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

Home , Antireductionism, Heinrich Rickert, Max Wertheimer, Norwood Russell Hanson, Otto Selz, Wolfgang Metzger

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 methodological, programmatic and institutional debates. Discussions of disciplinary identities typically focus on boundaries or else on genealogies, yielding models of demarcation and models of dynamics. Considerations of a discipline’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 philosophy 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 argue 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 generalizations.

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.

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 phenomena 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 subsequent 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 logical 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 series of important writings that the interaction between science and philosophy is in fact central to the history of both disciplines and also of philosophy 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 philosophy 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 institutions.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 cognition 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 physics and philosophy, intense and momentous as it has been for several cen- turies. The biased attention to physics often stems from its degree of conceptual, 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 because 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 prevents 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 human 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 dynamics 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 philosophy 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 reference and starting point. According to Friedman, the main role of philosophy in interaction with science is to facilitate the rational establishment of paradigms, i.e., conceptual transformations that become relatively uncontroversial, Characteristically philosophical reºection interacts with proper scientiªc reºection in such a way that controversial and conceptually 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 paradigm. (Friedman 2001, p. 107) This takes place through the philosophical formulation of conceptual frameworks, involving constitutive principles or conditions of intelligibility: This process of continuous conceptual transformations [in the sciences] should be motivated and restrained by an appropriate new philosophical meta-framework, which, in particular, interacts productively with both older philosophical meta-frameworks and new developments taking place in the sciences themselves. (Friedman 2001, p. 66) Concomitantly, developments in science provide guidance and boundaries to philosophical development, Philosophy (. . .) must follow the revolution of the special sciences so as to test itself and, if need be, to reorient itself with respect to 3. I have in mind work by, for instance, Nancy Cartwright.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 135

the far more certain and secure results of these sciences. In particular, then, the central problem of philosophy is not to provide epistemological foundation for the special sciences (they already have all the foundation they need), but rather to redeªne its own task in the light of the recent evolutionary scientiªc advances that have made all previous philosophies untenable. (Friedman 1999, p. 4) Friedman’s model is inseparably normative and descriptive, hence the relevance of challenging its formulation and its generality. Friedman’s examples include Kant’s engagement of Newton’s mechanics and Lavoisier’s chemistry, Schlick’s engagement of Hilbert’s axiomatization of geometry, Carnap’s engagement of Frege and Rusell’s logic, and Carnap, Schlick and Reichenbach’s engagement of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. Friedman also mentions, in passing, the role of Gestalt psychology in an emblematic document of logical positivism. The aim of Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (‘Logical Construction of the World’) (1928), he notes, is to use recent advances in the science of logic (in this case the Russellian type-theory of Principia Mathematica) together with advances in the empirical sciences (Gestalt psychology in particular) to fashion a scientiªcally respectable replacement for traditional epistemology.4 But psychology as empirical science doesn’t ªgure in Friedman’s general account. The importance of this remark is that it corrects the standard association of Mach’s atomic phenomenalism of elementary sensations with logical positivism, along with the corresponding distinctive association of Gestalt psychology with the revisionist efforts of the later Wittgenstein and anti-positivist philosophy of science, from Hanson to Kuhn and Polanyi. In the most sustained philosophical examination of Gestalt psychology, Barry Smith acknowledges a role for philosophy in the development of science—although a weaker one than Friedman grants—but he notes its current minimal relevance, largely due to the dominance of positivism in science—which itself should count as an inºuence of philosophy on science: the connection between such considerations and scientiªc practice is of necessity highly remote. Yet philosophy need not, for all that, 4. Friedman (1999), p. 5. A brief examination of the role of psychology as intellectual source of the Aufbau can be found in Moulines (1985), although there is no discussion of Gestalt psychology.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 136 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

be insigniªcant. It is too little recognized that there is something like a philosophical experimentation, a variety of experimentation that can test the strength of ideas in a way that is independent of and complementary to what takes place in the laboratory. (Smith 1988, p. 69) And, This of philosophical experimentation has been today largely for- gotten, both by philosophers and by scientists, as a result of the continuing dominance of the positivist orthodoxy within the mainstream of scientiªc research. For positivism would have it that philosophical and empirical considerations are divorced entirely from each other. (Smith 1988, p. 69) He also addresses, mutatis mutandis, the question of the philosophical inºuence of Gestalt theory and laments: As is seen above all from the lack of any substantial and formally fruitful logical treatment of the wealth of notions clustering around the Gestalt idea, a truly adequate mastering of the philosophical difªculties which surround this idea has never really taken place. And while the brilliance and experimental ingenuity of Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka led to many empirical advances over the earlier work of their colleagues in Graz, even the propo- nents of the Berlin theory lacked a wider philosophical framework of the sort that had been provided for the Graz psychologists by Meinong and by Brentano. (Smith 1988, p. 69) And in line with the importance of philosophy for scientiªc stability, al- most in illustration of Friedman’s view, he attributes to this lack of philosophical interest the failure of this theory to establish itself: I do however claim that it is as much as anything else in virtue of the lack of such clariªcation that the Gestalt idea has failed to establish itself securely within the mainstream of psychology. (Smith 1988, p. 70) Then, in a footnote, he simply notes the relevance of Gestalt theory to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and to post-positivist philosophy of science with the association mentioned above: Gestalt theory in modern philosophy of science see e.g. Kuhn (1962), pp. 174, 184; Hanson (1958), pp. 10ff.; perhaps Polanyi 1958, 1966. For Wittgenstein see especially his Philosophische Untersuchungen and Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 137

Compare also the remarks on numbers as Gestalten in the Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik (e.g. pp. 150, 229f. on the German edition) which will immediately recall Wertheimer 1912. (Smith 1988, p. 78, n. 68)

In the remainder of this essay I want to suggest that while attention to natural science has dominated the attention to questions regarding the relation between science and philosophy, Gestalt psychology has played an important role in philosophical developments and commanded a wider presence and acceptance, for instance in logical positivist writings, than acknowledged in the literature, but it has not always do so along the lines suggested by Friedman’s general model, namely, as an adaptive and unam- biguous conceptual response to the establishment of a revolutionary scientiªc result (such as Newton’s or Einstein’s physics, or Lavoisier’s chemistry). Instead, it has played such a role without establishing itself as an unproblematic scientiªc paradigm and it does so multiply, over time, diachronically, and, more interestingly, with renewed speciªc conceptual signiªcance. From the point of view of its emergence, it is worth noting that the very hybrid status, seeking methodological and institutional legitimacy from science and philosophy, was not far from the mind of its forbearers and enhanced the subsequent permeability to Gestalt psychology of the conceptual and institutional barriers that separated science and philosophy. The circulation across boundaries not only involves separate communities but also works and interests of same authors. Köhler’s post- war reºections on this ‘young science’ and its uncomfortable position with the natural sciences and the positivist epistemology that won the day are a telling example. In this essay I use the formulation and adoption of Gestalt notions as a marker for the purpose of tracking in broad brushstrokes the historical and conceptual relations between science and philosophy. This is not a history of Gestalt psychology. In the interest of length, attention to different authors and cases will be of necessity uneven. The resulting picture is a tangled mesh of interactions between scientists, philosophers and philosophers of science. One lesson to be learned is that much more can be noted about such interactions if we relax our selective attention to fully ‘autonomous’, ‘mature’, formal and exact, natural sciences, especially under philosophical models of scientiªc change—such as Kuhn’s, where Gestalt psychology appears only at the philosophical meta-level of description. Attention to human or social sciences, and to history cannot be left out; especially when history is employed as a tool for legitimacy. This paper stands as a cautionary tale for attempts at philosophical generalization and deªnition, descriptive and normative.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 138 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

2. Gestalt Theory from Atomic to Logical Positivism.

A) Pre-History and the Drama of Disciplinary Identity. A recognizable version of Gestalt theory was ªrst formulated by Christian von Ehrenfels in his essay ‘On Gestalt qualities’ of 1890 as a rejection of Mach’s atomistic psychology of perception and an elaboration and defends of one of his insights (Ehrenfels 1890). To that purpose Ehrenfels general- ized the use of the term ‘Gestalt’, ªgure or form, to refer to indivisible organized wholes of temporal and spatial sensations. Ehrenfels’ use of the term stems from Goethe’s work on morphology, his Kantian synthesis of epistemology and aesthetics, art and science, applied to the study of organic Nature.5 Goethe’s interest in form was not separate from his interest in Johann Caspar Lavater’s popular18th-century physiognomics, the attention to the human silhouettes as expression of personality types, and hence the basis for a ‘morpho-typology’ as a form of knowledge (Ash 1998, p. 86). The neo-Kantian Oswald Spengler would later turn Goethe’s ideas into the ‘physiognomic method’ in the comparative history of cultures and his Life-philosophy (Spengler 1937). From Kant’s ªrst Critique Goethe drew three lessons: the deep link between the objective and the subjective in the knowledge of nature, the role of the active uniªcation of external impres- sions and the creative and epistemological value of the imagination. It is little surprise that he would hold the view that observation is laden with theory. Tutored by his romantic friends Schiller and Schelling, Goethe next interpreted Kant’s third Critique in terms of the convergence of art and science and the central role of imagination in connection with the judgment of forms. In Goethe’s morphological studies, starting with his ‘Versuch über die Gestalt der Tiere’ (‘Essay on the form of animals’) of 1790, a Gestalt is the form as whole organizational structure that charac- terizes a living organism and reveals and actualizes its true nature as well as the unity in the species. References to Kant and Goethe will become re- current and important for the purpose of this essay. They provide a cultural and genealogical backbone to the evolution of Gestaltic notions and their adaptations. In Vienna Ernst Mach would become interested in perception and cognition, which ultimately he would think a matter of physiology and evolution, with little patience for German metaphysics. For Mach in his clas- sic The Analysis of Sensations (1886) all concepts, material or mental, were reducible to the labeling of combinations of atomic sensations—tones, smells, colors, tastes, etc—for purposes of economy of thought. The same 5. See Richards (2002) for a discussion of Goethe’s science and its Kantian sources.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 139

applies to complex sensations. Complex sensations are simply sets of atomic sensations in the mosaic of perception. Concepts are symbolic des- ignations of such complexes and merit no metaphysical commitment or interpretation. Only the atomic elements are ‘real’. Mach believed, nevertheless, that we also perceive forms, Gestalten, in geometrical ªgures and musical melodies that are preserved under variations in their atomic qualities. He called them space-forms and tone-forms (Mach 1897, pp. 119– 150). For the musician and philosopher Ehrenfels these aspects are the fundamental ones; he concluded that experiences possess ‘Gestalt qualities’; and they are structures, not atomistic sets. Ehrenfels’ wholes are higher-order objects or qualities—also called quasi-substances—associated with unitary elements and existing alongside them. Ehrenfels went as far as noting that two melodies could prove indistinguishable to perception even if they shared not two identical notes (Ehrenfelds 1890). Psychology emerged as an experimental discipline alongside medicine and the natural sciences in the mid-1870s, in Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig. But its origins in philosophical speculation and its institutional need for legitimacy and recognition kept it housed in philosophy departments and at the service of speculative philosophy (Ash 1982; Ash 1988, ch. 1). While Wundt was searching for psychic causes of behavior with empirical methods from the natural sciences (he had been Helm- holtz’s assistant), he thought of psychology as the basis for speculative philosophy and the system of the sciences. Wundt defended the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism, that mental causality is separate from physical causality (it is also distinctly laden with value considerations and the role of intention or purpose), and the two streams of causal processes are caus- ally independent from each other. Psychology remained in German- speaking universities associated with philosophy until 1941. And psychology laboratories (Leipzig, Würzburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn and Munich) were founded for psychologists recruited for philosophy chairs (Ash 1987). The scientiªc institutionalization of psychology as a science took place ªrst in America, through naturalistic and technocratic legitimacy: through pragmatism and positivism and its usefulness in organiz- ing and rationalizing education and industry. The philosopher and empirical psychologist Franz Brentano compiled an analysis of mental phenomena with logical and scholastic insights under the title Psychology from an Empirical Viewpoint (1874). Unlike his pre- decessor logician and theologian Bernard Bolzano, a Platonist about logic matters, Brentano embraced psychologism. It is to Brentano that Austria owes its ªrst psychology laboratory, in Graz, directed by his student Alexis Meinong. Other students would be Stumpf and Freud. Brentano urged empirical psychology to focus on the phenomenological content of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 140 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

‘inner perception.’ In a series of papers in the 1890s Meinong, following his student Ehrenfels, attempted to formulate a conceptual framework for psychology based on a hierarchy of Gestalt objects, or quasi-objects, which depending on their place in the hierarchy, would be considered as either founding or founded. The Graz school, with Meinong’s co-workers Stefan Witasek and Vittorio Benussi, would develop precisely devoted to the experimental research of such phenomena of cognition. In opposition to the old associationist psychology of reproduction of (atomic) perceptions, they started speaking of the ‘production’ and ‘construction’ of Gestalt. This sketched introduction of Gestalt thought already bears the mark common to the founders of Gestalt-thinking in psychology such as Ehrenfels, Oswald Külpe and Carl Stumpf: the notion that experimental psychology was both natural science and part of philosophy as basis for an alternative to idealism and positivism.6 The alternative would effectively integrate insights from both. Gestalt psychology developed with and beyond the experimental and scientiªc coming of age of psychology as a discipline. Nevertheless its hybrid intellectual dimension driven by ambi- tions and anxieties both scientiªc and philosophical will precisely enable it to weave the intricate genealogy of its history linking 20th-century science and philosophy. Carl Stumpf was a student of Franz Brentano in Würzburg. He would become academic teacher and father-ªgure in Berlin both to the philosopher Edmund Husserl and two of the best-known Gestalt psychologists, Köhler and Wertheimer—another, Koffka would collaborate with Stumpf in Frankfurt. Stumpf introduced his ideas in psychology not without philosophical inºuences and references. In his book on the origin of the idea of space Stumpf asserted that judgments such as ‘color is extended’ and ‘extension is colored’ refer to the same psychological ‘state of affairs’ (Sachverhalt), color and extension are each only a ‘partial content’. Husserl, before Wittgenstein, would adopt this notion of complex state of affairs in his Logical Investigations (1900) (Stumpf 1873). He referred to these partial contents of complex experience ‘moments of unity’ of the experience of objects. Part-whole concepts would be classiªed on a hierarchy. In 1907, Stumpf followed Husserl in his emphasis on the reality of structures and stresses that, in contrast with the natural sciences, laws are not causal or functional, inferred from phenomena; rather they are immanent and structural, and observed in them (Stumpf 1907). In his 1891 essay ‘Psychology and Epistemology’ Stumpf lamented that Kant’s mistake was to assume that a discussion of a priori judgments or forms of understanding can be independent from a psychological theory of judgments and the empirical

6. This is an important insight emphasized by Ash in his (1998).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 141

origin of concepts and processes of knowledge. Epistemology and psychology need each other (Stumpf 1891). The Würzburg school, with Külpe, Bühler, Ach, Watt, Marbe and others as Stumpf’s fellow travelers came to be linked with the rejection of a thought psychology based on mental pictures and associations, or Wundt’s doctrine of psychophysical parallelism, and with a discovery of phenomena situations of consciousness, awareness, and thoughts, including reºexive and non-depictive thought. The debates were fraught with ironies. While the ‘experimentalist’ Wundt, with a pioneering psychology laboratory, subsequently defended a theoretical psychology, Külpe and others defended (retrospective) self-observation, with experimental controls including the presence of a second person. In this climate of irony and, as Martin Kusch has put it, ‘promiscuity’, Würzburg-type work on thought psychology was attacked by Wundt but welcomed by anti-psychologists such as the neo-Kantians (Kusch 1999, ch. 2). Heinrich Rickert praised the logical theory of judgment and pointed to values in the objective knowledge of historical individuals and complexes (as he would defend the deep qualitative difference between the historical and the natural sciences in the tradition of Lask, Wildelband, Dilthey and Weber). An instance of a view close to Stumpf and the other ‘Würzburgers’ (Kusch’s term) was to be found in the work of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. In his 1910 Substance and Function, Cassirer explored the logic of scientiªc concepts and the role of invariant relations, and adopted as the most recent deliverance of contemporary psychology Ehrenfels’ idea that the psychology of relations is revealed as an empirical given by Gestalt qualities (Cassirer 1923, pp. 332–3). More generally, the new psychology was characterized by its different practitioners’ attitudes to physiology and to philosophy. Wundt, as stated above, adopted empirical psychology as a human science and the most fundamental discipline in the humanities. Külpe, who rejected mental causation, followed the positivism of Avenarius and Mach and claimed a place and a prospect for psychology among the natural sciences. Husserl, Frege and the neo-Kantians rejected psychologism in epistemology and defended, for instance, the normative and descriptive value of logic as the proper study of the laws of thought, an area gradually covered by psychology. The drama of this situation, the ‘Psychologismusstreit’, peaked with an episode notoriously analyzed by Kusch (Kusch 1995). The neo-Kantians and other philosophers’ rise against psychologism took place in 1912 after two experimental psychologists were appointed to prestigious philosophy chairs: N. Ach to Kant’s chair in Koningsberg in 1906 and E. Jaensch to Hermann Cohen’s chair in Margburg in 1912. Natorp, Rickert, Husserl, Windelband, Riehl and Eucken wrote up a petition, subsequently signed

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 142 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

by 107 philosophers, demanding that no more philosophical chairs go to experimental psychologists. At the same time, Husserl and others made clear that their work in phenomenology, for instance, would provide with the conceptual descriptions that would elevate experimental philosophy to true scientiªc status (Kusch 1999, ch. 4). In this way psychology quickly joined the historical and social sciences, with their ‘Methodensteit’ in the heated ªn-de-siècle debates over the differences between the natural and the human sciences.7

B) Gestalt Theory and Its New Philosophical Adventures. Subsequently, in the 1910s the term ‘Gestalt’ was taken up by the experimental psychologists Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler to refer, similarly, to segregated unities or organized wholes of sensations discovered in a series of experiments often carried out on each other. They worked together in the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt between 1910 and 1913. Before 1910, Koffka had studied rhythm and color as forms of grouping, Wertheimer had studies melody, and Köhler sounds of different intensities and frequencies. They rejected the distinction between Gestalts and founding elements—adopted by Ehrenfels, Meinong and others—and considered elementary concepts or qualities as abstractions from these complex unities. Then in 1912, in two foundational essays Wertheimer established the research project after the model of previous ones, on two fronts, or two levels of cognition: he explicitly introduced Gestalt concepts to pure phenomenal movement (‘phi-phenomenon’), that is, the experience of movement without moving object, and in relation to the concept of number, or counting as a form of grouping, in the ‘natural thinking’ of the Ewe peo- ple of West Africa (Wertheimer 1912a; Wertheimer 1912b). It is in 1914 that Wertheimer formulated the Gestalt laws or principles or cognitive organization associated with the new theory: laws of proximity, similarity, closure, good continuation, and the general law of Prägnanz, or the ten- dency to the simplest formations (Wertheimer 1923). Koffka extended these ideas to motor action. He included functional concepts such as task as ways in which experiences can be organized and brought under law-like relations. Gestalt theory came out of this program to study experimentally the laws of perceptual representations. In 1929 Köhler would offer the following brief but general characterization: This is indeed the most general concept of gestalttheorie: wherever a process dynamically distributes and regulates itself, determined 7. On the debates over method see Oakes (1990) and Tribe (1995) and on their role in the formation of views within the Vienna Circle, see Cartwright, Cat, Fleck and Uebel (1996).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 143

by the actual situation in a whole ªeld, this process is said to follow the principles of gestalttheorie. In all cases of this type, the process will have some characteristic which exists in an extended in an extended area only, so that a consideration of local points or local fac- tors as such will not give us full insight into the nature of the process.(. . .) According to the most general deªnition of Gestalt, the process of learning, of reproduction, of striving, of emotional attitude, of thinking, acting, and so forth, may be included as subject- matter of gestalttheorie insofar as they do not consist of independent elements, but are determined in a situation as a whole. (Köhler 1929, p. 193)

In 1913 Köhler was appointed to direct the anthropoid station the Prussian Academy of Sciences had on the Canary island of Tenerife. Their Gestalt theory acquired institutional dimensions, as the Berlin school, when in 1922 Köhler was appointed, as replacement of his own teacher Carl Stumpf, to a university chair of philosophy and the directorship of the Psychological Institute in Berlin. Gestalt theory could be safely and effectively developed and applied. And it was. With Gestalt psychology on the larger academic, intellectual and cultural map, Köhler and Wertheimer became particularly interested in dis- sociating themselves from the anti-scientiªc, romantic, even mystical forms of holism. One way in which they carried this out was by associating Gestalt psychology with the right philosophical schools and questions and with other sciences as well. Distinctive of the Berlin school was the hypothesis of cerebral integration, namely, the isomorphism between psychological and functional physiological structures or processes. The program was set by the so-called Wertheimer problem, from 1912: what is the nature of those brain processes which are the immediate physiological representatives of the Gestalt wholes experienced in sensation? In 1915 Koffka argued that just as holism in Gestalt phenomena conºicts with the atomism of previous stimulus-sensation theories, the theory would ‘treat the brain process correlated with an experience (. . .) as a whole process with its whole-properties’ (Koffka 1915, p. 378). This physicalist or materialist position was extended by Köhler in 1920 with the notion that Gestalt concepts apply to material phenomena in the physical sciences (Köhler 1920). Interestingly enough, Köhler referred to Maxwell’s notion of physical ªeld and to his reference, in the introduction to his Treatise of Electricity and Magnetism (1873), to Faraday’s method of the ‘whole’, in which lines of force, rather than point-like local forces, are primitive. He seemed unaware that Faraday’s ideas constitute one of many examples of the inºuence of romanticism on British science. They had been stimulated, largely through the inºuence of his employer Humphrey

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 144 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

Davy and S. T. Coleridge, by Oersted and Schelling’s romantic and holistic Naturphilosophie, and by his commitment to the art world and to land- scape portraiture. Other examples of physical Gestalts were the phenomena of ºow and charge distribution. The law of entropy was an example of a physical law of Prägnanz. In 1927 his interest in searching for natural Gestalts and debates with Hans Driesch on holism in the natural sciences led him to biology and the introduction of the notion of open and self-reg- ulating complex systems. Gestalt psychology here proved not just engaged with other sciences but a source for novel science: Köhler’s ideas were inspirational to pioneer system-scientists such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Manfred Eigen (Ash, p. 256 and p. 411). The question of the Kantian character of Gestalt psychology cannot be settled in a simple and straightforward manner. Köhler would criticize anything like Kantian critical realism explicitly on the question of realism or objective content of phenomenal Gestalt structures. Gestalts, he in- sisted, are objectively real. Their objectivity is not bestowed by the conceptual activity and unity of the mind. Their objectivity lies in their invariance across different phenomena or different types. But this objectivity is not grounds for naïve realism either. The structure of the organization real in phenomena didn’t represent the isomorphic structures in external reality. Physical Gestalts are not to be thought of as the real ones of which the phenomenal ones are an image. The only realism at stake involves not the reality of the real object in the environment, but of the material reality of the brain. The material Gestalts associated with phenomenal ones are neurological in character. In 1920 Köhler proposed his well- known thesis of psychophysical isomorphism: to Gestalts of perception correspond structurally identical brain states and processes (Köhler 1920). In the mid-1920s Koffka started defending the empirical realism of Ge- stalt representations and the results of Gestalt psychology. From the late 1920s onwards Köhler would raise the old Kantian question regarding the possibility of objectivity of our representations now in light of their neurological nature and he would address the question in similar realist terms. The general philosophical and humanistic ambition driving the theory made it receptive to broader philosophical sources regarding values and emotional, social and cultural phenomena. In 1932 Köhler tapped into Dilthey’s ideas. Dilthey was a post-Kantian Life-philosopher, responsible for coining the distinction between natural and human sciences and for trying to apply to the latter some of Kant’s epistemological insights historicized and relativized to life-attitudes and values. His presence had been dominant in the Berlin academic and philosophical world at the turn of the 20th century. In a lecture to the Berlin Kant Society, Köhler would

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 145

speak of his structural realism in terms of a ‘meaning realism’ (Ash,). Only six years later he would confront the issue in detail in his examination of the place of values in a world of facts (Köhler 1938). This empirical strand of Gestalt psychology, focused on phenomena of perception and action, enabled ªrst Koffka and then Köhler in 1935 to ªnd home and support also in the United States, where since the late nineteenth century experimental psychology and pragmatist philosophy were predominant. In fact, in 1929 Köhler published his comprehensive survey Gestalt Psychology directly in English in the United States. Similar conditions facilitated ªrst the acceptance of the doctrines of logical positivism and subsequently the reception of some logical positivist themselves. The philosophical signiªcance of Gestalt theory became further appar- ent in some of its features and some of the decisions made by its propo- nents. It has been argued that a number of theories of psychology and biology found cultural support in the German tradition of holism, especially during the Nazi period (Harrington 1996). It is quite plausible that the legacy of romantic and idealist philosophy in search of organic unities and uniªed world-pictures might have stimulated as well as provided acceptance for Gestalt ideas. In that regard, even its links to Kantianism are a matter of shared cultural genealogy and background. Nevertheless, the philosophical signiªcance can be established more speciªcally by dint of their Kantian ancestry, as a residue of the gradual demise of Kantian notions in the second half of the nineteenth century. In particular, for Kant the synthetic unity of consciousness gives perception an absolute and determined character. Yet the grounding of objectivity and certainty of knowledge based on such prior unity was criticized throughout the nineteenth century by developments in philosophy and in psychology of perception. That grounding was gradually replaced by new and weaker forms of cognitive and perceptual syntheses (for instance, Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the will and psychologists’ interest in the phenomenon of attention and Husserl’s ‘passive synthesis’). Gestalt psychology can be seen as falling within that tradition, as a ‘dream of the reciprocal afªrmation of the unity of the individual subject and the uniªed object of perception’ (Crary 1999, p. 160). The stronger claim that Gestalt theory is basically and distinctively Kantian has been dismissed by Köhler, Koffka, and Wertheimer. Köhler rejected the notions of conceptual or intellectual integration and uncon- scious inferences (Köhler 1913). There are not two stages in perceptive processes. Wertheimer rejected the fragmentation of the realm of sensations assumed by Hume and Kant (Wertheimer 1925). In Gestalt theory, the structure of phenomenal ªeld is both spontaneous and immanent. He also rejected the aggregative assumption in the case of concepts as sums of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 146 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

properties and syllogisms as lumpings of propositions. Koffka explicitly asserted that Gestalt psychology does not deal with any kind of Kantian a priori (Koffka 1935). References to Kant by Gestalt psychologists, however, are not always intended to safeguard intellectual distance. Köhler’s student Wolfgang Metzger would see in Gestalt psychology the opportunity to complete Kant’s program by determining scientiªcally and structures of appearance and the empirical principles that govern them.8

C) Enter Logical Empiricism. The other element of philosophical signiªcance and contact came in the form of Köhler’s rejection of anti-scientiªc philosophy not just in its dis- tancing from the Kantian ancestry but also in his close rapprochement with contemporary scientiªc philosophy emerging from that German tradition. It is worth noting ªrst that the young Köhler had attended Planck’s lectures in Berlin and was taken by Planck’s ideal of a uniªed physical world picture representing the objective and ‘the Real’ (Ash 1998, p. 117). Planck’s 1909 piece was part of a polemic with Mach on the nature of the uniªed physical world picture and an attack on Mach’s subjective anthropomorphism. Now chair of philosophy and director of the Psychological Institute in Berlin, Köhler promptly established close ties with Hans Reichenbach and his Society for Scientiªc Philosophy, the Berlin sister society of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists.9 With Ein- stein’s support, Reichenbach had been appointed professor of philosophy of physics in Berlin in 1926, after having gained notoriety for his logical axiomatization of relativity theory, in1924, and his ‘relativized’ Kantian theory of the ‘constitutive a priori’, in 1920. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Köhler and the also Gestalt-theorist Kurt Lewin participated in the Society’s discussions, gave lectures, and published in its journal, Erkenntnis, co-edited by Reichenbach and Carnap (Ash, p. 261 and p. 294). Also the mathematician with philosophical interests Kurt Grel- ling, a doctoral student under Hilbert and Zermelo, played an important role, especially after Reichenbach’s departure. (Grelling and Reichenbach might have met in Munich or in 1914 in Göttingen.) Soon after Reichen- 8. Metzger (1941). Toccafondi’s cursory focus on Piaget’s Kantian interpretation of Gestalt psychology misses the complexity of the genealogy of reactions to Kantian philosophy. Toccafondi (2002). With regards to the physiognomic tradition that goes back to Goethe’s Kantianism, it is worth mentioning that Heinz Werner had established a physiognomic theory of perception in 1926 and in subsequent publications; see Werner (1927). But holism and typological thinking regained currency in Nazi ideology; see Ash (1998), esp. ch. 20, and Harrington (1996). 9. Their acquaintance dates back to the early 1920s. See letters from 1923 discussing each one’s work (Hans Reichenbach Collection, University of Pittsburgh Libraries).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 147

bach had left for Istanbul, in 1933, he asked Köhler to replace him as doctoral examiner for his student Carl Hempel’s dissertation on probability theory.10 Hempel would emigrate to Belgium in 1934, under the auspices of chemist Paul Oppenheim, with whom he famously collaborated. When in 1937 he moved to Chicago to join Carnap, Grelling, in part encouraged by Otto Neurath, left Berlin and replaced him in the collaboration with Oppenheim.

D) Enter Ludwig Wittgenstein. Gestalt psychology would become the emblematic theory of perception behind Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and anti-positivist philosophies of science; but until then it was, ironically, ªrst part of the scientiªc under- pinning of logical positivism. The range of its appearance goes well beyond the location of Gestalt theory in post-war anti-positivism and also the mentions by Friedman and a few others of its role in Carnap’s logical positivism. Before it was adopted by Carnap in his Aufbau, ideas from Gestalt theory made its appearance ªrst in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus (1922). Away from Vienna, Wittgenstein encountered experimental psychology upon arrival at Cambridge in 1911. The psychologist Charles Myers specialized in the psychology of musical perception. Like Koffka and others, he treated musical meaningfulness in a Machian ‘musikgestalt quali- tat’ shared with linguistic communication. Wittgenstein would soon begin his own experiments in musical perception with his friend David Pinsent. He presented the results in the summer of 1912 at the British Psychological Society (Sterrett 2005, 96–99). Ten years later these issues reappeared in more abstract forms as a matter of representation, symbol- ism and logic. (Wittgenstein 1922, 4.011). Wittgenstein made use of the Necker Cube in ways typical of Gestalt psychology: This no doubt explains why there are two possible ways of seeing the ªgure as a cube; and all similar phenomena. For we really see two different facts (Tatsachen). (If I look in the ªrst place at the cor- ners marked a and only glance at the b’s, then the a’s appear to be in front, and viceversa).11 This use of the idea of the Necker Cube was a clear instance of presentation of Gestalt-like qualities. Wittgenstein was cognizant of the latest 10. See letter to Köhler, November 26, 1933 (HR013-48-29, Hans Reichenbach Col- lection, University of Pittsburgh Libraries). 11. Wittgenstein (1922) 5.5423; see Pastore (1991), 345, and Hanson (1961), 179.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 148 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

psychology literature12 and had had ample opportunity to that effect during his studies in Berlin. He even went as far as to declare that epistemology is philosophy of psychology (Wittgenstein 1922, 4.1121). Much in the Tractatus seems based on Stumpf and Husserl’s distinction between Tatsachen (facts) and Sachverhalten (possible states of affairs) and the question of the analysis of complexes. This passage conºicts with those empiricist interpretations of the nature of the ultimate facts that ground our atomic representations of the world and adopt a Machian or Russellian atomistic notion of complex (not necessarily empirical) facts. Neverthe- less, I think it accommodates and explicates the logical atomism and realism characteristic of the Tractatus. To see this we may start with mention of the Kantian dimension of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. As David Pears has noted, just like Kant had offered a critique of thought, Wittgenstein offered a critique of the expression of thought in language (Pears 1987, ch. 1). Central to the earlier and the later philosophy is the exploration of the limits of language in the case of the language of sensation with his consideration of solipsism and the holistic private language argument, respectively. In a more Gestalt-like and Kantian fashion his later philosophy would embrace the conventional and historical aprioricity and holism of language use and of culture. By contrast, in the Tractatus his approach to exploring limits combines atomism and realism. The form and limits of logic, language and grammar are determined by reality itself. Complex propositions are descriptions of complex objects. But such descriptions have an indeterminate sense. Their sense is established by reductive analysis through sentences specifying and naming the constituent objects and their mutual relations (like furniture in a room). Only the simple signs for elementary objects are determinate. But different ‘ways of seeing’—what would later become ‘aspects’—spec- ify different relations, and hence they correspond to different facts (Wittgenstein 1922, 3.1431, 3.23 and 3.24). Clearly, the ontological and epistemological project to which Wittgen- stein put Gestalt-like phenomena to work left out the considerations regarding realism and objectivity associated with Gestalt theory at least by its creators. Naturally, this parallelism does not indicate inºuence or borrowing. There is no reference to any work by any of the Gestalt psychologists, although we may assume he was familiar with the basic novel notions. Nevertheless mention of Gestalt-like ideas is relevant here insofar as (1) it places his early work in an intriguing relation of similarity with con-

12. Pastore is clearly mistaken in explaining Wittgenstein’s reference of the Necker Cube by appeal to his later acquaintance with Koffka’s own discussion in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology of 1935.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 149

temporary work in psychology and philosophy and (2) it renders less radically distinctive and novel in the evolution of his thinking the ideas that have received attention in the literature, namely, subsequent Gestalt ideas in his post-war work and engagement with the work of Gestalt psychologists. The Tractatus already engages pictorial, representational concepts that Wittgenstein has encountered in the sciences, especially psychology and, a well-known early interesting of his, aeronautics. The case of aeronautics and also phonography are addressed in detail in Susan Sterrett’s recent book Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World (Sterrett 2005).

E) Vienna’s Circle The ªrst logical positivist to incorporate results from Gestalt theory as an appropriate theory of human experience was Moritz Schlick. Schlick had completed his doctoral degree in 1904 under Planck. After a few years at the university of Rostock, he obtained with Einstein’s support a job the University of Kiel in 1921 and in 1922 he succeeded Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Mach in the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Vi- enna. After Einstein published his special and general theories of relativity, Schlick published philosophical discussions exploring their respective conceptual implications (in 1915 and 1917, respectively). In 1918 he published his ªrst important work in epistemology, General Theory of Knowledge, where he borrowed from David Hilbert’s axiomatics the idea of implicit deªnitions at the basis of a theory in the form of an axiomatic system. The problem of scientiªc knowledge is the problem of the correspondence, or coordination, of the ‘a priori’ axiomatic formal constructions constitutive of concepts with elements of experience through which we are acquainted with reality (described by the formal concepts). This is more a Kantian than a strict empiricist problematic as the theoretical constructs are the creative outcome of the mind and not determina- tions by or abstractions from experience. Yet, Schlick’s is not a strictly Kantian problematic, since the distinctive project that Reichenbach, Carnap and Schlick shared regarding the connection of theory and experience was precisely to accommodate the fact that modern mathematics (especially after Hilbert’s formal axiomatics and Frege’s and Rusell’s logi- cism) and mathematical physics did not have the synthetic origin and roots in a priori spatio-temporal intuition and sensation that Kant had ac- corded them. Following Einstein, he solved the problem by appeal to the idea of coordination in local spatio-temporal coincidences. In 1920, Schlick established contact with Reichenbach, after the latter had published his own philosophical discussion of relativity theory in his The The- ory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (1920); there he criticized Schlick

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 150 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

for rejecting constitutive or coordinating a priori principles connecting formal axioms and empirical reality. Schlick rejected the strict Kantian interpretation of such principles and suggested talking, instead, of conventions, in Poincaré’s sense. They eventually met in 1923 at a conference co- organized by Reichenbach and Carnap in Erlangen, where Reichenbach put Schlick in contact with Carnap, with whom Schlick had started corresponding in 1921 on relativity theory. In 1925 Schlick, now in Vienna, published a second edition of his Gen- eral Theory of Knowledge, where, following Reichenbach, he added coordinating conventions (for instance, on time measurement) to the previous types of deªnitions, implicit (formal and axiomatic) and ostensive (directly linking concepts and elements of empirical reality). For my purposes in this essay, it is worth noting that in the second edition he also remarked, along Wittgensteinian lines, that ‘what is really characteristic of a perception or a representation, what forms the content of a memory residue, is not some part or detail of the representation but primarily its ‘Ge- stalt quality’’ (Schlick 1925, p. 319). He next praised Köhler’s work for generalizing Gestalt theory to physical phenomena—in Die physichen Ge- stalten in Ruhe und im stationaeren Zustand. Eine Naturephilosophische Unter- suchung (1920)—and, more importantly, associating physical brain processes with psychological states—in Bemerkungen zum Leib-Seele-Problem (1924) (Schlick 1925, pp. 219–20). Köhler and Schlick had been in correspondence and personal contact in the early 1920s and both shared Max Planck as teacher and his distaste for Mach’s ideas, especially phenomenalism. Given the post-Kantian synthetic dimension of Gestalt theory I have mentioned above and also the non-empiricist aspect of Schlick’s epistemology, Schlick might have seen in the Gestalt theory of human perception an afªnity, or at least compatibility, with his own post-Kantian formalistic approach to theoretical knowledge as well as his attention to physics as paradigm of scientiªc knowledge and methodology. Carnap followed Reichenbach and Schlick in the neo-Kantian problem of coordinating abstract theoretical structures and experience while exploring the philosophical lessons of relativity theory and rejecting Kant’s synthetic a priori principles. He took a logical approach to the problem, and his solution was to reduce cognition to the empirical and the conventional linked by connecting statements that were neither synthetic nor empirical. In his pre-Aufbau works, however, he introduced a more purely Kantian element above conventions and experience, such as the notion of intuitive space, an experience-constitutive, necessary—not conventional—topologigal form imposed on our experience of space. Schlick invited Carnap to visit him in Vienna, where Carnap lectured on the Aufbau project-under the title of ‘Outline of a Constitutional Theory

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 151

of the Objects of Experience’. In 1926 he returned joining the University of Vienna as Schlick’s assistant. In 1928 the Aufbau was ªnally published. Carnap was concerned, in a Kantian fashion, with the constitution of the world and tried to combine the strengths of empiricist and Kantian epis- temologies in a system that was metaphysically neutral. One of the many possible logical constructions—borrowing Rusell’s terminology—or constitution systems of knowledge was to accommodate the epistemic value of individual experience while preserving the objective form of scientiªc knowledge (Friedman 1999). It is there that in order to scientiªcally represent experience he chose, following Schlick, Gestalt theory. Experience contributed a complex holistic stream—a ‘true’, ‘organic’ whole—out of which the elementary empirical concepts must be abstracted, by the process he called quasi-analysis. Unlike for Stumpf, but like for Wertheimer and Köhler, for Carnap elementary sensations are only abstractions—he speaks of quasi-analysis through classes of recollected experiences—from experiential Gestalts. In the book he explicitly referred to Köhler’s article ‘Gestaltprobleme und Anfänge einer Gestalttheorie, Uebersichtsreferat’ (1925) and Wertheimer’s survey Ueber Gestalttheorie (1925).13 Reichenbach, in personal and intellectual interaction with Köhler in Berlin, eventually mentioned Gestalt theory in his writings in 1931, in ‘Aims of Modern Philosophy of Nature’. There he raised the question of the philosophical problems of psychology and focused on Gestalt theory as ‘a recent development’ that ‘subsumes psychological events under the concept of Gestalt (. . .) an organized arrangement of experiences’ (Reichenbach 1931, p. 88). He next raised the philosophical issue of the occurrence of holistic properties in physics and, following Köhler, cited Maxwell’s ªeld theory of electromagnetic action. Like Schlick before him, Reichenbach gave as reference, Köhler’s Die physichen Gestalten (1920). In subsequent writings Reichenbach simply cited Carnap’s Aufbau for a discussion of epistemology based on Gestalt theory of experience. Schlick returned in 1935 to a discussion of the concept of wholeness and Gestalt psychology from a conventionalist and, after Carnap, a formal—not material—point of view (Schlick 1935). Gestalt psychology’s ‘holistic mode of presentation’, Schlick cautioned, was just that, a conve- nient mode of presentation and not a kind of thing or process. But, unlike its opposite, the atomistic concept of sum, it is the only promising mode of presentation in arriving at a formulation of the regularities which form the topic of psychology (Schlick 1935, pp. 398–9). Also in the same logical-positivist vein, another discussion of the con-

13. Carnap (1928), sects. 62 and 109. Besides Husserl’s, the inºuence of Meinong’s Gestalt-based philosophy deserves careful exploration.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 152 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

cepts of whole, sum, complex, etc., appeared in work by Kurt Grelling and Paul Oppenheim in 1937. They concluded that whole-part relations come in degrees of dependence and that Gestalts are concepts imposed on experience rather than immanent in experience as Köhler and Wertheimer emphasized (Grelling and Oppenheim 1937 and 1938, and Ash 1998, p. 372). The question of the degrees of dependence was taken up by Op- penheim and his protégé Carl Hempel, in a discussion in the tradition of typological methodology, of the concept of type for the purpose of classi- ªcation. The authors advocate a topological model of continuous ordering as a model of the logical unity of science.14 This is a topic that Hempel would subsequently pursue in the connection with discussions of logic, vagueness and provisos (Suppe 2000). Otto Neurath, who had been long concerned with the questions of vagueness, classiªcation of theories, uniªcation of the sciences and interconnection among scientiªc concepts, responded positively with an enthusiastic review of Hempel and Oppen- heim’s book (Neurath 1937). This important and neglected pre-war chapter in the complex philosophical history of Gestalt theory cannot end without a brief consideration of the extent of its philosophical impact. Gestalt psychology was dominant neither in psychology nor scientiªc philosophy. I will brieºy intro- duce the cases of two other philosophers in Vienna, Otto Neurath and Karl Popper. Like Kant, Popper was interested in a transcendental and regulative philosophy, and, more so than Kant, he hailed science as the paradigm of intellectual activity. But by 1928 he was still holding commitment to inductivism. In 1928 Popper ªnished his doctoral dissertation; it would deliver him to the intellectual gates of his ªrst major work, Logik der Forschung (Logic of Scientiªc Discovery), of 1935. In his dissertation, ‘On the Methodological Problem of Cognitive Psychology’, Popper set out to understand the relations between logic, biology and psychology, in the production of knowledge and, to that effect, to outline the methodological preconditions of cognitive psychology. Two alternative views of psychology were available to Popper through his two doctoral examiners, Karl Bühler and Moritz Schlick. Schlick represented Gestalt theory as psychology within the reductive framework of physicalism, that is, rejecting the existence of autonomous entities, laws and methods of psychology. Bühler’s career was central to Austrian psychology and to Red Vienna culture. After an assistanship under Stumpf in his Berlin’s laboratory, Bühler had come out, along with

14. Hempel and Oppenheim (1936). Their idea that a property could inhere in an object to a greater or lesser degree is part of early 20th century discussions of vagueness and anticipates ideas modeled in the 1960s in terms of fuzzy sets.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 153

Otto Selz and Max Wertheimer, of the research laboratory of Ostwald Külpe in Würtzburg. With Külpe he had engaged in empirical research on thought processes—contra Wundt’s atomistic psychology—with special attention to imageless thought and the importance of language. He subsequently moved with Külpe to Bonn and eventually replaced him in Munich in 1915. In 1912 Bühler had originally contributed to Gestalt psychology with the discussion of simple Gestalt forms involved in the perception of proportions of geometrical ªgures and ended concentrating on his cognitive phenomenon of the ‘aha experience’, a sudden insight in problem solving. Interested in the same phenomenon, Charlotte Mala- chowski was encouraged by Stumpf to join Bühler in Munich, where she became his wife. They collaborated on a project to study the mental development of children, ending in intelligent learning through language. The results appeared in his The Mental Development of the Child (1918), which immediately became the standard reference on the subject. In Vienna, Otto Gloeckel, founder of the world-renowned Vienna School Reform movement and president of the Vienna School Board, offered to fund for the Bühlers a psychological laboratory. After Karl Bühler lost to Köhler the appointment to the Berlin posts, he ended up assuming in 1923 the directorship of the newly funded Psychological Institute of Vienna. From the Institute the Bühlers became central to Red Vienna culture. They taught at the Pedagogical Academy of Vienna. In addition, she focused on children education and psychological welfare. His interest in language and philosophy brought him closer to Schlick (Wittgenstein’s sister Margaret organized social occasions for Wittgenstein, the Bühlers and the Schlicks to meet) and he encouraged his students to attend Vienna Circle seminars (Egon Brunswick, Elsa Frankel, Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazersfeld, Rudolf Ekstein and Edith Weisskopf). Then in 1927 he published Die Krise der Psychologie (The Crisis in Psychology). In the book Bühler argued that the problem of explaining the social signiªcance of language showed that psychology has lost the complexity and richness required to synthesize three levels of psychology: experience, behavior and intellectual structure (Bühler 1927; Hacohen 2000; Humphrey 1951). A framework was needed for unifying the different narrow ‘schools’ of psychology: Behaviorism, Gestalt theory, psychoanalysis, associationism, and humanistic psychology. They were deªcient in their narrow domain of application. The unity of psychology demanded methodological pluralism at the point of cooperation. Around this time, Popper’s interest in the scientiªc character of psychology was still bound to the notion that induction is the empirical method of the natural sciences (ter Hark 2002; Gattei 2004, p. 453). In 1927, after Vienna’s city council had uniªed the psychological and peda-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 154 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

gogical institutes into a Pedagogic Institute, Popper wrote his ªrst thesis, ‘‘Habit’ and ‘Experience of Law’ in Education’. There he justiªed the scientiªc status of pedagogy on inductivist grounds. And he raised the fateful philosophical problems of the ‘objective-scientiªc decidability of pedagogical problems’ and ‘the delimitation of the empirical part of pedagogy from its non-empirical part’ (ter Hark 2002, p. 88; Gattei 2004, p. 454). A similar interest in psychology arose and he developed it in his second thesis, on the method of cognitive psychology, of 1928. Popper argued against Schlick’s views rejecting the reciprocal interaction between body and mind: physicalism was impractical and psychophysical parallelism empirically unveriªable. The choice between Schlick’s physicalism and Bühler’s pluralism was not logically decidable. Psychology was better off autonomous, discovering empirically new laws and phenomena that only subsequently might or might not prove reducible to material interpretation. Moreover, he was primarily concerned with his own epistemological project, descriptive and regulative, regarding the production of scientiªc knowledge. Popper reasoned by analogy with Bühler’s problem regarding language that Gestalt psychology was too narrow to establish the conditions of possibility of cognitive psychology and the logic of intellectual structures. He was further interested in the Viennese Selz’s holistic and functional notion of ‘total task’, based on a psychological mechanism of trial and error (this notion would inspire not only Popper’s pedagogy but elements of his scientiªc methodology). His heart and mind were set against the sufªciency of Gestalt psychology. In his war and postwar works, starting with The Poverty of Historicism, Popper’s attitude became more nuanced. Popper would tackle the epistemological and conceptual criticism of holistic thought, in tandem with his sociopolitical diatribe The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper 1957; 1945). In The Poverty of Historicism he also defended the gestaltic aspect of physical phenomena especially in the new domain of atomic physics.15 This contrasts with the later attack on the determinism he associates with Köhler’s psychophysiological isomorphism and the ideas of Köhler’s teacher Max Planck (Popper and Eccles 1977, pp. 37–8). Popper distin- guished totalities, or entirety of features, from holistic aspects, Gestalts, in the form of structural organization. He judged Gestalt psychology to be the reasonable and scientiªc study of phenomena of the latter kind (Pop- per 1957, pp. 76–77). In Objective Knowledge, Popper would criticize the ‘bucket’ theory of the mind for understanding knowledge as consisting of entities contained in the mental ‘bucket’; of the possible entities enter-

15. Ibid., 82. Popper mentions in a footnote the example of Pauli’s exclusion principle, which (anti)correlates the states of electrons in an atom.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 155

tained in the literature, he nonetheless considers Gestalts or ‘molecular experiences’ better than atomic ones (Popper 1972, p. 62). Otto Neurath’s case is more telling, because he was intellectually and personally closer to Reichenbach and the fellow members of the Vienna Circle Schlick and Carnap. Moreover, like Wittgenstein and Popper, both prior to but especially during the Red Vienna period, Neurath was interested in education and cognitive psychology (like Popper, also in connection with socialist political and social goals). He quickly gained notoriety with his visual method of communication, known as ISOTYPE or Vienna Method. Neurath’s crusade for uniªed science against speculative metaphysics and the connected challenge of understanding the social and objective nature of scientiªc knowledge drove him in 1931 to adopt physicalism as the chief constraint on scientiªc concepts and theories. Physicalism, in a sense broader than Carnap and Schlick’s doctrine of the same term, was the materialist view that science speaks only of observable events, things and processes in space and time. This view set a (normative) bridge intended to unify the truly scientiªc natural and the social sciences, yet it did not require any reduction to physics. Radical empiricism, by contrast, would only impose the primacy of the subjective, the source of contentiousness, dogmatism and arbitrariness, which he abhorred in speculative metaphysical doctrines. From the point of view of Neurath’s physicalism or enlightened empiricism, the only acceptable psychological positions are the behaviorism championed by J. B. Watson, E. C. Tolman, and Skinner and physiological theories (Neurath 1931a, p. 50; 1931b, p. 55; 1931c, pp. 63, 67, and 73). While Neurath did not mention Gestalt theory explicitly in his writings, he surely must have been aware of it and probably considered it a physiological theory. In the Aufbau Carnap, interestingly enough, associated Watson’s behaviorism with a physicalist basis for a construction system, whereas Gestalt psychology was better suited to provide an empirical basis for the epistemological system (which was to reºect the origin of the concepts in our system of knowledge). It is only a matter for speculation why Neurath did not mention Gestalt as an example of scientiªc psychology. A rejection of holism, a characteristic itself present in his own social theory, could not have been a sufªcient reason. One could presume that his speciªc neglect of Gestalt theory is traceable to his lack of systematic epistemological or logical projects, of the kind shared by Carnap, Schlick and Reichenbach, and his predominant interest in the social sciences rather than, like for the others, in mathematical physics. I venture to spec- ulate that Neurath was constrained by his leading position in charge of the rhetoric that so successfully packaged the movement into the idea of a uniªed and international ideology, just like the science he proposed. Part

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 156 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

of his rhetorical strategy was to enlist foreign and scientiªc allies and philosophical ancestors alike, in blanket covering large strands of more or less loose family resemblances (just like the Circle manifesto itself also concealed many important differences among its members). His programmatic papers are frilled with numerous name lists. The alliance he alleged with behaviorism—or physiology—was an attempt to gain scientiªc legitimacy from a scientiªc school that instantiated many of the methodological and conceptual virtues the movement stood for. Indeed, Watson or physicist and philosopher of operationalism Percy Bridgman had formulated their respective philosophical manifesto ahead of the Circle. Neurath’s own priority of portraying and building a coherent movement, for the sake of the changes this might bring about, trumped any expression of pluralism on this matter. Others in the Circle found more open attitudes, alongside the self-consciousness about the controlled public face of the movement. Indeed, it is only in this sense that Carnap and Reichen- bach, especially the latter, valued psychoanalysis and even beneªted from it—ªrst in Europe and subsequently in the United States. My account, if correct, challenges the orthodox view Lawrence Smith has called the Behaviorism-Logical Positivism Alliance, that behaviorism and logical positivism are if not aspects of the same movement at least in- trinsically interrelated and this alliance shaped the development and ªxed the fate of neo-behaviorism (Smith, L. 1986). This view was popularized by E. G. Boring, doyenne of American history of psychology, and subsequently by others, and has become part of the lore and legend of psychology. The account presented here supplements Smith’s, which argues that neo-behaviorism in the works of Tolman, Hull and Skinner did not borrow its methodology from logical positivism nor were early behaviorism and positivism the sole doctrines and movements they were acquainted with. Rather, their own methodology became increasingly an expression of their own psychological theories, and key concepts had non-behaviorist sources. Tolman himself, for instance, became acquainted with Koffka in Giesen and borrowed from Gestalt theory in his holistic model of ‘the ultimate units of behavior’ (Smith, L. 1986, p. 82). Ash has made a compelling case for the inºuential role of Gestalt theory in Weimar culture (Ash 1998). But the cases of Popper and Neurath illustrate the extent to which Gestalt psychology was far from becoming established as a new scientiªc paradigm; more importantly they also illustrate how far it fell from constraining all of philosophy, including scientiªc philosophy and philosophy of science. While attention to physics commanded exploring the philosophical lessons of relativistic physics, Gestalt psychology failed to capture all the philosophical attention to psychology. And yet these cases also illustrate how being part of a revolution-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 157

ary transformation or a paradigm in science—whatever those might be— is not required for a scientiªc theory to be adopted in philosophical development. In the last part of this essay I want to brieºy revisit the post-war philosophical locus classicus of Gestalt theory in order to illustrate another aspect of the relation between science and philosophy, namely, that scientiªc transformation does not of necessity determine philosophical developments unambiguously. In other words, scientiªc developments do not always wear their philosophical signiªcance on their sleeves.

3. From Duck to Rabbit: Gestalt Theory Against Positivism.

a) From Facts to Values. Köhler’s foray into philosophical arena, especially after his emigration to the United States in 1935, is an example of yet another facet of how science and philosophy may be related: science and philosophy can develop within the work of a single individual, without cutting across social and institutional divides. While this situation recalls a similar one in 17th-century physics, it is more interesting and relevant to the overall discussion at hand in the light of the fact that the case of Gestalt psychology unfolds against a background of established institutional and social divides between science and philosophy. This is precisely the source of its connecting value. Köhler’s concern straddles the intellectual breach between a cultural demand of engagement with ‘fundamental issues of mankind’, especially in Europe, and the science-oriented ‘positivistic attitude’ prevailing in both in some quarters of Europe and in the Unites States. Köhler addresses the issue as one that extends to the relation of science—psychology—to philosophy in his introduction to The Place of Values in a World of Facts:

In recent years serious doubts have been raised as to whether, in its present course, science will be able to contribute much to the fundamental issues of mankind. Are we to infer that the philosopher and the scientist should live and work each in a world of his own? Actually, no boundaries separate the problems of one from those of the other. Thus, if there be no contact, something must be wrong either with philosophy or with science, or, perhaps, with both. This conviction need not lead to a positivistic attitude. It has been not done so in our investigation. Never, I believe, shall we be able to solve any problems of ultimate principle until we go back to the sources of our concepts, or in other words, until we use the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 158 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

phenomenological method, the qualitative analysis of experience. (Köhler 1938, p. vii) And he concludes, It is in the nature of philosophy to aim at the solution of general problems...Itwould be realized that, as a rule, partial and prelim- inary problems, have to be thoroughly mastered before general solutions can be successfully attempted...Inthepresent sense of the word, therefore, this may not be a philosophical book. (Köhler 1938, p. viii) This view clearly echoes both Carnap and others’ positivistic naturalism and Stumpf’s psychologism, or psychological research as prolegomenon to epistemological, and philosophical, inquiry. The speciªc issue was an alleged Krise der Wissenschaft in the early 30s: Scientiªc specialization was perceived to have erected a fence between science and larger issues; for instance, human affairs were about values—‘requiredness’—whereas science was about (essential) facts. Valuedness, or requiredness, was a consequence of the structure of the mind and its forming power. However, despite this quasi-Kantian stance, Köhler ªnds uninsightful the Kantian a priori, which is only less mysterious than Plato’s eternal forms. Kohler’s position on the speciªc conundrum is that science may not be about values but it is deeply imbued with them. In particular, in his subsequent ‘Value and Fact’ he points out that objectivity, clearness of reasoning and honesty in treatment of observational data are basic scientiªc values (Köhler 1944, p. 358). And they themselves, through phenomenological method, can be applied to the study of values, since values are attributed to things or events as we perceive them, and percepts, insofar as they are not parts or acts of the self, are phenomenologically objective (Köhler (1944), 366). The real challenge, thinks Köhler, appears for evolutionary theory. If we accept the radically different status of values and reject their place in nature, the ensuing dualism destroys the ‘hope of unity of knowledge’ (Köhler 1944, 372). Alternatively, he suggests, we can consider value situations—marked by experiences—as natural and study corresponding ‘so- matic situations’ in the brain. Unity of knowledge is thus restored, even if on phenomenological basis. We can see that fundamental issues rest on the issue of psychophysical isomorphism. From the philosophical point of view, Köhler would readily describe it as the mind-body problem. On this problem he then engaged the Vienna Circle philosopher then in Minnesota, Herbert Feigl. One of the formal issues central to logical empiricism was the relation between concepts and statements, whether data or theories. It was the question of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 159

reduction and emergence. Feigl addressed it in 1957 in The Mental and the Physical (Feigl 1957). He attributed to cyberneticists (Wiener, McCulloch and Pitts) and Gestalt psychologists (Wertheimer, Koffka and Köhler) the thesis of ‘psychoneurophysiological isomorphism’ as a dualist rejection of interactionism in the form of a non-atomistic one-to-one or at least one- to-many correspondence between mental and physical concepts. (Earlier, in 1950, Feigl had referred to Gestalt psychology as a ‘double knowledge’ or ‘double language’ theory.) This had the advantage, for Feigl, that mental states would be uniquely inferable from neurophysiological states and bring empirical evidence to bear (although he acknowledges that empirical evidence can’t decide between dualism and monism) (Feigl 1957, pp. 13, 81). On the other hand, Gestalt psychology proves to be a theory of emergence, since the laws of the whole cannot be derived from the laws of the constituents in isolation (Feigl 1957, p. 47). It is only on methodological grounds that he favored a monistic identity based on co- referentiality of descriptions, mental and physical. In 1957 Köhler would invite Feigl to deliver a general address before the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Au- gust, 1958 (Letter to Feigl, November 14, 1957 (HF 03-29-01, Herbert Feigl Collection, University of Pittsburgh Libraries). Feigl discussed some of the ideas mentioned above. Köhler would subsequently address the mind-body problem in an essay of 1960 of the same title. Köhler, however, would react to the positivism and naïve realism. While scientiªc epistemology refused to attribute any phenomenal characteristic to facts in nature, he objected in Carnapian language, the ‘construction of the physical world’ or the ‘construction of the system of natural science’ must contain one of several concepts known to us from phenomenal experience, otherwise, nature would be inaccessible to us. More theoretically, if we accept the theory of evolution, our scientiªc explanation of mental facts must be constrained by an invariance postulate, namely, that no new forces, processes or principles of action appear to operate in complex or- ganisms that are not in operation in matter. He concludes that Feigl’s identity thesis, in conjunction with the invariance postulate, can only apply to some complicated brain processes only, and it is a theory of emergence.16 In ‘A Task for Philosophers’, of 1966, Köhler agreed with Feigl that psychology needed strong philosophical guidance. He then proceeded to argue that it’s a conceptual misunderstanding that had led to the positivis-

16. Köhler (1971), 77. In a subsequent letter, Köhler reassured Feigl that there would be no discussion and that the presidential address, which would follow his lecture, would not likely concern the same questions.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 160 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

tic endorsement of behaviorism in psychology. Science and objectivity are notions that have been misappropriated from the natural sciences. In physics, objectivity refers to facts and methods in knowledge of directly inaccessible world and the distinction between objective and subjective was a value-laden distinction between good and bad (Köhler 1971, pp. 95–6). The objectivity of scientiªc method, in this sense, restricts the pool of data of the behaviorism and undermines the validity of its generalizations (Köhler 1971, p. 106). In defense of the phenomenological method in Gestalt psychology he asks, ‘do we really know that, in psychology, one may safely ignore certain facts merely because natural science was once afraid of them?’ and asserts that the foremost task of psychology is the discovery of principles involved in the occurrence of psychological facts (Köhler 1971, pp. 98, 100). In conjunction with the principle of isomorphism, Gestalt psychology can beneªt from psychological facts as evidence on matters of brain psychology. Psychology is a science, but not natural science in the manner of physics.

B) From Perception to Thought. Wittgenstein Redux. The emphasis on the mental and values brings out another and new philosophical impact of Gestalt psychology out of another line of research. From very early on the program of Gestalt theory, like earlier and other schools of psychology, had developed a more conceptually-oriented strand devoted to cognitive psychology. Its leading researcher was Wertheimer. In 1912 he had published ‘Numbers and Numerical Concepts in Primi- tive Peoples’, where he had applied the basic ideas of the new Gestalt theory to understanding counting and other elementary mathematical opera- tions, with attention of the mathematical education of children. While the Gestalt theory of experience rejected, among others, Mach’s atomic positivism, Wertheimer here rejected Locke’s account: Counting was not the result of iterating the addition of 1 unit or individual. The central idea was that ‘without structural group-apprehensions (. . .) no meaningful concept of quantity is possible’ (Wertheimer 1912b, in Ellis 1938, p. 272). In 1925 Wertheimer’s attention progressed from mathematical calcula- tions to logical inferences, in Ueber Schlussprozesse im produktiven Denken (The Syllogism and Productive Thinking). Inferences such as those ex- pressed in syllogisms involved a switch—a re-forming, re-centering and re-grasping—in the Gestalt under which their subject matter is compre- hended (Wertheimer 1925). For the purposes of this essay the most signiªcant feature of Wertheimer’s work was his application of these holistic or structural thought-processes to scientiªc thinking. They were meant to identify heuristic methods that explained intellectual accomplishments

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 161

which were not the outcomes of piecemeal calculation, abstraction or classiªcation and were typically mis-described as ‘the results of the imagination, or chance, or ‘the intuition of genius’ (Ellis, p. 281). Examples, according to Wertheimer, were the comprehension of stellar movements, the theory of the screw, and the history of the concept of inertia. He developed these ideas in more detail in his book of 1945 Productive Thinking (Wertheimer 1945). Acquainted with Einstein and his work (although Einstein had not thought Wertheimer was an adequate replacement for Schlick at Kiel in 1922), he added to discussions of Gauss and Galileo, as examples, a discussion of Einstein’s ideas in relativity theory. It could be said that, like Carnap and Schlick, Wertheimer had provided an example of scientiªc epistemology that became, by inclusion, an epistemology of science. Part and parcel of this conceptual cognitive strand in Gestalt psychology were also Köhler’s The Mentality of Apes (1924), on simian problem solving, The Place of Value in a World of Facts (1938), and subsequent discussions of values and objectivity (as the paradoxical value of value- freedom) in science (Köhler 1924; 1938; 1944). In line with his previous work, he offered a materialist Gestalt-phenomenology of values—including an analogy with the holistic concept of physical ªeld—in terms of the notion of ‘requiredness’. He considered the account to be a natural extension of empirical psychology’s treatment of mental states and processes which had been previously located in the realm of subjectivity. It is this intellectual strand in Gestalt psychology along with a simpler and intellectualized version of the more empirical strand that after the war would become philosophically signiªcant. They were adopted initially by Wittgenstein, once again, and subsequently, and under his inºuence, by leading anti-positivists such as Norwood Russell Hanson and Thomas Kuhn. In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics Wittgenstein included brief remarks on ªgures analogous to Wertheimer’s discussions of mathematics from 1912 (Wittgenstein 1956; Smith 1988, p. 69; Dwyler 1990). More importantly, in his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology and in Philosophi- cal Investigations, both written in the mid-1940s, Wittgenstein takes Ge- stalt theory, especially from Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology, as a departing point for his philosophical investigation of concepts. The former work fo- cuses on his investigation in philosophical psychology and the latter, most signiªcantly on his notorious holistic account of concepts, namely, in terms of use of terms circumscribed within the bounds of a language- game, linguistic community, culture, Weltanschauung or Lebenswelt. The latter are pervasive holistic concepts in German-Austrian culture and philosophy, especially Life-philosophy and phenomenology. Wittgenstein was

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 162 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

well acquainted with both (Janik and Toulmin 1973; Gier 1981; Dwyer 1990; Budd 1989; Schulte 1993). He was also well acquainted with Köhler’s work. In both books Wittgenstein linked perception, language and cognition through the notion of seeing-as applied to spontaneous and reversible Gestalts, such as in the famous Necker Cube, and the bird- antelope and duck-rabbit ªgures—the last he borrowed from Joseph Jastrow’s Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900) (Wittgenstein 1953, part II, p. xi). At ªrst ‘seeing-as’ is discussed in a purely perceptual sense, replac- ing Köhler’s terms ‘Gestalt’ and ‘sensory organization’ with ‘aspect’. As- pects, unlike color or extension, are not properties of the object. Change in ‘seeing-as’, Wittgenstein claimed, do not involve seeing a change of aspect but holding different interpretations. Visual pictures remain the same, whereas interpretations, which make an experience conform to a conjec- ture or ªction, vary at will. Aspect-seeing is irreducible to purely sensory or purely intellectual. Wittgenstein moved to extend the simile of Gestalt cognition of music to conceptual understanding and, bringing back early morphotypological approaches and references to Goethe, he asserted that ‘meaning is physiognomy’ (Wittgenstein 1953, part I, sect. 568). In a Life-philosophical vein, he extended the Gestaltic dimension to include the language game, culture and life-form. Now the formal aspect of Ge- staltic properties in thought and language are, unlike in the Tractatus, holistic, contextual, a priori, conventional and anti-realist.17 Wittgenstein was not alien to Vienna’s psychological culture. It is not surprising, on that assumption, that he viewed philosophy as a form of therapy, as he declared in his Philosophical Investigations. Also in Philosophi- cal Investigations Wittgenstein refracted notions from Gestalt psychology, rejecting some of Gestalt psychologists’ doctrines. Wittgenstein criticized speciªcally Köhler’s physicalist or physiological thinking. Instead, his own philosophical psychology was based on a duality between aspects and the sensory properties proper to objects, such as shape and color. He emphasized, contra Köhler, that many aspects were mainly determined by thoughts and associations rather than, less dualistically, being achievements of the nervous system (Pastore 1991). He then extended this model to conceptual cases. Even his novel account of the application of concepts in terms of family resemblances—as strands of similarities—rather than instantiated universals or shared properties, has the semblance of a Gestalt structure. In the most general case, the external consequence of changing an aspect of experience was for Wittgenstein a change of ‘life’.

17. These doctrines and his believe in imageless thought had been held also by Bühler, in rejection of reproductive, associationist psychology of perception. For a discussion of Bühler’s inºuence on Wittgenstein see Bartley (1973), 145–50, and Kaplan (1971).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 163

C) From Post-Positivist Philosophy to Post-Positivist Philosophy of Science. It is after Wittgenstein, and out of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, that Gestalt ideas enter post-positivist philosophy of science. Russell Hanson is best known for his methodological use of episodes from the history of science in order to inform his philosophy of science and for his anti-positivist doctrine of theory-ladenness of observation. The latter undermined the positivist doctrine—both in early works of Schlick and Carnap as well as in post-war American popularizations—of the distinction between theory and observation on which scientiªc method was claimed to rest. Hanson was educated in Oxford and Cambridge where he studied physics and philosophy during the 1950s, when Wittgenstein’s inºuence was at its high- est. He developed his distinctive view by conjoining the Oxford professor Gilbert Ryle’s notion of theory-ladenness of scientiªc concepts and the related views just mentioned of the late Cambridge professor and local legend Ludwig Wittgenstein.18 Ryle gave the example of the concept of gene by analogy with the Wittgensteinian example of the concept of trump in a game of cards. In his best-known work, Patterns of Discovery (1958), Hanson dwelt heavily on Wittgenstein’s insights from Gestalt psychology of perception both in the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations (Hanson 1958). He also borrowed from original sources in Gestalt psychology, including literature on Gestalt psychology on tasks and Wertheimer’s Pro- ductive Thinking, which, as I have mentioned above, touched on scientiªc observation and discovery. Hanson was after a logic of discovery. The text develops around the discussion of the emblematic Gestalt ªgures and quotes from Wittgenstein, including, among others, the remark that ‘we can also see the illustration now as one thing, now as another’ with the conclusion that ‘we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it’ (Hanson 1958, p. 14). Similar discussion explicitly addressing in scientiªc context Wittgen- stein’s notion of seeing-as appear in essay from the same time, although published posthumously (Hanson 1967, esp. ch. 6). Hanson did not hesitate to borrow heavily from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and true to the Gestalt tradition, to quote from Goethe. His introduction to Patterns of Discovery starts with Wittgenstein’s, ‘treat of the network, not what the network describes’, and chapter 1 starts with Goethe’s verses, ‘were the eye not attuned to the Sun/ The Sun could never be seen by it’ (Hanson 1958, ch. 1 and 4, resp.). With the help of Wertheimer’s scientiªc case-studies Hanson then ex-

18. see Ryle (1954), 90. Wittgentein’s inºuence on Ryle is undeniable. See also Cat and Lund (2006).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 164 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

tended Wittgenstein’s remarks to the case of scientiªc observation: even in physics seeing is seeing-as, and observation, in the context of proposi- tional observation reports, is rendered meaningful and signiªcant by virtue of being spontaneously—and not in a two-stage process of seeing and in- terpreting—laden with linguistic components, conceptual interpretations and theoretical beliefs. Tycho and Kepler, Simplicius and Galileo did not see the same thing when staring at the sun. Tycho and Simplicius saw a moving star in a geocentric system, whereas Kepler and Galileo saw a he- liocentric static star. Likewise, a child sees a complicated lamp bulb where a physicist sees an X-ray tube (Hanson 1958, p. 17). For Hanson this notion of observation is directly linked to the cognitive dimension of discovery and central to his project was to provide a logic of discovery. While Wittgenstein received training as an engineer and Hanson and Kuhn as physicists, Michael Polanyi was an accomplished chemist. He shared with Neurath, Popper and Wittgenstein an intellectual upbringing in the educated milieux of central Europe followed by exile in England. His brother Karl, an economist, left Budapest for Vienna in 1919. Michael followed suit after he received a doctorate in physics and medicine from the University of Budapest. He took a job in Karlsruhe, Germany, and in September of 1920 moved to Berlin. He became a member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin for Fiber Chemistry, and stayed in the city until he left for Manchester in 1933. It was not difªcult for Polanyi to move within a circle of intellectually active and well-connected scientists. Not unlike Neurath and Popper, Michael Polanyi developed an interest in the social and psychological complexities of scientiªc practice. Ac- quainted with the empirical researches of Gestalt psychology—especially Köhler’s—and its applications to higher cognition, he didn’t hesitate to adopt them as the starting point of his inquiry into the human sense of reality, process of problem-solving and scientiªc discovery and the commitment to scientiªc beliefs. He proposed tacit awareness, skill, commitment and faith as an alternative to the limited value of rule-governed method. Gestalt concepts provided a formal tool for the holistic and pre-logical dimension of his philosophy; they also provided a bridge to extend his understanding of perception to more theoretical levels of cognition.19 In one of the initial remarks in Science, Faith and Society (1946) he reasoned as fol- lows:

‘We must go back to the process by which we usually ªrst establish the reality of certain things around us. Our principal clue to the reality of an object is its possession of a coherent outline. It was the 19. On his holism, see, for instance, Cat (1998).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 165

merit of Gestalt psychology to make us aware of the remarkable performance involved in perceiving shapes. (. . .) the perception of the egg from the list of co-ordinate values would, in fact, be a feat rather similar in nature and measure of intellectual achievement to the discovery of the Copernican system.’ (Polanyi 1946, p. 24) In a preface in the subsequent 1964 edition he included the statement that ‘Scientiªc knowing consists in discerning Gestalten that are aspects of reality’ (Polanyi 1964, p. 10). Polanyi pursued his project in more detail in his best-known work, Per- sonal Knowledge (1958) (Polanyi 1958). In this book he rejected the idea of true knowledge as necessarily and connectedly impersonal, or detached, universal and objective (Polanyi 1958, p. xiii). He also rejected Wittgen- stein philosophical strategy in Philosophical Investigations based on examination of language (Polanyi 1958, p. 114). From Gestalt psychology he borrowed the guiding ideas of formal holism of organization and the functional holism of tasks and purposes. Such ideas enabled him to articulate the phenomenological, cognitive, purposive and active dimensions of scientiªc practice. They constitute what he called tacit knowledge and are irreducible to explicit and disembodied sets of rules. He summarized his project and views in the Preface: I have used the ªndings of Gestalt psychology as my ªrst clues to this conceptual reform. Scientists have run away from the philo- sophic implications of gestalt; I want to countenance them uncom- promisingly. I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the things known, an action that requires skill. Skilful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to become ‘subsidiarily aware’ of these particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the coherent entity that we achieve. Clues and tools are things used as such and not observed in themselves. They are made to function as extensions of our bodily equipment and this involves a certain change of our own being. Acts of comprehension are to this extent irreversible and also non-critical. For we cannot possess any ªxed framework within which the re-shaping of our hitherto ªxed framework could be critically tested.’ (Polanyi 1958, p. xiii) Like Gestalts, focal and subsidiary awareness are incompatible states. Meaningful attention to the whole, whether formal or functional, requires loss of attention to the speciªable parts. Like Wertheimer, Polanyi paid attention to mathematics and logic. Understanding proofs, he suggested,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 166 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

was based not only on the symbolic computation but on intuition as well, and the latter would operate by identifying wholes or units—he mentioned Wertheimer’s productive thinking in a footnote. Polanyi also mentioned Köhler’s research on problem solving in apes and pointed to an important similarity with Poincaré’s four-stage account of mathematical discovery—preparation, incubation, illumination and veriªcation—hence suggesting a naturalization of this cognitive phenomenon (Polanyi 1958, pp. 117–131). Finally, he borrowed loosely and critically Köhler’s idea of physiological isomorphism to suggest physico-chemical and biological bases for ‘emergent’ properties such as functions in machines and human cognitive capacities (Polanyi 1958, ch. 12). Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge is a source cited in Kuhn’s landmark work The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions (Kuhn 1962). Polanyi’s book starts with a discussion of the Copernican Revolution. On his notions of normal science and paradigms, Kuhn remarked: ‘Michael Polanyi has brilliantly developed a very similar theme, ar- guing that much of scientist’s success depends upon ‘tacit knowledge’, i.e., upon knowledge that is acquired through practice and that cannot be articulated explicitly. See his Personal Knowledge (Chicago, 1958), particularly chaps. v and vi.’ (Kuhn 1962, p. 44, n.) Whereas Polanyi’s inºuence plays a peripheral part in Kuhn’s The Struc- ture of Scientiªc Revolutions, Wittgenstein’s and Hanson’s ideas are central. The holistic structure of Gestalt concepts is the central metaphor that leads to the holistic idea of scientiªc paradigm. Kuhn was exposed to Wittgenstein’s writings by the Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell (Kuhn et al. 1997, p. 177). Wittgenstein’s insights about the joined conceptual and social dimensions of language-games, family resemblances and life changes articulate social and psychological holistic dimensions of scientiªc change: Ludwig Fleck’s idea (implicit in Kuhn’s text) of the social genesis and development of scientiªc facts (Fleck 1935), and Hanson’s and Wittgenstein’s psychological ideas about Gestalt theory of scientiªc observation. As Kuhn made clear, he was going beyond Wittgenstein’s and Hanson’s insights (Kuhn 1962, pp. 44–45 and 85). The concept of paradigm—the term appeared on the ªrst page of Hanson’s Patterns of Dis- covery—used to represent normal science is developed out of the notion of Gestalt, and scientiªc revolutions involving incommensurable paradigms are modeled after Gestalt switches. Yet, in a Kantian fashion, Kuhn explicitly adopted a more radical position about the world-constitutive role of tacit knowledge and paradigm-based ideas: changes in world-views are world changes (although reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s life changes). He pointed out the limitations of conceptual Gestalt analogies:

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 167

‘Others [such as Hanson] who have noted this [paradigm shift] aspect of scientiªc advance have emphasized its similarity to a change in visual gestalt: the marks on paper that were ªrst seen as a bird are now seen as an antelope, or viceversa. That parallel can be mis- leading. Scientists do not see something as something else, they simply see it. (. . .) In addition, the scientist does not preserve the gestalt subject’s freedom to switch back and forth between ways of seeing. Nevertheless, the switch of gestalt, particularly because it is so familiar, is a useful elementary prototype for what occurs in full- scale paradigm shift.’ (Kuhn 1962, p. 85) He considered the dis-analogy particularly revealing of the constitutive role of gestalts on experience in ways unavailable in ordinary experience (a point that was made about the independent constancy of sensation in ordinary perception by Koffka against Benussi in 1915 and by Hanson in 1958). It is the point about the absence of external authority beyond incommensurable paradigms that can adjudicate the shift as a rational choice: ‘With scientiªc observation, however, the situation is exactly re- versed. The scientist can have no recourse above or beyond what he sees with his eyes and instruments. If there were some higher authority by recourse to which his vision might be shown to have shifted, then the authority would itself become the source of his data, and the behavior of his vision would become a source of problems (as that of the experimental subject is for the psychologist).’ (Kuhn 1962, p. 114) Hence, he concluded, ‘The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world.’ (Kuhn 1962, p. 117) Thus far I have presented an argument about genesis of ideas. One may ask further, what purpose the reference to Gestalt psychology serves in The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions. To answer this question it must be noted that Kuhn’s book is rife with historical, anthropological, sociological and psychological examples, and, in the Postscript, evolutionary analogies (Kuhn 1969). Despite the philosophical venue of the Gestalt psychological analogy, all these other elements point to an attempt at an empirically and conceptually complex scientiªc model, of which philosophical or conceptual discussions are only a part. A similar question may be asked also of Polanyi’s and Hanson’s works,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 168 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

in connection with their common recourse to Gestalt theory and history of science. All these works contribute a philosophy of science in terms of novel conceptual systems that rests on a rejection of a priori ªrst philosophy and synthesis of science and history. What is genealogically peculiar, however, is that in both cases, the recourse to Gestalt theory is less the outcome of a response to novel scientiªc developments or paradigms than the inºuence of philosophical developments, namely, Wittgenstein’s. But, at a meta-level, this raises no reºexivity problem. It is perfectly congruent with their respective anti-positivism and holism about science. Taking science seriously is not a commitment to philosophical positivism; that is only one particular philosophical position. Indeed, philosophy is what they often thought they were doing. The positivist attitude to scientism is the one I have presented in the previous section, in connection with the previous philosophical life of Gestalt theory. The second life is anti-positivism. But not all anti-positivist proposals have rested on insights derived from Gestalt theory. While Polanyi adopted Gestalt psychology and rejected Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the Viennese Paul Feyerabend was, by contrast, largely inºuenced by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (in fact, to the point of intending to study under him instead of ending, by default, assisting Popper) and neglected Gestalt psychology. It is from Wittgen- stein that Feyerabend derived most of his holistic ideas about language, theory and culture. Yet he went as far as explicitly criticizing Hanson on observation and interpretation (Feyerabend 1981, vol. 1, p. 128). Like- wise, not all mentions of Gestalt in postwar philosophy of science bore the imprint of anti-positivism and organic antireductionism. Ernst Nagel was concerned with the structure of scientiªc knowledge, and in the logical positivist tradition, explored the question of unity, formulating his well- known model of theory reduction (Nagel 1961). He addressed Gestalt theory as a model of organic unity and a case of non-reductive relation between a whole and its parts. For this purpose he introduced a general characterization by Koffka, and cited examples from psychology by Wert- heimer, from topology by Lewin and from physics by Köhler (Nagel 1961, pp. 380–397). Nagel’s conclusion, however, is that the difference between functional, or structured, and non-functional, or summative, wholes cannot be settled a priori; instead, it depends on the pragmatic choice of representation or the state of development of science (Nagel 1961, p. 397).

4. Conclusion: The Tangle of Relations. In the previous sections I have told a story about the philosophical signiªcance of Gestalt psychology and I have parsed out its implications loosely in terms of a distinction between positivism and anti-positivism.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 169

It is worth noting that the strictness of the distinction is neither accurate nor, for the purpose of this essay, crucial. I pointed out above that, for instance, Schlick’s views are not an example of strict empiricism in the sense of the formation of concepts and hypotheses by abstraction and generalization from sense data. What is then the moral of the story? To begin with, the different cases I have presented are philosophically distinct, whether rightly or wrongly labeled as either positivist or anti-positivist; yet they are all cases of philosophical views which rest on insights from Gestalt psychology. The role of scientiªc developments in the evolution of philosophy is generally not reducible to single episodes; the philosophical ex- ploitation of Gestalt theory has spanned over half a century. Second, and more importantly, science does engage with philosophy but scientiªc developments do not always ªx philosophical developments uniquely. In this particular case, the same scientiªc theory is the source of the rejection of older philosophical views that rested scientiªc insights traceable to the same theory. A similar point is illustrated by the case of Einstein’s relativity theory and the diversity of philosophical implications it was claimed to support—think of Cassirer, Lewis, Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach, Bridgman, Feyerabend, Holton, Friedman, Ryckman, Galison, etc. This sort of case should be differentiated from cases of debates in philosophy of physics, say, over the interpretation of a particular theory such as quantum mechanics or general relativity. Third, the responsiveness of philosophy to developments in science is not reduced to paradigmatic or unproblematic scientiªc achievements. As Barry Smith has pointed out, and Popper was aware of, Gestalt theory failed to establish itself in the mainstream of psychology. Neither Popper nor Neurath saw it that way, nor did the scientist themselves, such as Bühler, at around the time of the theory’s ªrst philosophical applications. If Gestalt psychology had been a new paradigm in psychology, in Kuhn’s and Friedman’s sense, then the rest of my conclusion would still remain intact, and the discussion would simply focus on the fact, again, that Pop- per and Neurath, among others, sought insight from other psychological schools. Fourth, it is interesting that the insights from Gestalt psychology made their way into philosophical developments not just from direct attention to science itself, as was the case of Schlick or Wittgenstein, but de- rivatively, from philosophy itself, as was the case both of Hanson and Kuhn. Fifth, science itself—in this case of Köhler’s work in Gestalt psychology—is developed by attention to science—in this case Faraday and Maxwell’s ideas—which in turn is shaped by insights from philosophy— Kantianism and Naturphilosophie—, in particular, the philosophy it re-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 170 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

jected in order to associate itself with another—Reichenbach’s scientiªc philosophy. The case of the philosophical background to ªeld physics is interesting because extricates the question of the relation between philosophy and psychology from the question of the late nineteenth-century and early twenty-century conceptual, methodological and institutional inde- pendization of psychology from philosophy. Sixth, the philosophical developments to which Gestalt psychology contributed are intimately associated, and typically presented as such, with philosophical views which did not rest on insights from Gestalt theory. Both the orthodoxies of positivism and anti-positivism include such case; think, for instance, of Bridgman and Feyerabend, respectively. Of course, the point is really about the importance of the level of speciªcity of our claims and the cost of generalizations. If it was bad enough to put together Schlick and Carnap, we know better now than to mix together Schlick’s early and later views. The point applies, by parity of reason, to Gestalt psychology itself. The relation is not between Gestalt theory and the different philosophical views but between the latter and different strands, formulations and applications of the latter. But then, the conclusions above still stand for some of the cases, in, more generally, that the relation between science and philosophy is particularly diffused in a way not captured by the level of description for a great number of claims and questions. The topology of the interaction between science and philosophy is neither immediate, nor univocal nor simple; it is protracted, polymor- phous and circuitous. Simple relations might occur in very speciªc cases, but they do not bear generalization. This is overlooked by Friedman in his rationalized Kuhnian model of the co-evolution of science and philosophy, focused on physics. The fact that science and philosophy—generally speaking—can and do in fact interact is uncontroversial but not trivial. It calls attention to interesting features of both disciplines. For instance, it underscores the relevance of science to philosophy as a source of concepts, questions, answers and tools. It also reveals the philosophical dimensions and sources of science. The fact that such facts might be a contingent feature of historical development does not challenge the diagnosis, since—until shown otherwise—the identity of each discipline appears inseparable from its history. The philosophical dimensions of science are at least two. In one, the doc- trinal dimension, scientiªc practice—theoretical or experimental—can and has been stimulated and constrained by speciªc philosophical doctrines. These can be epistemological or methodological (positivism, Pop- perianism, etc), or descriptive and categorial (holism of uniªed forces in Naturphilosophie, as it made its way into ªeld physics and Gestalt psychology, etc.) In another dimension, more structural and practical, conceptual

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 171

reºection and assumptions are part of scientiªc theories and practice in a way not directly based on quantiªcation, observation or measurement. They may be understood as involving background assumptions, constitutive principles, functional a prioris, entrenched statements and beliefs, relativized a prioris, implicit deªnitions, standards or conventions. Rather than being testable themselves, their role consists in enabling the formulation of questions and rendering more salient claims descriptive and testable (Friedman 2001; Sklar 2000; Elgin 1996; Longino 1990, 2002). I have argued elsewhere that the application of mathematics in exact science often involves assumptions that are formal—for instance, continuity conditions—epistemological—for instance, criteria of physical or empirical status, or measurement conventions about simultaneity—and categorial or ontological—such as models or criteria of particlehood (classical or quantum), locality, determinism, causality (probabilistic, fuzzy set- theoretical, Bayesian), information, etc., or all of the above such as unity as a model of formal description and explanatory value and ontological description.20 It is at this conceptual or philosophical level that goals or values and biases ªnd, for better or worse, their unavoidable place. It is here that science responds, theoretically and experimentally—if the distinction applies—to social, political and ethical considerations. What remains in place is the dimension or job description, while the speciªc categories and values vary over individuals and over time. This hybrid nature of science, in this case conceptually (the complexity of science spans many other dimensions), is what makes possible the relevance of science to philosophy and, vice versa, of philosophy to science. It is precisely this hybrid and complex nature of science that, rather than un- dermining the autonomy of each discipline, multiplies the dimensions of their identity. Hence the relevance of the historical evidence to claims about their identity. The case of the intellectually and institutionally hybrid nature of psychology is then not an irrelevant anomaly but an explanatory factor in the story. The case of the human sciences should not be omitted from the discussion of the relation between science and philosophy or between the different sciences. The different sciences evolve not only in intellectual interaction with philosophy but also with one another.21 Even our understanding of science comes as much from philosophy as from different sciences—recall the role of mechanical, social, cognitive and evolutionary models. This triple intercalation is missing in Fried- man’s Kuhnian account. 20. see Cat (1998), (2001), (2002) and (2006); for classiªcation of such assumptions and examples from biology, see Longino (2002). 21. The inºuence of biology on sociology, or of physics on economics and vice versa is well documented.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 172 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

It might be suggested that the sustained interaction between science and philosophy either invites or reveals a more fundamental project involving a takeover. Despite the hybridity of each discipline, Michael Friedman and Helen Longino have advanced arguments showing the value of their relative autonomy. Relying on an emphasis on the social dimension of science their arguments show that their autonomy best guarantees the beneªts of their interaction. Friedman speaks of communicative rationality (he rightly criticizes Habermas for opposing communicative to pragmatic or instrumental rationality and associating the latter with ‘the positivistic presumptions of Naturwissenschaften’ (Friedman 2001, p. 95)). He locates the philosophical activity relevant to science on the level of constitutive principles in such a way that ‘a shared constitutive framework thereby facilitates shared mutually comprehensive rational argumentation [and mutual understanding]’, which ‘yields agreement on what counts as an empirical reason or justiªcation for any given empirical possibility’ (Friedman 2001, p. 93). Continuity of philosophical debate at the constitutive level is what bridges the gap between incommensurable paradigms and prevents relativism (Friedman 2001, chs. 3, 4). The continuity of such debate is best guaranteed, I think, by the relative degree of autonomy of philosophical activity. Longino’s argument is based on her account of objectivity, rationality, and, more generally, effective normative epistemology. Values and assumptions are the basis for a social notion of objectivity in scientiªc practice. Her account requires the ability of a community to promote criticism and its uptake. One desired outcome is the consideration and revision of otherwise implicit background assumptions, values and standards. Criti- cal discussion requires debate with individuals within the community or, especially in case of consensus—outside of it who do not share the same assumptions. Philosophy would constitute an external community provid- ing a source of debate. Longino extends the value of external community to both philosophy and history of science.22 All these conclusions become relevant to the task of assessing the content and merits of projects that involve the relation between the two disciplines. One is the question of naturalized philosophy, a view about the cognitive primacy of science as source of problems and solutions whose formulation and merits depends on what is assumed about science (including its unity). Another is the question of the relations between history of

22. Longino (2002), esp. 135, n. 20. Longino’s procedural and social model of objectivity and rationality contrasts with Kant individualist and constitutive one. Also, her emphasis on objectivity contrasts with Galison’s emphasis on the rising recourse to expert judgement in the interpretation of images despite their technological origin and mechani- cally objectivity; Galison (1998).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 173

science and philosophy of science. But these are issues that I can only raise but not address here.

References Ash, M. G. 1982. “Epilogue.” In Woodward and Ash. 1982, 347–65. ———. 1987. “Psychology and Politics in Interwar Vienna: The Vienna Psychological Institute, 1922–1942.” In Ash and Woodward. 1987, 143–164. ———. 1998. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890–1967. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press. Ash, M. G. and W. R. Woodward, eds. 1987. Psychology in Twenty-century Thought and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartley, W. W. 1973. Wittgenstein. New York: J. B. Lippincott. Bühler, K. 1927. Die Krise der Psychologie. Jena: Fischer. Carnap, R. 1928/1967. Logical Structure of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cartwright, N, J. Cat, L. Fleck and T. Vebel. 1996. Otto Neurath: Philoso- phy Between Science and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassirer, E. 1910. Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer. Translated as Substance and Function. New York: Dover. 1953. ———. 1997. “Unity of Science in the Framework of Naturalism.” Dis- cussion Paper Series, Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sci- ence, LSE, Spring 1997. ———. 1998. “The Physicists Debates on Uniªcation in Physics at the End of the 20th Century.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences. 28, n.2. 1998, 253–299. ———. 2001. “On Understanding: Maxwell on the Methods of Illustra- tion and Scientiªc Metaphor.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Vol. 33B, n.3 (2001), 395–442. ———. 2002. “Representation as Theory: How and Why Mathematical Representation Makes a Difference in Physical Theory” in Cat, Physics Beyond Laws and Theories. Forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2006. “Fuzzy Empiricism and Fuzzy-Set Causality: What is All the Fuzz About?” Philosophy of Science 73, n. 1, 26–41. Cat, J. and M. Lund. 2006. “Norwood Russell Hanson.” In S. Sarkar and J. Peipper, eds., Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Science. London and New York: Routledge. Crary, J. 1999. Suspension of Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 174 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

Dwyler, P. 1990. Sense and Subjectivity. A study of Wittgenstein and Merleau- Ponty. Leiden: Brill. Ehrenfels, C. von. 1890. “Ueber ‘Gestaltqualitäten’.” Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. 14, 249–92. Translated in Smith (1988), 82–117. Elgin, C. 1996. Considered Judgement. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ellis, W. D. 1938. A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Feyerabend, P. K. 1981. Collected Papers (2 vols.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fleck, L. 1935/1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientiªc Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedman, M. 1999 Reconsidering Logical Positivism. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI. Galison, P. 1998 “Judgment against Objectivity.” In C. Jones and P. Galison, eds. Picturing Science, Producing Art. New York: Routledge, 327–59. Gattei, S. 2004. “Karl Popper’s Philosophical Breakthrough.” Philosophy of Science. 71, 448–466. Grelling, K. and K. Oppenheim. 1937/38. “Das Gestaltbegriff im Liche der neuen Logik.” Erkenntnis 7, 211–225, Ergänzungen, 357–59, 371. Grier, N. F. 1981. Wittgenstein and Phenomenology. Albany: SUNY Press. Hacohen, M. 2000. Karl Popper. The Formative Years, 1902–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hanson, N. R. 1961. Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press. ———. 1969. Perception and Discovery. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Co. Harrington, A. 1996. Enchanted Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. C. G. Hempel and P. Oppenheim. 1936. Der Typusbegriff im Lichte der neuen Logik. Leiden: Sijthoff. Humphrey, G. 1951. Thinking. London: Methuen and Co. Husserl, E. 1900–1901. Logische Untersuchungen. Halle: Max Niemeyer. 2nd ed. Transl. as Logical Investigations. London: Routledge, 1973. Janik and Toulmin. 1973. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kaplan, B. 1971. “Some Considerations of Inºuences on Wittgenstein.” Idealistic Studies 1, 73–88. Koffka, K. 1915. “Zur Grundlegung der Wahrnehmungspsychologie.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 175

Eine Ausseinandersetzung mit V. Benussi.” Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 71, 11–90. Translated in Ellis (1938), 371–8. ———. 1935. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Köhler, W. 1913. “Ueber unbemerkte Empªndungen und Urteilstäuschungen.” Zeitschrift für Psychologie 66, 51–80. Translated in M. Henle (ed.) The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler. New York: Liveright, 1971,13–39. ———. 1920. “Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand, Eine naturphilosophische Untersuchung.” Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn. Translated in Ellis (1938), 17–54. ———. 1924. The Mentality of Apes. London: Kegan Paul. ———. 1929. Gestalt Psychology. New York: Liveright Corp ———. 1938. The Place of Value in a World of Facts. New York: Liveright Corp. ———. 1944. “Value and Fact.” Journal of Philosophy, 41(8), 197–212. Kuhn, T. S. 1962. The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1969. “Postcript.” In The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions. 2nd. edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. et al. 1997. “A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn.” Neusis 6, 143–98. Kusch, M. 1985. Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge. London: Routledge. ———. 1999. Psychological Knowledge. A Social History and Philosophy. London: Routledge. Longino, H. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press. ———. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mach, E. 1897. Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations. Chicago: Open Court. Metzger, W. 1941. Psychologie. Die Entwicklung ihrer Grundannahmen seit der Einfuhrung des Experiments. Darmstadt: Steinkopf. Moulines, C. U. 1985. “Hintergruende der Erkenntnistheorie des Fruehen Carnap.” in Grazer Philosophische Studien 25 (1985), 1–18. Nagel, E. 1961. The Struture of Science. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Neurath, O. 1931a. “Physicalism and the Vienna Circle.” In Neurath (1983), 48–51. ———. 1931b. “Physicalism.” In Neurath (1983), 52–57. ———. 1931c. “Sociology and Physicalism.” In Neurath (1983), 58–90.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 176 Switching Gestalts on Gestalt Psychology

———. 1937. “The concept of ‘Type’ in the Light of modern Logic.” In Neurath (1983), 183–188. ———. 1983 Philosophical Papers 1913–1946. Dordrecht: Reidel. Oakes, G. 1990. Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pastore, N. 1991. “Wittgenstein on Köhler and Gestalt Psychology: A Critique.” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, 27, 341–351. Pears, D. 1987. The False Prison, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Polanyi, M. 1946. Science, Faith and Society. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press. ———. 1958. Personal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1964. Science, Faith and Society. 2nd ed. Chicago: Chicago Univer- sity Press. Popper, K. R. 1935. Logik der Forschung. Vienna: Julius Springer Verlag. Translated as Logic of Scientiªc Discovery. London: Unwin and Co. ———. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies (2 vols.). London: George Routledge & Sons. ———. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1972. Objective Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Popper, K. R. and J. Eccles. 1977. The Self and the Brain. New York: Springer Verlag. Reichenbach, H. 1931. Ziele und Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie. Ham- burg: Felix Meiner. Translated in Reichenbach (1959) Modern Philoso- phy of Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 75–108. Richards, R. 2003. The Romantic Conception of Life. Chicago: Chicago Uni- versity Press. Ryckman, T. 2005. The Reign of Relativity. Philosophy in Physics 1915– 1925. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryle, G. 1954. Dilemmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlick, M. 1918. Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre. Berlin: Springer. 2nd ed. 1925. Translated as General Theory of Knowledge. La Salle: Open Court. ———. 1935/1979. “On the Concept of Wholeness.” In H. Mulder and B. van Velde-Schlick (eds.) Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. Dordrecht: Reidel, 388–399. Sklar, L. 2000. Theory and Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, B. 1988. (ed.). Foundations of Gestalt Psychology. München: Philosophia Verlag. Smith, L. 1986. Behaviorism and Logical Positivism. A Reassessment of the Al- liance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Spengler, O. 1937. The Decline of the West. New York: Knopf.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 177

Sterrett, S. G. 2005. Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World. New York: Pi Press. Stumpf, C. 1873. Ueber den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung. Leipzig: Hirzel. ———. 1891. “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie.” Abhandlugen der königlich bayrischen Akademie der Wissesnschaften, I. Kl. 18, 481–509. ———. 1907. “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften.” Abhandlungen der königlich preussichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2–10. Suppe, F. 2000. “Hempel and the Problem of Provisos.” In J. Fetzer, ed., Science, Explanation and Rationality. The Philosophy of C. G. Hempel. Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 187–213. Ter Hark, M. 2002. “Between Autobiography and Reality: Popper’s In- ductive Years.” Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Science. 33, 79– 103. Toccafondi, F. 2002. “Receptions, Readings and Interpretations of Gestalt psychologie.” Gestalt Theory 24, n. 3, 199–210. Tribe, K. 1995. Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse 1750–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werner, H. 1927. “Ueber physiognomische Wahrnehmungsweisen und ihre experimentelle Prüfung.” Eighth International Congress of Psychology, Proceedings and Papers. Groningen: Noordhoff, 443–446. Wertheimer, M. 1912a. “Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung.” Zeitschrift für Psychologie 61, 161–265. ———. 1912b. “Ueber das denken der Naturvölker, Zahlen und Zahlgebilde.” Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 60, 321–378. Translated in Ellis (1938), 265–73. ———. 1923. “Untersuchungen zur Lehre von des Gestalt, II.” Psychologische Forschung 4, 301–350. Translated in Ellis (1938), 71–88. ———. 1925. “Ueber Schlussprozesse im produktiven Denken.” Drei Abhlandlungen zur Gestalttheorie. Erlangen: Verlag der Philosophischen Akademie. Translated in Ellis (1935), 274–282. ———. 1945. Productive Thinking. New York and London: Harper and Bros. Wittgenstein, L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (2nd ed. 1961) Lon- don: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1956. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1953 Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Woodward, W. R. and M. G. Ash, eds. 1982. The Problematic Science. Psy- chology in Nineteenth-century Thought. New York: Praeger.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2007.15.2.131 by guest on 25 September 2021