
But I think there are ways to employ both. Early in my career, I had do a fair amount of mudlogging from coal exploration wells—a boring but vital job. We had a standardized vocabulary for describing what we saw that was structured into a list. Working your way through it, metre by metre, kept you observing what was important even when bored out of your skull. And at the end of list was—“what is different?”. A key to make a novel observation that was outside the parameters of the list.