A classical work on Gestalt psychology from a member of the "Berlin School." Discusses perception in relation to the environment, along with action, learning, memory, and socieity.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper examines the claims of the Gestalt psychologists that there was a crisis in experimental psychology ca. 1900, which arose because the prevailing sensory atomism excluded meaning from among psychological phenomena. The Gestaltists claim that a primary motivation of their movement was to show, against the speculative psychologists and philosophers and Verstehen historians, that natural scientific psychology can handle meaning. Purportedly, they revealed this motivation in their initial German-language presentations but in English emphasized their scientific accomplishments for an American (...) audience. The paper finds that: there was a recognized crisis in the new experimental psychology ca. 1900 pertaining especially to sensory atomism; that the Gestaltists responded to the crisis with new experimental findings and theoretical concepts that challenged atomism; in both languages, they raised problems of meaning and discussed the contest with speculative psychology and philosophy only after presenting their scientific case; that they introduced phenomenological observations on meaning and perceptual organization into their psychology but did not develop a theory of meaning or solve philosophical problems; that they argued ‘‘philosophically,’’ that is, using abstract, conceptual arguments; and that this aspect of their cognitive style was not received well by some prominent members of their American audience. (shrink)

Summary By introducing the concept of “invariants”, Koffka endowed perceptual psychology with a flexible theoretical tool, which is suitable for representing vision situations in which a definite part of the stimulus pattern is relevant but not sufficient to determine a corresponding part of the perceived scene. He characterised his “invariance principle” as a principle conclusively breaking free from the “old constancy hypothesis”, which rigidly surmised point-to-point relations between stimulus and perceptual properties. In this paper, we explain the basic terms (...) and assumptions implicit in Koffka’s concept, by representing them in a set-theoretic framework. Then, we highlight various aspects and implications of the concept in terms of answers to six separate questions: forms of invariants, heuristic paths to them, what is invariant in an invariant, roots of conditional indeterminacy, variability vs. indeterminacy, and overcoming of the indeterminacy. Lastly, we illustrate the lasting value and theoretical power of the concept, by showing that Koffka’s insights relating to it do occur in modern perceptual psychology and by highlighting its role in a model of perceptual transparency. (shrink)

The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured for the animal. Koffka made a sharp distinction between the “behavioural environment” and (...) the “geographical environment”. We show how this distinction picks out the difference between the environment as perceived by an individual organism, and the shared publicly available environment. The ecological psychologist James Gibson was later critical of Koffka for inserting a private phenomenal reality in between animals and the shared environment. Gibson tried to make do with just the concept of affordances in his explanation of molar behaviour. We argue however that psychology as a science of molar behaviour will need to make appeal both to the concepts of shared publicly available affordances, and of the multiplicity of relevant affordances that invite an individual to act. A version of Koffka’s distinction between the two environments remains alive today in a distinction we have made between the field and landscape of affordances. Having distinguished the two environments, we go on to provide an account of how the two environments are related. Koffka suggested that the behavioural environment forms out of the causal interaction of the individual with a pre-existing, ready-made geographical environment. We argue that such an account of the relation between the two environments fails to do justice to the complex entanglement of the social with the material aspects of the geographical environment. To better account for this sociomaterial reality of the geographical environment, we propose a process-perspective on our distinction between the landscape and field of affordances. While the two environments can be conceptually distinguished, we argue they should also be viewed as standing in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence. (shrink)

Je m’oppose ici à la théorie « structurale » de la sensation développée par Kurt Koffka dans les années 1920, et reprise notamment par Merleau-Ponty, qui en fait le centre théorique des analyses de la psychologie de la forme. Je commence donc par examiner cette théorie et les faits sur lesquels elle repose, en montrant notamment, à l’aide de la méréologie husserlienne, qu’ils ne peuvent paraître corroborer une théorie structurale de la sensation que si l’on confond « abstraire » (...) et « séparer réellement » une qualité de son contexte. Il s’agit par là plus largement de montrer l’impossibilité, en fait comme en droit, de toute philosophie de la perception qui chercherait à réduire les sensations ou « qualia » à des prédicats relationnels. Je convoque alors William James à l’appui de ces conclusions, en rappelant qu’il avait déjà montré contre les théories néo-hégéliennes de son époque l’illégitimité de leur prétention à se réclamer de faits psychologiques similaires, et qu’il avait soutenu contre eux une théorie de la connaissance par accointance et de l’absoluité ontologique des qualités sensorielles que je cherche à reprendre à mon compte. (shrink)

The Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels published his essay "On 'Gestalt Qualities'" in 1890. The essay initiated a current of thought which enjoyed a powerful position in the philosophy and psychology of the first half of this century and has more recently enjoyed a minor resurgence of interest in the area of cognitive science, above all in criticisms of the so-called 'strong programme' in artificial intelligence. The theory of Gestalt is of course associated most specifically with psychologists of the Berlin (...) school such as Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. We shall see in what follows, however, that an adequate philosophical understanding of the Gestalt idea and of Ehrenfels' achievement will require a close examination not merely of the work of the Berlin school but also of a much wider tradition in Austrian and German philosophy in general. (shrink)

In his 1935 book Principles of Gestalt Psychology, Kurt Koffka stated that empirical research in perceptual psychology should begin with “a phenomenological analysis,” which in turn would put constraints on the “true theory.” In this paper, I take this statement as a point of departure to investigate in what sense Gestalt psychologists practiced a phenomenological analysis and how they saw it related to theory construction. I will contextualize the perceptual research in Gestalt psychology vis-a-vis Husserlian phenomenology on the one (...) hand and mainstream psychophysics on the other, and I will argue that Gestalt psychologists practiced a form of “frontloading” phenomenology: Instead of requiring experimental subjects to engage in experiential reflections, such reflections were—in a sense—already engrained in the experimental designs used by researchers. This type of phenomenology was decidedly anti-“introspectionist” and as such was compatible with some of Husserl’s basic commitments, while at the same time bearing a surprising resemblance with the methods employed by psychophysicists like E. Boring and S.S. Stevens. This latter point will prompt me to explore what the difference between Gestalt-psychology and psychophysics amounted to. My analysis will reveal some disagreements and misunderstandings, especially with regard to the notions of isomorphism and introspection. (shrink)

Although symmetry has been discussed in terms of a major law of perceptual organization since the early conceptual efforts of the Gestalt school (Wertheimer, Metzger, Koffka and others), the first quantitative measurements testing for effects of symmetry on processes of Gestalt formation have seen the day only recently. In this study, a psychophysical rating study and a “foreground”-“background” choice response time experiment were run with human observers to test for effects of bilateral symmetry on the perceived strength of figure-ground (...) in triangular Kanizsa configurations. Displays with and without bilateral symmetry, identical physically-specified-to-total contour ratio, and constant local contrast intensity within and across conditions, but variable local contrast polarity and variable orientation in the plane, were presented in a random order to human observers. Configurations with bilateral symmetry produced significantly stronger figure-ground percepts reflected by greater subjective magnitudes and consistently higher percentages of “foreground” judgments accompanied by significantly shorter response times. These effects of symmetry depend neither on the orientation of the axis of symmetry, nor on the contrast polarity of the physical inducers. It is concluded that bilateral symmetry, irrespective of orientation, significantly contributes to the, largely sign-invariant, visual mechanisms of figure-ground segregation that determine the salience of figure-ground in perceptually ambiguous configurations. (shrink)

The paper presents basic Gestalt psychological concepts of ego and self. They differ from other concepts in the way that they do not comprehend ego and self as fixed entities or as central controlling instances of the psyche, but as one specific organized unit in a psychological field in dynamic interrelation with the other organized units—the environment units—of this field. On this theme, well-known representatives of Gestalt theory have presented some general and special theories since the early days of this (...) approach that could partly be substantiated experimentally. They illuminate the relationship between ego and world in everyday life as well as in the case of mental disorders. Not only the spatial extension of the phenomenal ego is subject to situational changes, but also its place in the world, its functional fitting in this world, its internal differentiation, its permeability to the environment, and much more. The German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger emphasizes the significant functional role that this dynamic plasticity of the phenomenal world and its continuously changing segregation of ego and environment have for human life by designating the phenomenal world as a “Central Steering Mechanism.” In this article, ego and self as part of this field in their interrelation with the total psychological field will be illuminated from the perspective of the thinking of the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Lewin, Wolfgang Metzger, Mary Henle, Edwin Rausch, and Giuseppe Galli. (shrink)

One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psychological environments of cognitive subjects (...) and the different sorts of external (physical, geographical, social) environments which they inhabit. The present essay addresses this environmental version of the problem of intentionality. It draws not only on the work of Husserl and Scheler but also on the Gestalt psychological writings of Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin. It considers the influential subjective idealist theory of animal environments put forward by J. von Uexküll and contrasts this with a realist theory of organism-environment interaction based on the work of the ecological psychologists J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker. This realist theory is then exploited as a basis for an ontology of social objects of a range of different sorts. (This is the English original of the French translation.). (shrink)

In 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels published his classic paper "Über 'Gestaltqualitäten'", the first systematic investigation of the philosophy and psychology of Gestalt. Ehrenfels thereby issued an important challenge to the psychological atomism that was still predominant in his day. His paper not only exerted a powerful influence on the philosophy of the Meinong school, it also marked the beginning of the Gestalt tradition in psychology, later associated with the work of Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka in Berlin. Includes papers by (...) C. Von Ehrenfels, Kurt Grelling and Paul Oppenheim and contributions by K. Mulligan, P.M. Simons and Barry Smith. (shrink)

Much leading thought about consciousness in the inter-war period was associated with the British intellectual C. K. Ogden. His International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method included landmark textbooks by major psychologists including Adler, Jung, Koffka, and Piaget. His journal Psyche, included work about Behaviorism, brain chemistry, and essays such as ‘Are we becoming more conscious?’ by literary critic I. A. Richards. The chapter surveys the work from Ogden’s projects which demonstrates the greatest acuity and foresight about questions (...) concerning consciousness which preoccupy us now. It concentrates on Ogden’s other book series – especially To-Day and To-Morrow. Some of the more provocative new thinking about consciousness is to be found among its speculations on the future. In one of the pioneering transhumanist texts in this series, J. D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil invents the electronic cyborg. He imagines increasing longevity by transferring brains to machine hosts; hot-wiring them to instruments providing extra senses – X-ray, chemistry, but above all radio. This would enable them to be in direct wireless contact with everyone else – effectively the internet before the invention of the computer. Such interconnectivity makes imaginable a form of collective consciousness. Such ideas mesh with new thinking about language and criticism; fields in which Ogden and Richards were also pioneers. These writers poised before the threshold of computing thus raise questions which anticipate work in subsequent neuroscience, and also our moment at the dawn of Artificial Intelligence, and the questions that raises about whether consciousness can be extended, synthesized, or indeed detected. (shrink)

The beginnings of unity and order in living things, by C. M. Child.--On the structure of the unconscious, by K. Koffka.--The genesis of social reactions in the young child, by J. E. Anderson.--The unconscious of the behaviorist, by J. B. Watson.--The unconscious patterning of behavior in society by E. Sapir.--The configurations of personality, by W. I. Thomas.--The prenatal and early postnatal phenomena of consciousness, by M. E. Kenworthy.--Values in social psychology, by F. L. Wells.--Higher levels of mental integration, by (...) W. A. White. (shrink)

resumo Neste artigo, pre t e ndemos mostrar como a concepção de Merleau- Po nty acerca das relações ent re sujeito perceptivo e mu ndo muda no decorrer de sua obra. Em seu livro Fenomenologia da Percepção, public a do em 1945, Merleau- Ponty atribui a tal sujeito a capacida de de assimilar ade q ua da mente o ser do mu ndo. No ent a nto, no início dos ano s cinqüenta, seu estudo da obra do psicólogo Kurt (...) class='Hi'>Koffka explicita alguns resultados incompatíveis com a atribuição de tal capacida de ao sujeito. Por fim, em O Visível e o Invisível , Merleau-Ponty reconhece que as capacidades de assimilação perceptiva do ser do mundo possuem limitações. palavras-chave percepção; mundo percebido; mundo geográfico; fé perceptiva; ser. (shrink)

Formatosi alla lezione di Franz Brentano e di Hermann Lotze, maestro a Halle di Edmund Husserl e in seguito, a Berlino, dei fondatori della psicologia della Gestalt – Köhler, Koffka e Wertheimer – Carl Stumpf fu uno dei massimi esponenti della filosofia del suo tempo. Filosofo dai vasti interessi, ma anche psicologo di rango, attento studioso di filosofia della musica e pioniere dell’etnomusicologia, Stumpf è una figura indubbiamente originale, il cui lungo itinerario intellettuale appare sempre più imprescindibile per comprendere (...) l’evoluzione del pensiero filosofico della seconda metà dell’Ottocento e del primo Novecento in Germania. Estraneo ai dogmi del positivismo allora imperante, ma anche alla fascinazione trascendentale della fenomenologia husserliana, Stumpf concepisce la riflessione filosofica come esercizio critico aperto all’esperienza e tuttavia capace di trascenderla per mirare alle vette della speculazione metafisica ed etica. Gli scritti qui tradotti consentono, con l'aiuto dell'apparato critico, di dare corpo all’idea di una rinascita della filosofia, che riecheggia il titolo di una conferenza berlinese di Stumpf del 1907, ma che ben si attaglia al suo progetto filosofico complessivo. (shrink)

Bruno Petermann in his The Gestalt Theory and the Problem of Configuration and S. H. MacColl in her A Comparative Study of the Systems of Lewin and Koffka with special reference to Memory Phenomena have shown that the gestalt concept is fundamentally valid but that as a tool of psychological explanation it has been developed with unrecognized inconsistencies and without a successful correlation with physiological facts. And John J. Ryan in his “Volition” has shown that psychology must provide a (...) place for ethical responsibility. The purpose of the present paper is to show that the gestalt concept when conceived in accord with the fundamentals of experimental psychology and of theoretical mathematics and physics: avoids unrecognized inconsistencies; opens the gates to an increasingly refined mensurational correlation between physiological facts and psychological experience; and provides a place within a comprehensive psychology for freedom and purpose, integrated with conditioning, which result in understanding and cooperation in the achievement of ideal purposes. (shrink)