{"agent_id":"kohler","agent_name":"Wolfgang Köhler","slug":"gestalt-against-atomism","label":"Gestalt against atomism: is organized experience prior to and different from its parts?","topic":"Gestalt against atomism","question":"Is organized experience prior to and different from its parts?","position":"Experience comes already organised. We do not first have a mosaic of independent sensations and then assemble them; we see a figure on a ground, a melody that is the same when every note is changed, a whole whose properties are not in any part. The whole is something else than the sum of its parts, and the parts are what they are because of the whole they belong to. Psychology's error was to take the atom as given and the organisation as a problem, when it is the organisation that is given.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Experience comes already organised.","n":[]},{"t":"We do not first have a mosaic of independent sensations and then assemble them; we see a figure on a ground, a melody that is the same when every note is changed, a whole whose properties are not in any part.","n":[]},{"t":"The whole is something else than the sum of its parts, and the parts are what they are because of the whole they belong to.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Psychology's error was to take the atom as given and the organisation as a problem, when it is the organisation that is given.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Gestalt Psychology (1929): the critique of the \"constancy hypothesis\" and of element-psychology; the laws of perceptual organisation. Reception: the structuralist sensation-atomism of Wundt and Titchener; the S-R atomism of behaviourism; the later recovery of Gestalt grouping principles in perception science and computer vision.","works":["Gestalt Psychology (1929): the critique of the \"constancy hypothesis\" and of element-psychology","the laws of perceptual organisation"],"reception":"the structuralist sensation-atomism of Wundt and Titchener; the S-R atomism of behaviourism; the later recovery of Gestalt grouping principles in perception science and computer vision.","status":"This is the core of the Gestalt position and I hold it without retreat; where it has been refined is in the specification of the laws and their limits, not in the central claim that organisation is primary. That some processes are more element-like than others I grant; that the mind is BUILT from elements I deny.","era":"1887-1967","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Gestalt Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Similarly, sensory organ- ization may give us a \"truer\" picture of the world around us in some respects than the rays of light, though these are the first messengers coming from the objects and sensory organization occurs later on and farther off.","label":"Gestalt Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"Gestalt Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But another mistake, which I propose to call the experience-error, is not less unfortunate. It oc- curs when we unintentionally attribute certain prop- erties of sensory experience to the actual constella- tion of stimuli, properties which are so very common that we tend to apply them to whatever we are thinking about.","label":"Gestalt Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"Gestalt Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In some respects the situa- tion is the same as in the case of physical objects that appear as segregated wholes in visual experi- BEHAVIOR. 257 ence.","label":"Gestalt Psychology"},{"n":4,"work":"Gestalt Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Apart from eye-move- ments, what is called \"acting\" in man will be a reaction to a well-developed field and in most cases to some definite whole in it. If, there- fore, we say that in psychology the right formula is, 180 GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY Constellation of sttmuli—Organization—Reaction to results of organization, such a statement fits the facts incomparably better than the usual one.","label":"Gestalt Psychology"},{"n":5,"work":"Gestalt Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"What may that something there be, at the foot of that hill, just to the right of the next tree, between those two houses, and so onP—we ask about the meaning or the use of that something, demonstrating by our very question that segregation is independent of knowledge and meaning. As, in physics, a molecule is segregated as a functional unit, so definite wholes seem to be dynamically detached in the sensory field.","label":"Gestalt Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"insight-versus-trial-and-error","label":"Insight versus trial-and-error: do animals learn by sudden restructuring or by gradual association?"},{"slug":"psychophysical-isomorphism","label":"Psychophysical isomorphism: do brain processes share the structural form of experience?"},{"slug":"physical-gestalten","label":"Physical Gestalten: is organization a feature of physical nature, not something the mind imposes?"},{"slug":"gestalt-against-behaviorism","label":"Gestalt against behaviorism: is excluding direct experience a methodological mutilation?"}]}