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Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology: on the Relation Between Science and Philosophy

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Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology: on the Relation Between Science and Philosophy Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology: On the Relation between Science and Philosophy Jordi Cat Indiana University The distinction between science and philosophy plays a central role in meth- odological, programmatic and institutional debates. Discussions of disciplin- ary identities typically focus on boundaries or else on genealogies, yielding models of demarcation and models of dynamics. Considerations of a disci- pline’s self-image, often based on history, often plays an important role in the values, projects and practices of its members. Recent focus on the dynamics of scientiªc change supplements Kuhnian neat model with a role for philoso- phy and yields a model of the evolution of philosophy of science. This view il- luminates important aspects of science and itself contributes to philosophy of science. This interactive model is general yet based on exclusive attention to physics. In this paper and two sequels, I focus on the human sciences and ar- gue that their role in the history of philosophy of science is just as important and it also involves a close involvement of the history of philosophy. The focus is on Gestalt psychology and it points to some lessons for philosophy of science. But, unlike the discussion of natural sciences, the discussion here brings out more complication than explication, and skews certain kinds of generaliza- tions. 1. How Do Science and Philosophy Relate to Each Other? a) As Nietzsche put it in the Genealogy of Morals: “Only that which has no history can be deªned.” This notion should make us wary of Heideggerian etymology, conceptual analysis and even Michael Friedman’s relativized, dialectical, post-Kuhnian Hegelianism alike. On my view, it is a fact about semantics or identity of the modes of inquiry that their unity is ex- clusively historical, as is their diversity and respective development. The role of history, which I call transcendental historicism, serves equally three types of purposes: conceptual, empirical or methodological, and pragmatic or heuristic. Perspectives on Science 2007, vol. 15, no. 2 ©2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology 131 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 132 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology Real science takes time. It takes time for models and theories to be fashioned and developed and applied, for symbols and tools to be gathered and sharpened, for experiments to be run and replicated and for phenom- ena to be stabilized, for deliberations to take place and decisions to be made, for information, individuals and objects to circulate, for discoveries to be accepted, for models to be articulated, tested, pitted against others, rejected or accepted, for practitioners to be educated, for authority to be institutionalized and play a role in the processes listed, etc. etc. In local and global time, what counts as the identity and recognizability of scien- tiªc process is inseparably bound with its history. But when this history is paid heed, the same identity seems richly and saliently bound with all kinds of objects, events, practices, languages, ideas. In the intellectual realm, any process and progress of a scientiªc program might be bound and intercalated with other theories, other sciences, other disciplines, and other modes of inquiry and reºection, including philosophy. The relation of philosophy to science is a complex one and philosophy of science ªnds itself developing in the middle. Assumptions about these relations and distinctions underlie fundamental debates, substantive and methodological. A critical self-consciousness and self-image of what each discipline is and can be is paramount for pursuing them into their future. b) The question of the relation between science and philosophy is at present singularly relevant. The second half of last century witnessed the devastating critique of the possibility and desirability of any foundational role for philosophy with, for instance, Carnap and Neurath’s rejection of metaphysical speculation, Quine’s advance of naturalism and its subse- quent developments, and Rorty’s defense of pragmatism. In the same vein, post-positivist studies of science advanced a critique of the intellectual and cognitive centrality of science in, for instance, Feyerabend’s anti- positivist philosophy of science and the Strong Programme’s sociology. The same phenomenological ideas of Husserl’s that fed into Carnap’s logi- cal and systematic scientiªc epistemology and into Weyl’s mathematical ªeld physics, also branched off into an alliance with literature and existen- tialism. Many of these moves and movements have been hostage to false idols, unexamined assumptions and distorted images (Cat 1997). Over the last decade Michael Friedman has persuasively argued in a se- ries of important writings that the interaction between science and philos- ophy is in fact central to the history of both disciplines and also of philoso- phy of science, as illustrated by the origins of logical positivism. This essay is a contribution to the same project; its aim is neither refutation nor explanation, but documentation and complication. It argues that the case of Gestalt psychology suggests that the relation between science and phi- losophy is far more complicated than is often assumed in naturalistic pro- Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 133 jects and, in particular, than is portrayed in Friedman’s account and in mentions of Gestalt psychology in presentations of positivist and post- positivist philosophy of science. Here I attempt to track this complex in- terwoven genealogy by following individuals, ideas, contexts and institu- tions.1 Elsewhere I elaborate on this project in two sequels tracking the path of many of the same ideas, characters, institutions and cultures into art history, philosophy of science and aesthetics (with Popper, Wittgen- stein and Gombrich in Vienna, Polanyi in Berlin, Hanson and Wollheim in Oxford, then the British reunion: Wittgenstein reigning over Oxbridge philosophy, with Polanyi in Manchester, Wollheim, Gombrich and Pop- per in London, etc.). Then I ªnally shift from the focus on individual cog- nition to the case of the social in political economy where, again, many of the same characters, and places display new forays, connections, contexts and interests (the central European culture and later the British that wove a network of contexts, ideas and debates in the work of Neurath, Mach, and Popper, von Mises, Wittgenstein, von Hayek, and Michael and Karl Polanyi).2 Friedman started paying attention to physics. But claims about science and philosophy more generally cannot rest solely on the interplay of phys- ics and philosophy, intense and momentous as it has been for several cen- turies. The biased attention to physics often stems from its degree of con- ceptual, methodological and institutional autonomy and its paradigmatic historical role within the sciences. This bias has marred the vexed question of the unity of the sciences and, speciªcally, the relation between the natural and the human sciences since the 19th-century. But precisely be- cause of its origins and the traditions within physics of interplay with philosophy—scholastic, Cartesian and Leibnizian episodes stand out—we can use the precedent to track further the continued dynamics that pre- vents quarantining physics and philosophy, and their respective self- images, from each other. An illuminating elaboration of this project is Thomas Ryckman recent book, The Reign of Relativity. Philosophy in Physics 1915–1925 (Ryckman 2005). By the same token, equally valuable is the more recent case of the hu- man sciences for their own critical self-understanding, motivation and foresight. More importantly, both projects are performatively interdepen- 1. The role of institutions below will not be emphasized or placed as nearly at the cen- ter of the argument as in, say, Kusch (1999), where details of the complex institutional dy- namics in early 20th-century German psychology are available. 2. See ‘From Aesthetics to Philosophy of Science, from Seeing-As to Seeing-In’ and ‘The Philosophical Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Social Rationality, Objectivity and Unity in Philosophy of Science and Social Thought in Neurath, Polanyi and Popper’ in Cat, From the Human Sciences to Philosophy of Science. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 134 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology dent. All of this should provide the basis for shedding light onto the mis- conceived distinctions between the natural and the human sciences, on the one hand, and between sciences and philosophy, on the other. The result can only be a welcome connected renewal of the history and philosophy of science, and history of philosophy of science. Especially helpful is recent philosophy of science that borrows philosophical images from the philoso- phy of the human sciences to gain new insight into the natural sciences.3 Attention to the human sciences, then, must be viewed as an opportunity to enrich our understanding of science and its philosophical engagement. Philosophy of science, in particular, cannot be argued from and reduced to epistemological and scientiªc fantasies, old and new. Nor should they dic- tate what science and philosophy have been, are and can be. c) Here I am adopting Friedman’s work as a helpful and insightful ref- erence and starting point. According to Friedman, the main role of philos- ophy in interaction with science is to facilitate the rational establishment of paradigms, i.e., conceptual transformations that become relatively un- controversial, Characteristically philosophical reºection interacts with proper scientiªc reºection in such a way that controversial and conceptu- ally problematic philosophical themes become productively inter- twined with relatively uncontroversial and unproblematic scientiªc accomplishments; as a result, philosophical reºection can facilitate (. .) the introduction and communication of a new scientiªc para- digm. (Friedman 2001, p.
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