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Max Wertheimer was one the more famous gestalt researchers. Gestalt can be translated as "form" and part of the emphasis of the gestalt group was that "the whole (or gestalt) was greater than the sum of its parts." We aren't interested here in exactly what this slogan was meant to convey. However, notice that this represented an explicit focus on the question of composition; that is, how are our ideas structured. The slogan was meant to convey the gestaltist's belief that this process of composition probably wasn't a simple one. This slogan can be understood a bit better if we get a little more technical. Summation is, of course, an additive process. If you recall the implications of the axioms of addition, you may recall that the contribution of one number to the sum is independent of when you add it...or put another way, where it appears in the summation. E.g. 2 + 3 + 4 = 9 = 3 + 2 + 4. That is, the 3 that appears in bold, and in fact the whole equation yields the same result regardless of the context. And in fact 3 is still three in the equation 1,899, 622, + 3 + 567,333. The gestaltist were suggesting that we really had to consider the context in which some element occurred in order to understand how it contributed to the whole or gestalt. They thought that the mind rarely combined things or organized things independent of the context in which they appear. Consider the two configurations shown below: |
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In both of these configurations we have a larger rectangle placed between two smaller rectangles. But note that the "large rectangle" in the top figure is exactly the same size as the two "smaller rectangles" in the lower figure. Here the "context" is presumably influencing the way in which I encode the various rectangles. The fact that there are two ways of viewing configurations of this sort was very important to the arguments that went on between the gestaltists and behaviorists during the earlier part of the 20th century. On one view, an absolute or context independent view, we place the center rectangle of the top figure and the left and right rectangles of the lower figure into the same equivalence class because they are exactly the same size and shape. But, on another view, the middle rectangles of each figure should be seen as equivalent because they both depict a large rectangle that is between two smaller rectangles. The fact that there are two possibilities may pose a problem for a "passive mind". The environment can hardly be asked to decide which of these alternatives is seen by the viewer. The "stimulus" seems to be a somewhat ambiguous notion when thought of in this way...But, since the behaviorist studied the way in which stimuli became associated with responses, the behaviorist couldn't allow the stimulus to be a fuzzy notion. (Note that ambiguous figures present exactly the same problem and this is one of the reasons that they have been studied so extensively in perception.) Recall that I referred to the large rectangle between two smaller rectangles. Relations such as 'between' also gave rise to some difficulties. Is "between" something that is out there in the world? Can you point at it? Well, not really. It seems to be a way in which we describe a situation and not an intrinsic property of the situation. (Cf. the Würzburg Group discussed in Chapter 1 of your text.) And if that isn't bad enough, I can also correctly say things such as: "There is not a circle in either picture." "There is not a triangle in either picture." There is not an apple in either picture." etc. ad nauseum.... Even this simple innocuous every day word "not" causes problems since we can use it to make true statements about the world. But, how does the situation or stimulus elicit statements of this sort....there are infinite number of such statements that I could make about any situation! |
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| © Charles F. Schmidt | ||