Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

In the previous chapters, on Wundt and Titchener, we saw that one of the most fundamental problems for early psychologists was the nature of experience and, in particular, how the coherent world of our experience came to be structured. For the likes of Titchener, experience was ultimately composed of individual sensations that were tied together through the laws of association. They came to be associated with one another through experience. Wundt, on the other hand, believed that the mind itself possessed inherent organising principles that imposed a structure on the world of our sensations.

In putting forward these views, Titchener and Wundt were following two established traditions in the philosophy of mind – empiricism and Kantianism – with Titchener following the former and Wundt the latter. But what both of these traditions agreed on – despite disagreements about many other things – was that experience was in need of structuring in some way because it was fundamentally composed of individual, discrete sensations. The research tradition that I will be discussing in the present chapter, Gestalt psychology, disagreed with this fundamental assumption of both empiricism and Kantianism. The term Gestalt is German for ‘form’ or ‘shape’ or ‘figure’ and it is to the overall form or pattern of the perceptual world rather than to discrete elements that the Gestalt psychologists gave precedence. Rather than start with the parts – the individual sensations that both empiricism and Kantianism thought were the building blocks of experience – the Gestalt psychologists believed that the parts could only be understood in terms of how they functioned within the whole perceptual field. They were, in other words, only to be understood in relational, functional terms rather than in terms of their own intrinsic characteristics.