Gestalt against atomism: is organized experience prior to and different from its parts?

Wolfgang Köhler, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.1 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.23

Sources

  1. On the other hand, if the subject has once found the 4 in that figure, which means that 4 has now become a segregated whole, he will consequently find it again easily, and reproduce the name. From this it follows that the traces of past experiences are neither an indifferent continuum nor a mosaic of independent points; rather they must be pictures of past organization.
    Gestalt Psychology
  2. Similarly, sensory organization 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.
    Gestalt Psychology
  3. This is the case primarily, wherever we have not yet learned to see the problem contained in those common properties of experience. No wonder, then, that neurologists and some psychologists still talk about "the retinal process" corresponding to an object, as though there were something like a segregated functional unit on the retina.
    Gestalt Psychology

Where the argument is made

  • Gestalt Psychology (1929): the critique of the "constancy hypothesis" and of element-psychology
  • the laws of perceptual organisation

How the argument was received

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.