Blog da Psicologia da Educação

Autor: Fabrizio Fallas Vargas – Licenciado en Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica. Profesor de la Escuela de Ciencias Sociales del Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica.

Fonte: http://revista.inie.ucr.ac.cr/articulos/1-2008/archivos/gestalt.pdf

Resumen: El presente trabajo explora las principales implicaciones de la teoría Gestalt en tanto que modelo de aprendizaje. Para ello desarrolla las categorías de análisis fundamental producidas por sus exponentes fundadores, Wertheimer, Koffka, y Köhler, el concepto de pensamiento productivo, así como las reglas perceptuales derivadas de sus investigaciones empíricas. Asimismo se exploran aplicaciones pedagógicas y psicopedagógicas de la teoría, en articulación con el concepto axial de la Gestalt en términos de aprendizaje: die Einsicht, el cual es elaborado en forma crítica.

Palabras clave: GESTALT, APRENDIZAJE POR PERSPICACIA, MODELOS DE APRENDIZAJE, PROCESOS DE APRENDIZAJE, PEDAGOGÍA GESTALTICA, PENSAMIENTO PRODUCTIVO

Abstract: This paper explores the main implications of Gestalt theory as a model of learning. To achieve that purpose, it develops the categories of fundamental analysis conceived by it´s founders: Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler. It also develops the concept of productive thinking, as well as the rules of perception derived from their empirical investigations. Likewise, it explores pedagogical and psychopedagogical applications of the theory, articulated with the axial concept of Gestalt theory, in terms of learning: die Einsicht, which is elaborated in a critical approach.

Keywords: GESTALT, INSIGHT LEARNING, MODELS OF LEARNING, LEARNING PROCESSES, GESTALTIC PEDAGOGY, PRODUCTIVE THINKING.

Requería Herón II, rey de Siracusa y pariente de Arquímedes (287 a.C. – 212 a.C.), saber si la corona encargada al orfebre local era realmente de oro puro. Advirtió el rey a Arquímedes, expresamente, que no dañase la corona. Arquímedes dio varios rodeos al problema, hasta que un día, al meterse en la bañera, vino a solucionar el asunto. De acuerdo con lo percibido, pensó que el agua que se desbordaba tenía que ser igual al volumen de su cuerpo en ella sumergido, por lo que, trasladando el asunto a la corona de Herón, si medía el agua que rebosaba al meter la corona, accedería a saber el volumen de ésta, y acto seguido, podría compararlo con el volumen de un objeto de oro que pesase igual que la corona. Si los volúmenes no fuesen iguales, sería la prueba de que la corona no era de oro puro. Excitadísimo por el descubrimiento, salió del baño y corriendo desnudo, a palacio, gritaba: ¡Lo encontré! ¡Lo encontré!. El griego eurhka (Eureka) pasa a la posteridad como la expresión que anuncia el descubrimiento. Arquím des logró demostrar que la corona tenía mayor volumen que un objeto de oro con el mismo peso, contenía plata, un metal de menor densidad que el oro. “La” fórmula” fundamental de la teoría Gestalt, puede ser expresada de la siguiente forma: Hay todos cuyo comportamiento no está determinado por sus elementos individuales, sino donde los procesos parte se encuentran determinados por la naturaleza intrínseca del todo. Es la esperanza de la teoría Gestalt el determinar la naturaleza de tales todos”.
Max Wertheimer, lección dada en 1924 a la Sociedad Kantiana de Berlín.

El surgimiento de la Gestalt, en tanto que teoría psicológica, completa el panorama de
la psicología centroeuropea, junto al estructuralismo, el funcionalismo, que surge hacia
finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX, y particularmente, junto al psicoanálisis, por el cual
se decantará la Teoría Crítica de la sociedad, el freudomarxismo y las elaboraciones
práctico-teóricas de las ciencias sociales progresivas, en abierta oposición política y teóricometodológica
contra el positivismo, y, claro está, sus derivas que se constituyen en el campo
de la psicología behaviorista, ampliamente extendida al otro lado del Atlántico y la práctica
educativa de corte asociacionista, que Max Wertheimer (psicólogo y compositor de origen
checo, quien había estudiado leyes en Praga, antes de ir a Berlín a estudiar psicología),
procede a criticar en forma vehemente. Con fuerte acento en el idealismo trascendental
kantiano, la Gestalt referirá la organización de la percepción en el sujeto a un marco
estructurador de lo real a priori, esto es, independientemente de la experiencia.

La noción de Gestalt, es introducida por Christian Von Ehrenfels en 1890, como “forma”, “estructura”, al descubrir que una misma melodía podría ser tocada sobre distintas notas, al tiempo que las mismas notas en distinto orden daban lugar a una tonada distinta.

Siendo que la tonada se da a la percepción, sucede que la totalidad estructural, o sea, la forma, la pone el sujeto. Hacia 1912, Max Wertheimer, realiza experimentos sobre el movimiento estroboscópico (fenómeno phi), junto a los otros grandes exponentes de lo que se denominará en adelante la teoría Gestalt: el berlinés Kurt Koffka, y el estonio, formado en Alemania, Wolfgang Köhler. A partir de tales experimentos, Wertheimer logra concluir que ante la exposición de dos líneas separadas y estacionarias a corta distancia en rápida sucesión temporal, la percepción del sujeto será una línea única moviéndose desde la posición de la primera a la de la segunda línea; movimiento, por lo demás aparente.

Será Köhler quien dará el sentido que tiene entre los psicólogos gestaltistas, el término Gestalt, en tanto que una suerte de entidad característica e individual con existencia independiente y que posee forma, estructura, entre sus atributos.

De acuerdo con Koffka (1935), la aplicación de la Gestalt, significa “determinar que partes de naturaleza pertenecen a todos funcionales, para descubrir su posición en ellos, su grado de independencia relativa y la articulación de grandes todos en sub-todos”.

Así las cosas, para la Gestalt, la unidad de análisis fundamental será la noción de estructura, en tanto que organización de los elementos de un todo en sus relaciones, hecha posible por la ley de Praegnanz (pregnancia). Ello es importante puesto que explica el concepto de inteligencia que se maneja en la Gestalt, como la facultad para percibir el campo y la de organizar elementos en orden a la solución creativa (Gestaltungskraft) desde lo que propone el conjunto no resuelto (reestructuración) y no la mera acumulación de información dirigida a la reproducción de tareas programadas que propone el modelo de adiestramiento skinneriano. En efecto, como sostiene Wolman (1975, p. 516):

Los chimpancés de Köhler no probaban y erraban al modo de Thorndike, ni se tornaban condicionados al estilo de Pavlov. Abordaban nuevas situaciones; mostraban una orientación en el aprendizaje y bastante inteligencia. No intentaban ciegamente todas las respuestas posibles; su conducta ponía de manifiesto que el aprendizaje incluía un considerable volumen de actividad dirigida a un fin[…]estaban situados en una jaula, y se colocaba un banano a una cierta distancia de ella[…]utilizaban cuerdas, palos y cajas para conseguir el banano; al parecer percibían de algún modo la situación y empleaban la perspicacia para resolver el problema.

El propio Köhler, en la Mentalidad de los simios (1925), registra las siguientes observaciones:

Sultán intenta alcanzar la fruta con el más pequeño de dos palos. Sin éxito, rasga un pedazo de alambre que se proyecta en la red de su jaula, en vano…De repente, recoge de nuevo el palo corto, sube a las barras directamente opuestas a un palo largo, le jala hacia él con el “auxiliar”, lo toma, y va con él al punto opuesto en donde se encuentra la meta (la fruta), qué él consigue afianzar.

En ese sentido resulta pertinente la distinción entre pensamiento reproductivo y pensamiento productivo introducida por Wertheimer en Pensamiento productivo:

El pensamiento reproductivo sería aquel que consiste simplemente en aplicar destrezas o conocimientos adquiridos con anterioridad a situaciones nuevas Así, por ejemplo, todos hemos aprendido a aplicar de modo reproductivo la ecuación del ‘binomio de Newton’ para hallar el cuadrado de una suma: (a+b)2 = (a2+b2+2ab). En cambio, el pensamiento productivo sería aquel que implicaría el descubrimiento de una nueva organización perceptiva o conceptual con respecto a un problema, una comprensión real del mismo. (Pozo, 1997, p. 171)

Dicha organización de elementos, no por vía generalizadora (como postularía el empirismo anglosajón), sino relacional, tendría como efecto posterior el aprendizaje, cuya metáfora prototípica es el grito arquimédico de Eureka, y ha sido denominada por la Gestalt con el nombre de Einsicht, término acuñado por Wolfgang Köhler, con base en sus investigaciones con chimpancés en las islas Canarias. Einsicht remite al aprendizaje por perspicacia, que es un componente clave, al tiempo que polémico de la teoría gestáltica en su conjunto.

De acuerdo con Wertheimer, en Pensamiento productivo, tal como advierte Pozo (1997, p. 172):

…lo fundamental para obtener una solución productiva a un problema y comprenderlo realmente es captar los rasgos estructurales de la situación más allá de los elementos que la componen[…]La solución de problemas y el aprendizaje no se obtendrán por la asociación de elementos próximos entre sí, sino de la comprensión de la estructura global de las situaciones.

La comprensión elemental no reproductiva (propia de simple memorismo asociativo) que se contiene en el Einsicht guarda íntima relación con la ley de Praegnanz, de acuerdo con el cual, en forma a priori, el sujeto gestáltico, tendería a la organización de lo real con base en formas simétricas, completas y regulares, equilibradas y centradas, todo ello en forma inmediata y rápida, tal como lo haría el trascendental kantiano con las intuiciones en las formas puras de la apercepción y las categorías del entendimiento en la Crítica de la razón pura.

La ley de Praegnanz, involucra tres procesos que, de acuerdo a los experimentos gestálticos, intervienen en el aprendizaje: Nivelación o cambio en el sentido de la simetría y la distribución apropiada; agudizamiento, que consiste en la acentuación de los elementos esenciales de una figura, aspecto que le hace fácilmente identificable; normalización que remite a la simplicidad y claridad de la figura percibida. Asimismo, a partir de sus investigaciones, los gestaltistas derivan una serie de reglas de la percepción (que se ilustran en el cuadro 1), y desde luego, el aprendizaje, a saber, la similitud, que remitiría al agrupamiento de datos semejantes en la percepción; la proximidad, en cuyo caso, el agrupamiento de los datos se funda en su carácter próximo; continuidad, por la que son percibidos en términos unitarios los datos agrupados en líneas rectas o curvas; el cierre, cuando se completan los datos que faltan en las figuras que no lo son; fondo-forma, que se operaría en el destaque de figuras contorneadas especto del contexto que se presenta como fondo, siendo que en caso contrario la confusión de todo el conjunto bloquearía el efecto.

Los gestaltistas se ocuparon de tareas de aprendizaje de una complejidad mayor a los conductistas, fijados en el ensayo-error y el uso de reforzadores. Así, Wertheimer en Pensamiento Productivo, tal como advierte Pozo (1997, p. 173):

…presenta dos ejemplos de cómo se produce la comprensión súbita de la estructura
de los problemas científicos. Analiza el descubrimiento de la teoría de la relatividad
por Einstein y la comprensión de la inercia por parte de Galileo. En este último caso,
muestra que Galileo descubrió la ley de la inercia cuando se dio cuenta de que el
reposo y el movimiento rectilíneo constante eran dos situaciones estructuralmente
equivalentes. De esta forma, organizó completamente la estructura conceptual de la
mecánica, al interpretar el reposo como un caso de velocidad constante.

Dado que la percepción en sus reglas sería fundamental en tanto que condición productiva del Einsicht, y, en este caso, del aprendizaje, la función del docente es el de identificar el campo perceptivo en el cual este se juega, en términos generales, de organizar os recursos materiales y afectivos para facilitar el alcance de metas que el sujeto que aprende se trazaría dentro de dicho campo. Para ello, Wertheimer distingue tres tipos de procesos que deben ser considerados a nivel pedagógico, a saber: Procesos tipo a que aseguran el pensamiento productivo (que conduce a la relación medios-fines en el contexto de la totalidad) y que, que dan lugar a soluciones decisivas para problemas estructurales. Este tipo de proceso involucra operaciones de agrupamiento, reorganización y el descubrimiento de características esenciales. Por lo demás, no ha de confundirse el Einsicht con procesos de tipo y, que se ubican en el discurso pedagógico conductista, el aprendizaje por asociación, el condicionamiento, prueba-error, y que en su confusión, desenfoque y precipitación al extraer conclusiones taran el pensamiento productivo, en el planteo de hipótesis sin sentido y susceptibles de influjo exterior; sino que más bien el Einsicht se verifica en procesos, denominados por Wertheimer, de tipo b que integra la perspicacia y análisis. El pensamiento productivo es el que logra articular relaciones todo-parte y todocualidades en búsqueda de la “verdad estructural”, produciendo nuevas y mejores Gestalts.

El aprendizaje, tal como ha sido entendido por Köhler en la Psicología Gestalt, comporta, entonces, una re-estructuración: “…todos los efectos ejercidos por el aprendizaje sobre la subsiguiente experiencia constituyen post-efectos de la organización previa. Si el aprendizaje…equivale a asociación y si es que estamos en lo correcto la asociación es un post-efecto de la organización”. (Pozo, 1997, p.175)

De conformidad con el principio del isomorfismo, el campo perceptivo tendría que ajustarse en su diagnóstico al lenguaje de la física (por lo cual se advertiría una marcada orientación de ciertos elementos de la teoría, sobre todo en el caso de Lewin, por la lectura marburguista del idealismo kantiano). Dicho campo es entonces susceptible de ser diagramado en un esquema topológico espacio-temporalmente delimitado, dentro del cual las percepciones de los sujetos se integrarían, de cara a las metas de aprendizaje propuestas (término que en la Gestalt antagoniza con el elemento de refuerzo conductista) y los impulsos del sujeto, que para estos efectos sería autotélico, en vectores; y en cuyo desplazamiento intervendrían determinadas valencias positivas y negativas cuyo fondo se recorta sobre el carácter de las relaciones que se establecen entre el sujeto percipiente que aprende y sus colegas, así como las que se establecen con el profesor, a nivel particular y grupal. Emerge en este sentido el componente motivacional que el docente ha de tener en cuenta en su accionar dentro de esta relación, así como la propia que apuntala el sujeto en/desde sus vectores, y que sería crucial para la superación de barreras u obstáculos que se presenten dentro del campo para que las metas de aprendizaje sean alcanzadas, en términos de su viabilidad. Lo anterior resulta sumamente interesante, en la medida en que muestra gran afinidad con el planteamiento decrolyano, en tanto que la función globalizadora integra percepción y afectividad, razón por la cual el trabajo mental es susceptible de ser dinamizado por mor de tendencias inmanentes al sujeto y la variabilidad de su estado de ánimo. El fundador de los “centros de interés” va más allá del método de lectoescritura al que comúnmente se reduce su obra, y organiza la ponderación del ambiente de aprendizaje, a nivel curricular, con base en el principio de enseñanza global y una concepción de un sujeto percipiente activo dentro de su entorno:

…la historia (asociación en el tiempo) y la geografía (asociación en el espacio) adquieren una importancia mayor, al igual que las actividades expresivas (lenguaje, dibujo, música, etcétera). Por lo que respecta a la observación Decroly la entiende en la manera más activa posible, casi como exploración del ambiente, y no según el módulo más bien pasivo de las viejas lecciones intuitivas o “lecciones de cosas. (Abbagnano, 1984, p. 669)

La función del docente además de promover el espacio perceptual idóneo (lo cual anuncia el fuerte vínculo de la Gestalt con el enfoque ecológico contemporáneo) debe promover en el estudiante el gestar metas que comprendan la correlación de su todo como sujeto que aprende, a saber, de sus potencialidades, necesidades, limitaciones en su momento dado, lo cual conduce a las ventajas del autoplanteamiento de desafíos que le sean provechosos en términos de su formación en tanto que sujeto autónomo. Para alcanzar esta finalidad que Kant identifica con la “salida de la infancia” y la capacidad para pensar por sí mismo, en el contexto revolucionario de la Ilustración, el docente de la gestalt, adquiere la responsabilidad de proporcionar al sujeto que aprende la confianza en sus propias fuerzas, aspecto de su intervención dentro del campo perceptual que hace sintagma con la selffullfilling prophecy y particularmente con el efecto Rosenthal que plantea el estudio del Pigmalión en sus aplicaciones pedagógicas:

…los alumnos que son valorados positivamente por el docente consiguen mejores resultados que los valorados negativamente, con independencia de sus capacidades reales. Se diría que sobre ellos se proyecta un efecto de confianza en sus propias posibilidades, a la vez que el docente, de forma inconsciente tal vez, actúa con ellos de manera diferente. (Sarramona, 2000, p. 236)

En tal sentido, advierte Sarramona (2000, p. 236), sobre las aplicaciones pedagógicas de la Gestalt, función de estructura y campo perceptual:

La teoría de la Gestalt sugiere la necesidad de plantear las situaciones educativas en general y de aprendizaje en particular teniendo presentes (sic) la situación en su conjunto. El primer contacto con una nueva realidad ha de ser vivida de manera “correcta”, esto es, de modo que en el sujeto le quede impregnada una “buena forma”. Si las primeras experiencias en una escuela o en el aprendizaje de una materia son negativas, será difícil superar luego esa impresión. Es la aplicación pedagógica del viejo adagio de la vida social que habla de la necesidad de “causar buena impresión desde el primer momento.

En virtud de lo anterior, la Gestalt, demanda una organización del campo perceptual de aprendizaje dentro de una totalidad no inserta sino fluyente en sus elementos (cuya dinámica se encuentra en la del todo). En forma coherente el planteamiento de las actividades, procesos en los que se involucra el sujeto gestáltico que se (auto)organiza en el aprendizaje, demanda del docente, además, el debido cuidado en torno a la experiencia primera, en la que el sujeto se interrelaciona con el objeto de la percepción, su adecuada presentación remite a la necesaria consideración de que el puro objeto no resulta, pese a ser inmediatamente organizable, sino que dicho objeto ha de representar para el sujeto una “buena forma”, esto es, que el momento de planeamiento resulta fundamental, así como la flexibilidad del proceso de aprendizaje en marcha. El objeto no puede por sí mismo indicar nada si no es para el sujeto que ha de otorgarle sentido, forma, y es en este momento en donde la Gestaltungskraft (la fuerza creativa) requiere del docente la percepción de estructura, en la que el cierre se haya comprendido, y el inicio ha de contener la buena forma en consecuencia, para que el sujeto gestáltico que aprende progrese en el uso de sus fuerzas creativas, y proceda a la producción de lo no manifiesto (lo contrario sería reducir la función de estructura a suma de elementos atomísticos) en lugar de la mera reproducción.

De acuerdo con Wertheimer es deseable el desarrollo de métodos para la descripción y medida de cualidades totales. La diferenciación entre enfoque y reenfoque es fundamental para comprender los contornos del pensamiento productivo, tal como apunta Wolman (1975, p. 520):

En el enfoque, se produce un cambio o transición desde un punto de vista subjetivo o personal a un punto de vista más independiente con una aprehensión objetiva de la situación total y de los requisitos estructurales y funcionales. Esta operación da lugar al dominio de los requisitos estructurales y funcionales objetivos de la situación y a una neutralización de la interferencia de las propias creencias y experiencias personales. El reenfoque consiste en la obtención de una perspectiva nueva y penetrante. Proporciona un nuevo ángulo desde el cual considerar la cuestión de los logros e intereses múltiples de las personas creativas, y la capacidad de los científicos e ingenieros, adiestrados en determinados terrenos para funcionar, tras un breve intervalo de orientación, en otros terrenos con altos niveles de productividad.

La función psicopedagógica a nivel de planeamiento, asesoramiento e intervención es fundamental dentro de este campo perceptivo de aprendizaje gestáltico, siendo que los vectores en razón de los cuales el sujeto se encuentra topológicamente dirigido al alcance de determinado objetivo, por ejemplo, u objetivo de aprendizaje, entran en relación con elementos que a su vez resultan determinantes en el contenido específico de las valencias en que se juega el carácter significativo del campo perceptual de aprendizaje (Ver Figura 1). Dichos elementos integran necesidades, que en el caso del sujeto que aprende son particulares, puesto que si bien la Gestalt postula el carácter a priori de las reglas de organización perceptual, admite su especificidad interpretativa y personalísima (ya Köhler en sus estudios sobre la naturaleza de las asociaciones, mostraba la falsedad de principio asociacionista de equipotencialidad, según el cual todas las asociaciones se aprenden con la misma facilidad); de ahí que tales necesidades puedan estar vinculadas a estilos, ritmos y/o necesidades especiales de aprendizaje, y cuyo abordaje psicopedagógico resulta crucial de acuerdo con el principio de atención a la diversidad, al ingresar dentro del campo valorativo no solamente las áreas por mejorar (componentes extraídos del proceso diagnóstico), sino además, en equilibrio con las potencialidades que caracterizan al sujeto, esto es, sus habilidades perceptuales, herramientas (meta)cognitivas, recursos psicofísicos, afectivos y las estrategias que utiliza para producir soluciones (no simplemente a resolver tareas o problemas en forma eficiente) que le permitan hic et nunc, alcanzar los objetivos propuestos dentro del espacio vital de aprendizaje, habida cuenta de posibles barreras que se fraguan dentro del ambiente perceptual y psicológico y que se expresan como valencias positivas y negativas que estarían siendo provechosas o perniciosas para la organización del aprendizaje. Ello es fundamental para comprender cómo mediar procesos de aprendizaje en forma efectiva dentro del espacio-vital perceptual de aprendizaje que es el aula (una de las derivas contemporáneas de influencia gestáltica es el denominado enfoque ecológico), en términos de la gestalt, y desde luego para comprender la necesaria coordinación de los elementos que componen la dinámica de un sistema-forma con mayor capacidad de absorción, como habría de serlo en su expresión a nivel institucional, esto es a los elementos involucrados directamente en el proceso de aprendizaje (docentes-discentes), y otros cuyo involucramiento es más remoto (autoridades institucionales) y/o peculiar: ámbito familiar y comunidad; además las necesidades que presentan los sujetos que integran tales ámbitos, la clarificación de las fortalezas y elementos por mejorar, a nivel curricular, de infraestructura, clima organizacional que envuelve a su vez el conjunto de espacios perceptuales y de aprendizaje en un momento dado dentro de los contornos físicos de determinada institución al interior del subsistema educativo, que a su vez se plantea fines formativos y comprende una serie de áreas fuertes, necesidades, limitaciones, barreras que remiten al propio carácter de la formación económico social a la que sustenta y reproduce como aparato ideológico.

Uno de los aspectos polémicos que remiten no sólo al sujeto percipiente sino al subsistema educativo, siendo clara su función en el mantenimiento del statu quo, y que la Gestalt recupera con gran fuerza crítica es el problema del traído y llevado “conocimiento previo” o la “experiencia previa” que no necesariamente podría entenderse como experiencia, puesto que ésta última tendería a la reestructuración, como sabía Vigotsky, apertrechado de la dialéctica hegeliana y marxista, y no a la mera estructuración típica. La polémica que carga el concepto de Einsicht se encuentra imbricada en su tendencia homologadora del campo perceptual y el de aprendizaje no asimilatorio o reproductivo, por lo que no alcanza a explicar la producción del Einsicht; dibuja ciertamente sus contornos, pero el enfoque idealista siempre es apriorístico, y su sujeto prehegeliano carece de historia, por ello la insistencia hic et nunc de la percepción y del aprendizaje. No obstante el momento de verdad del planteamiento gestáltico es el que genera este conflicto en que se resuelve su propia contradicción:

…La Gestalt no proporciona una explicación sobre la influencia de la naturaleza pasada en la comprensión súbita de un problema. De hecho, el efecto de la experiencia previa más estudiado por los gestaltistas, la fijeza funcional, está relacionado más bien con la influencia negativa de esa experiencia, que, según sus investigaciones, en ciertas circunstancias vendría a dificultar la reestructuración del problema en lugar de facilitarla […]cuando una tarea o problema tenga varias estructuras posibles y alguna de ellas resulte más inmediata o fácil de percibir para el sujeto, la reestructuración resultará más difícil. Igualmente cuando en la solución de una tarea entren en juego intereses o motivos personales, el cambio a una estructura distinta de la situación se verá obstaculizado (Wertheimer, 1945). En ambos casos la fijeza funcional o resistencia a reestructurar la tarea impedirán su correcta solución y, por tanto, el aprendizaje productivo. (Pozo, 1997, p.175)

Los casos estudiados por Wertheimer, de la historia de la ciencia, Einstein y Galileo, requieren incorporar un lapso de preparación o incubación, pero ello liga el Einsicht a sus contornos, sin solución de continuidad entre percepción, con todas sus determinaciones psicofísicas y conocimiento, tal es la función del concepto de meta en la gestalt, que vendría a resemantizar el valor de la tarea inconclusa, en su transición justamente al alcance de esa meta. Abstraída la fijeza funcional de la experiencia previa, el concepto de aprendizaje por reestructuración (sin consideración dialéctico-materialista) tiene que retrotraer a los rasgos definitorios del sujeto trascendental kantiano, quien con base en sus categorías a priori organiza lo real y así le produce. Nótese que el concepto de fijeza funcional, al involucrar el uso no meramente teórico de la razón, sino práctico-empírico, no deja de mostrar la aversión kantiana por el tema de lo patológico, esto es, la implicación de las inclinaciones que vendrían a entorpecer, a fraguar ilusiones que pertenecen al sujeto empírico, contra la cientificidad y rigor del sujeto en su uso teórico de la razón crítica. Algo de la mediación tendría que abstraerse para salvar a la inmediatez de sí misma, y en ello la Gestalt apunta bien, de ahí que sea éste, su momento emancipatorio, aunque debe entenderse dentro de la lógica del sujeto trascendental, por ello no puede resolver, cuando la resolución del problema es de carácter extralógico. El modelo local, formalmente constructivista, habría de incorporar dicho momento emancipatorio, posicionando la función material de la educación allende la realidad que cumple y clausura parodia del modelo conductista, cuya corporeización se efectualiza en la estructuración académica institucional del docente transmisor de “cultura” no ceja en sus esfuerzos de realizar, al proyectarse desde ellos, currículum oculto: el Einsicht de la dominación.

Referencias
Abbagnano, Niccola. (1984). Historia de la pedagogía. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Koffka, Kurt. (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. Recuperado el 12 de noviembre del 2007 de http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/koffka.htm

Köhler, Wolfgang. (1925). La mentalidad de los simios. Recuperado el 12 de noviembre del 2007 de http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kohler.htm.

Pozo, Juan. (1997). Teorías cognitivas del aprendizaje. Madrid: Morata. Sarramona, José. (2000). Teoría de la Educación. Reflexión y normativa pedagógica. Barcelona: Ariel.

Wertheimer, Max. (1924). Gestalt theory. Recuperado el 12 de noviembre del 2007 de http://www.gestalttheory.net/archive/wert1.html#fn1.

Wolman, Benjamín. (1975). Teorías y sistemas contemporáneos de psicología. Barcelona: Martínez Roca.

Autor: Wolfgang Köhler (1959)
First published in: American Psychologist, 14, 727-734.
Fonte: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Kohler/today.htm

In 1949, the late Herbert Langfeld gave a lecture in Europe in which he described what appeared to him to be the major trends in American psychology. He also mentioned Gestalt psychology; but he added that the main observations, questions, and principles characteristic of this school had become part of every American psychologist’s mental equipment. I was not so optimistic. And, in fact, the very next year attempts were made to explain the molar units in perception by processes which gradually connect neural elements. Soon afterwards, a theory of conditioning was developed, according to which more and more components of a stimulus object are gradually conditioned, and the course of the whole process can be explained in this fashion. Such theories may prove to be very useful, but one can hardly say that, at the time, their authors were greatly influenced by Gestalt psychology. It is for this and similar reasons that a new discussion of old questions seems to me indicated.

I should like to begin with a few remarks about the history of Gestalt psychology — because not all chapters of this history are generally known. In the eighties of the past century, psychologists in Europe were greatly disturbed by von Ehrenfels’ claim that thousands of percepts have characteristics which cannot be derived from the characteristics of their ultimate components, the so-called sensations. Chords and melodies in hearing, the shape characteristics of visual objects, the roughness or the smoothness of tactual impressions, and so forth were used as examples. All these “Gestalt qualities” have one thing in common. When the physical stimuli in question are considerably changed, while their relations are kept constant, the Gestalt qualities remain about the same. But, At the time, it was generally assumed that the sensations involved are individually determined by their individual stimuli and must therefore change when these are greatly changed. How, then, could any characteristics of the perceptual situation remain constant under these conditions? Where did the Gestalt qualities come from? Ehrenfels’ qualities are not fancy ingredients of this or that particular situation which we might safely ignore. Both positive and negative esthetic characteristics of the world around us, not only of ornaments, paintings, sculptures, tunes, and so forth, but also of trees, landscapes, houses, cars — and other persons — belong to this class. That relations between the sexes largely depend on specimens of the same class need hardly be emphasized. It is, therefore, not safe to deal with problems of psychology as though there were no such qualities. And yet, beginning with Ehrenfels himself, psychologists have not been able to explain their nature.

This holds also for the men who were later called Gestalt psychologists, including the present speaker. Wertheimer’s ideas and investigations developed in a different direction. His thinking was also more radical than that of Ehrenfels. He did not ask: How are Gestalt qualities possible when, basically, the perceptual scene consists of separate elements? Rather, he objected to this premise, the thesis that the psychologist’s thinking must begin with a consideration of such elements. From a subjective. point of view, he felt, it may be tempting to assume that all perceptual situations consist of independent, very small components. For, on this assumption, we obtain a maximally clear picture of what lies behind the observed facts. But, how do we know that a subjective clarity of this kind agrees with the nature of what we have before us? Perhaps we pay for the subjective clearness of the customary picture by ignoring all processes, all functional interrelations, which may have operated before there is a perceptual scene and which thus influence the characteristics of this scene. Are we allowed to impose on perception an extreme simplicity which, objectively, it may not possess?

Wertheimer, we remember, began to reason in this fashion when experimenting not with percep- [p. 728] tual situations which were stationary, and therefore comparatively silent, but with visual objects in motion when corresponding stimuli did not move. Such “apparent movements,” we would now say, occur when several visual objects appear or disappear in certain temporal relations. Again in our present language, under these circumstances an interaction takes place which, for instance, makes a second object appear too near, or coincident with, a first object which is just disappearing, so that only when the first object, and therefore the interaction, really fades, the second object can move toward its normal position. If this is interaction, it does not, as such, occur on the perceptual scene. On this scene, we merely observe a movement. That movements of this kind do not correspond to real movements of the stimulus objects and must therefore be brought about by the sequence of the two objects, we can discover only by examining the physical situation. It follows that, if the seen movement is the perceptual result of an interaction, this interaction itself takes place outside the perceptual field. Thus, the apparent movement confirmed Wertheimer’s more general suspicion: we cannot assume that the perceptual scene is an aggregate of unrelated elements because underlying processes are already functionally interrelated when that scene emerges, and now exhibits corresponding effects.

Wertheimer did not offer a more specific physiological explanation. At the time, this would have been impossible. He next turned to the problem of whether the characteristics of stationary perceptual fields are also influenced by interactions. I need not repeat how he investigated the formation of molar perceptual units, and more particularly of groups of such objects. Patterns which he used for this purpose are now reproduced in many textbooks. They clearly demonstrate that it is relations among visual objects which decide what objects become group members, and what others do not, and where, therefore, one group separates itself from another. This fact strongly suggests that perceptual groups are established by interactions; and, since a naive observer is merely aware of the result, the perceived groups, but not of their dependence upon particular relations, such interactions would again occur among the underlying processes rather than within the perceptual field.

Let me add a further remark about this early stage of the development. Surely, in those years, Gestalt psychologists were not satisfied with a quiet consideration of available facts. It seems that no major new trend in a science ever is. We were excited by what we found, and even more by the prospect of finding further revealing facts. Moreover, it was not only the stimulating newness of our enterprise which inspired us. There was also a great wave of relief — as though we were escaping, from a prison. The prison was psychology as taught at the universities when we still were students. At the time, we had been shocked by the thesis that all psychological facts (not only those in perception) consist of unrelated inert atoms and that almost the only factors which combine these atoms and thus introduce action are associations formed under the influence of mere contiguity. What had disturbed us was the utter senselessness of this picture, and the implication that human life, apparently so colorful and so intensely dynamic, is actually a frightful bore. This was not true of our new picture, and we felt that further discoveries were bound to destroy, what was left of the old picture.

Soon further investigations, not all of them done by Gestalt psychologists, reinforced the new trend. Rubin called attention to the difference between figure and ground. David Katz found ample evidence for the role of Gestalt factors in the field of touch as well as in color vision, and so forth. Why so much interest just in perception? Simply because in no other part of psychology are facts so readily accessible to observation. It was the hope of everybody that, once some major functional principles had been revealed in this part of psychology, similar principles would prove to be relevant to other parts, such as memory, learning, thinking, and motivation. In fact, Wertheimer and I undertook our early studies of intellectual processes precisely from this point of view; somewhat later, Kurt Lewin began his investigations of motivation which, in part , followed the same line; and we also applied the concept of Gestaltung or ,organization to memory, to learning, and to recall. With developments in America, Wertheimer’s further analysis of thinking, Asch’s and Heider’s investigations in social psychology, our work on figural aftereffects, and eventually on currents Of the brain, we are probably all familiar.

In the meantime, unexpected support had come from natural science. To mention only one Point: Parts of molar perceptual units often have charac- [p. 729] teristics which they do not exhibit when separated from those units. Within a larger visual entity, a part may, for instance, be a corner of this entity, another part its contour or boundary, and so on. It now seems obvious; but nobody in psychology had seen it before: the same happens in any physical system that is pervaded by interactions. These interactions affect the parts of the system until, eventually, in a steady state, the characteristics of all parts are such that remaining interactions balance one another. Hence, if processes in the central nervous system follow the same rule, the dependence of local perceptual facts on conditions in larger entities could no longer be regarded as puzzling. Comparisons of this kind greatly encouraged the Gestalt psychologists.

In America, it may seem surprising that enthusiastic people such as the Gestalt psychologists were intensely interested in physics. Physics is generally assumed to be a particularly sober discipline. And yet, this happened to us most naturally. To be sure, our reasoning in physics involved no chan-es in the laws of physics and no new assumptions in this field. Nevertheless, when we compared our psychological findings with the behavior of certain physical systems, some parts of natural science began to look different. When reading the formulae of the physicist, one may emphasize this or that aspect of their content. The particular aspect of the formulae in which the Gestalt psychologists became interested had, for decades., been given little attention. No mistake had ever been made in applications of the formulae, because what now fascinated us had all the time been present in their mathematical form. Hence, all calculations in physics had come out right. But it does make a difference whether you make explicit what a formula implies or merely use it as a reliable tool. We had, therefore, good reasons for being, surprised by what we found; and we naturally felt elated when the new reading of the formulae told us that organization is as obvious in some parts of physics as it is in psychology.

Incidentally, others were no less interested in this “new reading” than we were. These other people were eminent physicists. Max Planck once told me that he expected our approach to clarify a difficult issue which had just arisen in quantum physics if not the concept of the quantum itself. Several Years later. Max Born, the great physicist who gave quantum mechanics its present form, made almost the same statement in one of his papers. And, only a few weeks ago, I read a paper in which Bridgman of Harvard interprets Heisenberg’s famous principle in such terms that I am tempted to call him, Bridgman, a Gestalt physicist.

We will now return to psychology. More particularly, we will inspect the situation in which American psychology finds itself today. The spirit which we find here differs considerably from the one which characterized young Gestalt psychology. Let me try to formulate what members of this audience may have been thinking while I described that European enterprise. “Enthusiasm?” they probably thought. “Feelings of relief when certain assumptions were found less dreary than those of earlier psychologists in Europe? But this is an admission that emotional factors and extrascientific values played a part in Gestalt psychology. We know about the often pernicious effects of the emotions in ordinary life. How, then, could emotions be permitted to influence scientific judgments and thus to disturb the objectivity of research? As we see it, the true spirit of science is a critical spirit. Our main obligation as scientists is that of avoiding mistakes. Hence our emphasis on strict method in experimentation and on equally strict procedures in the evaluation of results. The Gestalt psychologists seem to have been guilty of wishful thinking. Under the circumstances, were not some of their findings unreliable and some of their concepts vague?”

I will at once admit two facts. Almost from its beginning, American psychology has given more attention to questions of method and strict proof than Gestalt psychology did in those years. In this respect, American psychology was clearly superior. Secondly, sometimes the Gestalt psychologists did make mistakes. Not in all cases was the reliability of their findings up to American standards, and some concepts which they used were not immediately quite clear. I , myself once used a certain concept in a somewhat misleading fashion. I had better explain this.

What is insight? In its strict sense, the term refers to the fact that, when we are aware of a relation, of any relation, this relation is not experienced as a fact by itself, but rather as something that follows from the characteristics of the objects under consideration. Now, when primates try to solve a problem, their behavior often shows that they are aware of a certain important relation. But when they now make use of this “insight,” and thus [p. 730] solve their problem, should this achievement be called a solution by insight? No — it is by no means clear that it was also insight which made that particular relation emerge. In a given situation, we or a monkey may become aware of a great many relations. If, at a certain moment, we or a monkey attend to the right one, this may happen for several reasons, some entirely unrelated to insight. Consequently, it is misleading to call the whole process a “solution by insight.”

This will be particularly obvious when the solution of the problem is arbitrarily chosen by the experimenter. Take Harlow’s excellent experiments in which primates are expected to choose the odd item in a group of objects. “Oddity” is a particular relational fact. Once a monkey attends to it, he will perceive it with insight. But why should he do so during his first trials? His first choices will be determined by one factor or another, until he happens to attend, once or repeatedly, to the oddity relation just when he chooses (or does not choose) the right object. Gradually, he will now attend to this particular relation in all trials; and he may do so even when entirely new objects are shown. Surely, such a process should not simply be called “learning by insight.” If Harlow were to say that, under the circumstances, it is learning of one kind or another which gives the right relation and corresponding insight their chance to operate, I should at once agree. What, I believe, the monkeys do not learn is insight into which object in a given group is the odd one; but they must learn to pay attention to the oddity factor in the first place. I hope that this will clarify matters. They have not always been so clear to me.

When the solution of a problem is not arbitrarily chosen by the experimenter, but more directly related to the nature of the given situation, insight may play a more important role. But, even under these circumstances, it is not insight alone which brings about the solution. The mere fact that solutions often emerge to the subjects’ own surprise is clear proof that it cannot be insight alone which is responsible for their origin.

But I intended to discuss some trends in American psychology. May I confess that I do not fully approve of all these trends?

First, I doubt whether it is advisable to regard caution and a critical spirit as the virtues of a scientist, as though little else counted. They are necessary in research, just as the brakes in our cars must be kept in order and their windshields clean. But it is not because of the brakes or of the windshields that we drive. Similarly, caution and a critical spirit are like tools. They ought to be kept ready during a scientific enterprise; however, the main business of a science is gaining more and more new knowledge. I wonder why great men in physics do not call caution and a critical spirit the most important characteristics of their behavior. They seem to regard the testing of brakes and the cleaning of windshields as mere precautions, but to look forward to the next trip as the business for which they have cars. Why is it only in psychology that we hear the slightly discouraging, story of mere caution over and over again? Why are just psychologists so inclined to greet the announcement of a new fact (or a new working hypothesis) almost with scorn? This is caution that has gone sour and has almost become negativism — which, of course, is no less an emotional attitude than is enthusiasm. The enthusiasm of the early Gestalt psychologists was a virtue, because it led to new observations. But virtues, it has been said, tend to breed little accompanying vices. In their enthusiasm, the Gestalt psychologists were not always sufficiently careful.

In American psychology, it is rightly regarded as a virtue if a man feels great respect for method and for caution. But, if this virtue becomes too strong, it may bring forth a spirit of skepticism and thus prevent new work. Too many young psychologists, it seems to me, either work only against something done by others or merely vary slightly what others have done before; in other words, preoccupation with method may tend to limit the range of our research. We are, of course, after clear evidence. But not in all parts of psychology can evidence immediately be clear. In some, we cannot yet use our most exact methods. Where this happens, we hesitate to proceed. Experimentalists in particular tend to avoid work on new materials resistant to approved methods and to the immediate application of perfectly clear concepts. But concepts in a new field can only be clarified by work in this field. Should we limit our studies to areas already familiar from previous research? Obviously, would mean a kind of conservatism in psychology. When I was his student, Max Planck repeated this warning over and over again in his lectures. [p. 731]

Our wish to use only perfect methods and clear concepts has led to Methodological Behaviorism. Human experience in the phenomenological sense cannot yet be treated with our most reliable methods; and, when dealing with it, we may be forced to form new concepts which, at first, will often be a bit vague. Most experimentalists, therefore, refrain from observing, or even from referring to, the phenomenal scene. And yet, this is the scene on which, so far as the actors are concerned, the drama of ordinary human living is being played all the time. If we never study this scene, but insist on methods and concepts developed in research “from the outside,” our results are likely to look strange to those who intensely live “‘inside.”

To be sure, in many respects, the graphs and tables obtained “from the outside” constitute a most satisfactory material; and, in animal psychology, we have no other material. But this material as such contains no direct evidence as to the processes by which it is brought about. In this respect it is a slightly defective, I am tempted to say, a meager, material. For it owes its particular clearness to the fact that the data from which the graphs and tables are derived are severely selected data. When subjects are told to say no more than “louder,” “’softer,” and perhaps “equal” in certain experiments, or when we merely count how many items they recall in others, then we can surely apply it precise statistical techniques to what they do. But, as a less attractive consequence, we never hear under these circumstances how they do the comparing in the first case and what happens when they try to recall in the second case.

Are such questions now to be ignored? After all, not all phenomenal experiences are entirely vague; this Scheerer has rightly emphasized. And, if many are not yet accessible to quantitative procedures, what of it? One of the most fascinating disciplines, developmental physiology, the science investigating the growth of an organism from one cell, seldom uses quantitative techniques. And yet, nobody can deny that its merely qualitative description of morphogenesis has extraordinary scientific value. In new fields, not only quantitative data are relevant. As to the initial vagueness of Concepts in a new field, I should like to add an historical remark. When the concept of energy was first introduced in physics, it was far from king a clear concept. For decades, its meaning could not be sharply distinguished from that of the term “force.” And what did the physicists do? They worked and worked on it, until at last it did become perfectly clear. There is no other way of dealing with new, and therefore not yet perfect, concepts. Hence, if we refuse to study the phenomenal scene, because, here, few concepts are so far entirely clear, we thereby decide that this scene will never be investigated — at least not by us, the psychologists.

Now, I had better return to Gestalt psychology. Let me try to show you how Gestalt psychology tends to work today by discussing, a more specific issue, an issue on which scores of American psychologists have worked for years. We shall thus be enabled to compare the way in which they approach this issue with the Gestalt psychologists’ approach.

The issue in question refers to the concepts of conditioning and motivation. One school seems to regard conditioning as almost the process with which the psychologist has to deal. In a famous book with the general title Principles of Behavior, the late Clark Hull, then the most influential member of the school, actually dealt with little else — although he often used other terms. He felt that even such facts as thinking, insight, intentions, striving, and value would eventually be explained by a consistent investigation of the various forms of conditioning. We are all familiar with the basic concepts of his theory. Hence I will say only a few words about it. When conditions in an animal’s tissue deviate from an optimal level, a state of need is said to exist in this tissue. Such needs produce, or simply are, drives — which means that they tend to cause actions in the nervous system, some more or less prescribed by inherited neural connections, others of a more random nature. Drives are also called motivations. None of these terms is to be understood in a phenomenological sense. They always refer to assumed states of the tissue. The main point is that, for biological reasons, states of need must, if possible, be reduced and that this may be achieved by certain responses of the organism to the given situation. In case first responses are of a random character, learning or conditioning will often select such responses as do reduce the needs in question. In a simple formulation, the well-known rule which governs such developments is as follows: when a response has repeatedly occurred in temporal contiguity with the neural effects of a certain stimulus, then this stimu- [p. 732] lus will tend to evoke the same response in the future — provided the response has caused a reduction of the need. I will not define such further concepts as habit strength, reaction potential, afferent stimulus interaction, reactive inhibition, and so forth, because they will play no role in my discussion.

But one term seems to me particularly important. Many recent, and important, investigations are concerned with so-called “learned drives,” an expression which has, of course, this meaning: if a neutral stimulus is repeatedly followed by conditions which cause a primary state of drive such as pain, and the corresponding fear, then the fear with its usual effects on behavior will gradually become connected with that neutral stimulus, so that the stimulus alone now evokes the fear and its overt consequences. Certain drives are therefore said to be “learnable” in the sense that they can be attached to facts which, as such, are not related to the drive and hence would originally not evoke corresponding responses.

Some experiments in the field of conditioning in general are most interesting. I will only discuss the concepts used in the interpretation of this work and the conclusions which it is said to justify.

To begin with these conclusions: They refer to certain human experiences which, if the conclusions were justified, would have to be regarded as strange delusions. I mean our cognitive experiences. Suppose somebody discovers by accident that, every time he subtracts the square of a given integer from the square of the next integer in the series, the result is an odd number. A more learned friend now explains to him why this is a necessary rule, undoubtedly valid beyond any tests ever done by a person. The explanation refers to simple relations and to relations among relations — all readily understandable — and the final outcome is convincing. Now, is the understanding of the relations involved to be explained in terms of conditioning? Nothing in conditioning seems to give us access to the psychological fact which I just called understanding; and, since an understanding of relations is essential to, all cognitive achievements, the same applies to the whole field.

Explanation of our intellectual life in terms of conditioning would simply mean: its reduction to the operations of an often most practical, but intrinsically blind, connection of mere facts. Promises that such an explanation will nevertheless be achieved cause in the present speaker a mild, incredulous horror. It is not the business of science to destroy evidence. Behaviorists would perhaps answer that arguments which refer to human thinking as an experience are irrelevant, because science is only concerned with facts observable from the outside, and therefore objective. This answer would hardly be acceptable. The Behaviorist’s own objective observations are invariably observation of facts in his perceptual field. No other form of objective observation has ever been discovered. Consequently, the Behaviorist cannot, without giving more particular reasons, reject reference to other individual experiences merely because they are such experiences.

Thus we are justified in considering a further example of human experience. A need or drive, we are sometimes told, is a motivation. I do not entirely agree with this statement for the following reasons. A need or drive, we remember, is supposed to be a particular state in the tissue. There is no indication in Hull’s writings that such a state “points beyond itself” toward any objects — although it may, of course, cause movements, or actions of glands. Now it is true that the same holds for certain needs as human experiences; because, when a need is felt, it does not always point toward an object, attainment of which would satisfy the need. At the time, no such object may be in sight: in fact, no such object may yet be known. But when the proper object appears, or becomes known. then the situation changes. For, now the subject feels attracted or (in certain instances) repelled by this object. In other words, an object may have characteristics which establish a dynamic relation between the subject and that object. According to common experience, it is this dynamic relation which makes the subject move toward, or away from, the object. We ought to use different terms for a mere need per se and the situation in which a subject is attracted or repelled by an object. Otherwise, the dynamic aspect of the latter situation might easily be ignored. I suggest that we reserve the term “motivation” for this dynamic situation. Here we are, of course, on familiar ground. Motivation as just described was Kurt Lewin’s main concern in psychology. He clearly recognized the part which certain characteristics of an object play in establishing the dynamic relation between this object and the subject. He called such charac- [p. 733] teristics of objects Aufforderungscharaktere, a term which then became “valences” in English.

So far as I know, there are no valences in objects no attractions and no repulsions between objects and subjects in the Behaviorist’s vocabulary. I am afraid that, in this fashion, he misses a point no only important in human experience but also relevant to what he regards as true science.

How would a Gestalt psychologist handle motivation in the present sense? He would be-in with the following psychological facts. I do not know up to what point Lewin would have accepted what I am now going to say. My facts are these: (a) In human experience, motivation is a dynamic vector, that is, a fact which has a direction and tends to cause a displacement in this direction. (b) Unless there are obstacles in the way, this direction coincides with an imaginary straight line drawn from the object to the subject. (c) The ,direction of the experienced vector is either that toward the object or away from it. In the first case, the vector tends to reduce the distance in question; 1 the second, to increase it. (d) The strength of both the need present in the subject and of the valence exhibited by the object can vary. Both in man and in animals it has been observed that, when the strength of the valence is low, this reduction can be compensated for by an increase of the need in the subject; and, conversely, that, when the need is lowered, an increase of the strength of the valence may compensate for this change when considering these simple statements, anybody familiar with the elements of physics will be reminded of the behavior of forces. (a) In physics, forces are dynamic vectors which tend to change distance between one thing (or event) and another. (b) Unless there are obstacles in the way, force operates along a straight line drawn from first object (or event) to the other. (c) The action in which a force operates is either that of attraction or of a repulsion of a reduction or of increase of the given distance. (d) The formula which the intensity of a force between two objects is given contains two terms which refer to the sizes of a decisive property (for instance, an electric charge) in one object and in the other. It is always the product of these two terms on which, to the formula, the intensity of the force depends. Consequently, a reduction of the crucial term on one side can be compensated for by an increase in the term on the other side.

We have just seen that the behavior of vectors motivational situations is the same as the behavior of forces in nature. Gestalt psychologists are, therefore, inclined to interpret motivation in terms of such forces or, rather, of forces which operate be between certain perceptual processes and processes another part of the brain, where a need may be physiologically represented. We have no time to discuss the question how cortical fields or forces would cause overt movements of the organism in the direction of these forces.

Now, not everybody likes the term “force.” Its meaning, it has been said, has anthropomorphic connotations. But, in human psychology, we simply must use terms which — if I may use this expressions — “sound human.” If we refused to do so, we would not do justice to our subject matter which (to a high degree) is human experience. To be sure, in physics, Heinrich Hertz once tried to do without the concept “force.” He actually wrote a treatise on mechanics in which he avoided this term. And what happened? He had to populate the physical world with unobservable masses, introduced only in order to make their hidden presence substitute for the much simpler action of forces. Ever since that time, physicists have happily returned to the old concept “force,” and nobody has ever been harmed by the fact.

The present reasoning leads to a conclusion which distinguishes this reasoning from the treatment of motivation in the Behaviorist’s system. Clark Hull was a great admirer of science; but, to my knowledge, he hardly ever used the concepts characteristic of field physics. The fundamental distinction between physical facts which are scalars (that is, facts which have a magnitude but no direction) and vectors (which have both an intensity and a direction) played no decisive part in his theorizing. His main concepts were obviously meant to be scalars. There is no particular spatial direction in a habit strength, none in a reaction potential, and none even in what he called a drive state. Hence, the core of modern physics as developed by Faraday and Maxwell had no influence on his system. For this reason, and also because he refused to consider motivation as an experienced vector, he could not discover that the operations of motivation appear to be isomorphic with those of fields or forces in the brain.

But, if motivation is to be interpreted in this fashion, certain assumptions often made by Behav-[p. 734] iorists may no longer be acceptable. Take the concept of learned drives. As I understand this term, it means that learning can attach a drive state to a great variety of stimuli which, as such, are neutral facts. Now, so long as a drive is not regarded as a vector, this seems indeed quite possible. But, if the drive in Hull’s sense is replaced by a motivational force which operates between a subject and some perceptual fact, no arbitrary connections of this kind can be established. For, now motivation becomes the experienced counterpart of a force in the brain, and this force depends entirely upon the relation between conditions in the subject and the characteristics of the perceived object. There can be no such force if the object is, and remains, a neutral object. Forces only operate between objects which have the right properties. Any example of a force in nature illustrates this fact.

How, then, are the observations to be explained which are now interpreted as a learning of drives? After all, some learning must be involved when an originally neutral object gradually begins to attract or repel a subject. >From the present point of view, only one explanation is possible. Supposing that the subject’s need does not vary, learning must change the characteristics of the object, and thus transform it into an adequate motivation object. One instance would be what Tolman calls a sign Gestalt; in other words, the neutral object would become the signal for the appearance of something else which is a proper motivational object. This expected object would now be the object of the motivation. Or also, when a neutral object is often accompanied by facts which are natural motivational objects, the characteristics of such facts may gradually “creep into” the very appearance of the formerly neutral object and thus make it a proper motivational object. Years ago, comparative psychologists in England stressed the importance of such processes, to which they gave the name “assimilation.” They regarded assimilation as a particularly effective form of an association. And is it not true that, as a consequence of learning, a coffin looks forbidding or sinister? I also know somebody to whom a bottle covered with dust and just brought up from the cellar looks most attractive.

As a further and particularly simple possibility, the subject might just learn more about the characteristics of the given object itself than he knew in the beginning; and the characteristics revealed by this learning might be such that now the same object fits a need. It seems to me that all these abilities ought to be considered before we accept the thesis that motivations in the present sense can be attached to actually neutral objects. Incidentally, similar changes of objects may also be responsible for the developments which Gordon Allport once regarded as evidence of “functional autonomy.”

You will ask me whether my suggestions lead to any consequences in actual research. Most surely, they do. But, since I have lived so long in America, and have therefore gradually become a most cautious scientist, I am now preparing myself for the study of motivation by investigating, first of all, the action of dynamic vectors in simpler fields, such as cognition and perception. It is a most interesting occupation to compare motivational action with dynamic events in those other parts of psychology. When you do so, everything looks different, not only in perception but also in certain forms of learning. Specific work? There is, and will be more of it than I alone can possibly manage. Consequently, I need help. And where do I expect to find this help? I will tell you where.

The Behaviorist’s premises, we remember, lead to certain expectations and experiments. What I have just said invites us to proceed in another direction. I suggest that, in this situation, we forget about schools. The Behaviorist is convinced that his functional concepts are those which we all ought to use. The Gestalt psychologist, who deals with a greater variety of both phenomenal and physical concepts, expects more from work based on such premises. Both parties feel that their procedures are scientifically sound. Why should we fight? Many experiments done by Behaviorists seem to me to be very good experiments. May I now ask the Behaviorists to regard the use of some phenomenal facts, and also of field physics, as perfectly permissible? If we were to agree on these points, we could, I am sure, do excellent work together. It would be an extraordinary experience — and good for psychology.

Autor: Kurt Koffka (1935)
Origem: Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935) publ. Lund Humphries, London. Chapter 1 reproduced here.
Fonte: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/koffka.htm

Chapter I. Why Psychology?

An Introductory Question

When I first conceived the plan of writing this book I guessed, though I did not know, how much effort it would cost to carry it out, and what demands it would put on a potential reader. And I doubted, not rhetorically but very honestly and sincerely, whether such labour on the part of the author and the reader was justified. I was not so much troubled by the idea of writing another book on psychology in addition to the many books which have appeared during the last ten years, as by the idea of writing a book on psychology. Writing a book for publication is a social act. Is one justified in demanding co-operation of society for such an enterprise? What good can society, or a small fraction of it, at best derive from it? I tried to give an answer to this question, and when now, after having completed the book, I return to this first chapter, I find that the answer which then gave me sufficient courage to start on my long journey, has stayed with me to the end. I believed I had found a reason why a book on psychology might do some good. Psychology has split up into so many branches and schools, either ignoring or fighting each other, that even an outsider may have the impression – surely strengthened by the publications. “Psychologies of 1925″ and “Psychologies of 1930″ – that the plural “psychologies” should be substituted for the singular.

Psychology has been pampered in the United States, where for many years it has enjoyed great popularity, though it seems to me that its fortunes have somewhat ebbed and may be ebbing more; in England, the land of conservative change, it found for a long time as cold a welcome as any other loud and startling innovation, but has gradually gained ground and is, in my belief, still gaining; in Germany, where experimental psychology was born and had at first a period of rapid expansion, a strong reaction set in soon afterwards which very definitely kept psychology “in its place.”

I confess that today I feel much less animosity towards the active enemies of psychology – or those of them who are serious and honest – than when I was younger.

The comparison of psychology as it is today with other branches of human knowledge has raised the question in my mind what contribution psychology has made through the very extensive and intensive effort of the men and women who devote their life’s work to it.

No student of philosophy need fail to get some inkling of the great and deep problems which have beset the minds of our profoundest thinkers from ancient to modern times; no student of history need remain unaware of the terrific human forces that have been consumed in the making and unmaking of empires and have combined to create the world in which we are living at this moment; no student of physics need pass his final examination without some insight into the increasing rationalisation of our knowledge of nature nor into the inexorable exactness of experimental methods; and no student of mathematics should leave his courses without having learned what generalised thinking is and what beautiful and powerful results it can achieve. But what can we say of the student of psychology? Must he have learned to understand human nature and human actions better at the end of his course? I am not ready to answer this question in the affirmative. But before I had an answer to the question, what it is that a student of psychology should be able to gain from his general course, what it is, more generally expressed, that psychology can contribute to the imperishable possessions of our race, I did not feel justified in writing a general book on the subjects

Facts and Theories

Nobody can reproach psychology with having discovered too few facts. A psychologist who knew all the facts that have been brought to light by experimental methods would indeed know much, very much. And such knowledge is today regarded as an aim in its own right. “Find facts, facts, and again facts; when you are sure of your facts try to build theories. But your facts are more important.” This slogan expresses the creed of a philosophy which is widely accepted today. And indeed it seems very plausible. On the one side are the objective facts, independent of the scientist who investigates them; on the other are Ills hypotheses, his theories, pure products of his mind. Naturally we should attribute more value to the former than to the latter. In psychology such a view can claim a particular justification. For this science consisted of a number of simple and comprehensive theories and few scientifically, established facts before the beginning of the new era. With the advent of experiment more and more facts were discovered which played havoc with the old theories. Only when psychology determined to become a fact-finding science did it begin to become a real science. From the state in which it knew little and fancied a great deal it has progressed to a state where it knows a lot and fancies little – at least consciously and with a purpose, though unawares it contains more fancy than many psychologists are aware of. To evaluate this progress we have to examine what it means to know much. The Latin adage multum non multa distinguishes between two meanings of the word “much.” The one which it discards in favour of the other is purely quantitative. According to the latter a person who knows twenty items knows ten times as much as the person who knows only two items. But in another sense the latter person, if he knows those two items in their intrinsic relation, so that they are no longer two but one with two parts, knows a great deal more than the former, if he knows just twenty items in pure aggregation. Although from the point of multa this person would be superior, he would be inferior from the point of multum.

Now as I look upon the growth of science it seems to me that it began to find itself and thereby entered a new epoch when at the time of the Renaissance it changed from a chase for the multa to a search for the multum. Since that time science has continually ,striven to reduce the number of propositions from which all known facts can be derived. In this enterprise it has been more and more successful, and has by its new method also discovered more and more facts which otherwise would never have become known; it has simultaneously discarded as fancy many a piece of knowledge which was taken as fact, and has changed the systematic status of many other facts. It is a “fact” that heavy bodies fall more quickly than light ones, as anyone can test by dropping a pencil and a sheet of paper. But it is a complex, not a simple fact, whereas the simple fact is that all bodies fall with the same velocity in a ,vacuum. From this scientific fact the everyday fact can be derived but not vice versa. The very concept of fact, therefore, becomes problematical.

One can look at the progress of science as a steady increase in the number of facts known. Then one arrives at a position where much knowledge means knowledge of multa. But a very different aspect of scientific progress is also possible: the increasing simplicity – not of course in the sense that it is more and more easy to learn, but in the sense that to him who has mastered it the system of science becomes a more and more cohesive and unitary whole. Or otherwise expressed, science is not comparable to a catalogue in which all facts are listed according to an arbitrary principle, like the books in a library in the alphabetical order of their authors; science is rational; the facts – and their order are one and the same; facts without order do not exist; therefore if we know one fact thoroughly we know ever so many more facts from the knowledge of this one fact. From this point of view, much knowledge is knowledge of multum, knowledge of the rational system, the interdependence of all facts.

Science and the Sciences

Of course science never succeeds in reaching its goal. At any one moment in its history there is a wide gap between its ideal and its accomplishment. The system is never complete, there are always facts, old and newly discovered, which defy the unity of the system. Apparent as this is within the compass of any individual science, it becomes even more manifest when we consider the variety of different sciences. They have all arisen from one common matrix. The first scientific impulse was not directed towards different special groups of topics but was universal. In our present terminology we can say that philosophy is the mother of all sciences.

Progressive specialisation has marked scientific progress, and our science, psychology, was the last to gain her independence. This separation and specialisation was necessary, but it has of necessity worked against the aim of unification of knowledge. If a number of separately established sciences have developed, then coherent as each one may be in itself, what is their mutual relation? How can a multum arise from that multa? That this task must be accomplished follows from the very function of science. I am the last to see the value of science in its practical applications. The explanation of the shift of spectral lines coming from stars millions of light years distant, is in my eyes a much greater triumph of science than the construction of a new bridge with a record span or the transmission of photographs across the ocean. But for all that I do not believe that science can be legitimately regarded as the game of a relatively small number of people who enjoy it and get their livelihood from it. In some sense science cannot be wholly divorced from conduct.

Science and Conduct

Conduct, of course, is possible without science. Humans carried on in their daily affairs long before the first spark of science had been struck. And today there are millions of people living whose actions are not determined by anything we call science. Science, however, could not but gain an increasing influence on human behaviour. To describe this influence roughly and briefly will throw a new light on science. Exaggerating and schematising the differences, we can say: in the prescientific stage man behaves in a situation as the situation tells him to behave. To primitive man each thing says what it is and what he ought to do with it: a fruit says, “Eat me”; water says, “Drink me”; thunder says, “Fear me,” and woman says, “Love me.”

This world is limited, but, up to a point, manageable, knowledge is direct and quite unscientific, in many cases perfectly true, but in many others hopelessly wrong. And man slowly discovered the errors in his original world. He learned to distrust what things told him, and gradually he forgot the language of birds and stones. Instead he developed a new activity which he called thinking. And this new activity brought him great advantages. He could think out the consequences of events and actions and thereby make himself free of past and present. By thinking he created knowledge in the sense of scientific knowledge, knowledge which was no longer a knowledge of individual things, but of universals. Knowledge thereby becomes more and more indirect, and action, to the extent that it loses its direct guidance by the world of things, more and more intellectualised. Moreover, the process of thinking had destroyed the unity of the primitive world. Thought had developed categories or classes, and each class had its own characteristics, modes of behaviour, or laws. Concrete situations which demand decisions and prompt actions do not, however, fall into only one such class. And so action, if it were to be directed by scientific knowledge, had to be subjected to a complex thought process, and often enough such a process failed to give a clear decision. In other words, whereas the world of primitive man had directly determined his conduct, had told him what was good, what bad, the scientific world proved all too often a failure when it came to answering such questions. Reason seemed to reveal truth, but a truth that would give no guidance to conduct; but the demand for such guidance remained and had to be filled. Thus arose eventually the dualism of science and religion, with its various phases of double-truth theory, bitter enmity, and sentimentalisation of science, one as unsatisfactory as the other.

The Danger of Science

Is it the tragedy of the human race that for every gain it makes it has to pay a price which often seems greater than the gain? Must we pay for science by a disintegration of our life? Must we deny on week-days what we profess on Sundays? As a personal article of faith I believe that there is no such inexorable must. Science, in building rational systems of knowledge, had to select such facts as would most readily submit to such systematisation. This process of selection, in itself of the greatest significance, involves the neglecting or rejecting of a number of facts or aspects. As long as scientists know what they are doing, such procedure is fraught with little danger. But in the triumph over its success science is apt to forget that it has not absorbed all aspects of reality, and to deny the existence of those which it has neglected. Thus, instead of keeping in mind the question which gave rise to all science, “what God is, what we are . . .” it holds up such questions to ridicule, and considers the men and women who persist in asking them as atavistic survivals.

This attitude, whose historical necessity and merit I plainly discern, must be rejected, not because it is inimical to religion, but because it would, if consistently maintained, block the progress of science itself by closing to its advance the gates that lead to the most essential of all questions. In my opinion no gate should be closed to science; by this I do not mean that today’s or yesterday’s science is capable of answering the fundamental questions, as so many radicals, men of the best motives, seem to think. Instead I believe that science, aware of its incompleteness, should gradually attempt to broaden its base, to include more and more of the facts which it found at first necessary to exclude, and thereby become better and better equipped to answer those questions which mankind will not be denied. As long as science misunderstands its task it will always be in danger of losing its position of independence and integrity. The illegal usurper of a throne will always find illegal pretenders. The denunciation of the intellect which has assumed such tremendous proportions in some parts of our world with such far-reaching consequences, seems to me the outcome of the wrong scientific attitude, although for that reason it is no less wrong itself. I shall revert to this theme in a later chapter (Chapter IX), and shall point out only that science if it follows the path which I have briefly indicated will assume a different face. But I hope that such a science will, slowly but surely, help to re-create that original unity which it had to destroy in order to develop.

A science, therefore, gains in value and significance not by the number of individual facts it collects but by the generality and power of its theories, a conclusion which is the very opposite of the statement from which our discussion started. Such a view, how. ever, does not look down upon facts, for theories are theories of facts and can be tested only by facts, they are not idle speculations of what might be, but theoriai, i.e., surveys, intuitions, of what is. Therefore in my presentation of psychology I shall emphasise the theoretical aspect; many facts will be reported, but not as a mere collection, or an exhibition of curious phenomena to be compared to Mme. Tussaud’s waxworks, but as facts in a system – as far as it is humanly possible not a pet system of my own, but the system to which they intrinsically belong, i.e., as rationally understandable facts.

Science As Discipline

Such a procedure would, however, be without value if it neglected another aspect of science, so far omitted from our discussion, viz., the greatest possible exactness in the establishment of facts. By its demand for exactness science frees itself from the personal wishes of the scientist. A theory must be demanded by facts; in its turn it demands facts, and if they fail to conform exactly to it, then the theory is either wrong or incomplete. In this sense science is discipline. We cannot do what we want, but must do what the facts demand. The success of science has tended to make us proud and conceited. But such conceit is out of place. He is the greatest master who is the greatest servant. Again and again we experience in the progress of knowledge how apt we are to halt and stumble, again and again we find how little we can make knowledge, how we must give our thoughts time to grow. Therefore the pursuit of knowledge, instead of making us proud and boastful, should make us modest and humble.

Function of Science

To summarise: the acquisition of true knowledge should help us to reintegrate our world which has fallen to pieces; it should teach us the cogency of objective relations, independent of our wishes and prejudices, and it should indicate to us our true position in our world and give us respect and reverence for the things animate and inanimate around us.

Special Function of Psychology

This is true of all sciences. What special claim can psychology make? To teach us humility, what science can do that better than astronomy and astrophysics which deal with times and distances far beyond the scope of our imagination? And what science can discipline us better than pure mathematics with its demands for absolute proofs? Could we then claim that psychology is particularly fitted for the task of integration, and give this as an answer to the question from which – we started? I think we can, for in psychology we are at the point where the three great provinces of our world intersect, the provinces which we call inanimate nature, life, and mind.

Nature, Life, Mind

Psychology deals with the behaviour of living beings. Therefore, as every biological science, it is faced with the problem of the relation between animate and inanimate nature whether it is aware of and concerned with this problem or not. But to the psychologist, one special aspect of behaviour, in ordinary parlance called the mental, assumes paramount importance. This is not the place to discuss consciousness and mind as such. Later chapters will show the use we make of these concepts. But we will not reject at the outset a distinction which permeates our idiomatic speech as much as our scientific terminology. We all understand what is meant by the proposition that a prize-fighter was knocked out and did not recover consciousness for six minutes. We know that during these fatal six minutes the pugilist did not cease to live, but that he lost one particular aspect of behaviour, Furthermore we know that consciousness in general and each specific conscious function in particular, is closely bound up with processes in our central nervous system. Thus the central nervous system becomes, as it were, the nodal point where mind, life, and inanimate nature converge. We can investigate the chemical constitution of the nervous tissue and will find no component that we have not found in inorganic nature; we can study the function of this tissue and will find that it has all the characteristics of living tissue; and finally there is this relation between the life function of the nervous system and consciousness.
Two Types of Solutions of the Problems Involved in This Relation Rejected.

Anybody who would claim to have found a complete and true solution of our problems would expose himself to the just suspicion of being either an ass or a quack. These problems have occupied the best human minds for thousands of years, and therefore it is more than unlikely that a solution can be found by any, other way than a slow and gradual approach. What I think about the mode of this approach I shall again defer to a later part of the book.

Materialism.

But here I shall reject two types of solutions that have been offered. The first is the solution of crude materialism, which gained great momentum about the middle of the last century and found its most popular expression in a book that around 1900 was a best-seller and is now practically forgotten. I mean Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe. I am not sure that the United States are not even now feeling the last ebbing wave of this flood which reached the shores of the New World long after its crest had passed from the Old. This materialistic solution is astonishingly simple. It says: The whole problem is illusory. There are no three kinds of substance or modes of existence, matter, life, and mind; there is only one, and that is matter, composed of blindly whirling atoms which, because of their great numbers and the long time at their disposal, form all sorts of combinations, and among them those we call animals and human beings. Thinking and feeling, why, they are just movements of atoms. Interfere with the matter of the brain and see what remains of consciousness. Although I have expressed this view very crudely, I believe that I have expressed it adequately, particularly when I add that this view is not only a scientific conviction, but as well, or even more so, a creed and a wish. It is the revolt of a generation that saw a strongly entrenched church hold on to dogmas which science, growing up like a young giant, had crushed – a generation that, by the successful applications of science to technical problems, had become vainglorious and had lost that feeling of awe which should accompany all true knowledge. just as the victorious barbarians, be they vandals or Calvinists, destroyed thoroughly and passionately the creations most dear to their vanquished enemies, so our materialists developed a hatred of those parts of human philosophy that pointed beyond the pale of their narrow conceptions. To be called a philosopher was an insult, and to be a believer was to belong among the untouchables.

Now I bear no grudge against these men, much as I see their narrow-mindedness and their smallness of stature. For I believe that malgré tout they have served a good purpose. They have helped to build up an intelligentsia strong enough to stand out against the unwarranted interference of a reactionary church and pursue their own way, bringing up a new generation which was unhampered by theological restrictions and therefore had no axe to grind.

As to materialism itself, it is not necessary today to refute it. I will add only this: the materialist’s claim that the problems of relationship or interaction between matter, life, and mind were falsely put may turn out to be perfectly valid. The hopeless error which the materialists committed was to make an arbitrary discrimination between these three concepts with regard to their scientific dignity. They accepted one and rejected the two others – their excuse being the intrinsic and extrinsic success of science and the absurdities of the contemporary speculative philosophy – whereas each of them may, as a conception, contain as much of the ultimate truth as the others, quite apart from the stage of development which each of them may have reached at a given time.

Vitalism, Spiritualism.

The other type of solution which I want to reject here does not deny the validity of our problems; rather it attempts to solve them by establishing two or three separate realms of existence, each sharply distinguished from the other by the presence or absence of a specific factor. One can discriminate three such attempts; the first draws the dividing line between life and mind, life and inanimate nature belonging together (Descartes), and mind, a new and divine substance, separating man from the rest of creation. The second, on the other hand, throws life and mind together as directed by a power not found in inorganic nature and therefore essentially different from it (vitalism). The third sticks to the threefold division and looks for special active principles in each of the three realms (Scheler). Of these three, vitalism has gained by far the greatest importance because many thorough and highly ingenious attempts have been made to establish it as a truly scientific theory. The problem of vitalism will therefore occupy us repeatedly in the following pages. Here I only explain why I must reject this whole type of explanation at the outset. The answer is simple enough, but will, without a wider context, appear somewhat unsatisfactory. The vitalistic type of solution is no solution, but a mere renaming of the problem. By renaming it, it emphasises the problem, and is, in that respect, much superior to crude materialism. But by pretending that a new name is a solution, it might do a great deal of harm to science were it widely accepted. Characteristically, however, vitalism, not to mention the two other forms of our type, has never been popular among scientists, particularly not among those nearest concerned, the biologists. It required always a full share of personal courage to profess oneself a vitalist, and therefore let us honour the men who were willing to sacrifice their reputations and their careers in the service of a cause which they considered to be a true one.

Integration of Quantity, Order, and Meaning.

By rejecting these types of solution I have implied the kind of solution our psychology ‘II have to offer. It cannot ignore the mind-body and the life-nature problem, neither can it accept these three realms of being as separated from each other by impassable chasms. It is here that the integrative quality of our psychology will become manifest. Materialism tried to achieve a simple system by using for its interpretation of the whole the contribution of one part. To be truly integrative, we must try to use the contributions of every part for the building of our system. Looking at the sciences of Nature, Life, and Mind, we may extract from each one specific and particularly important concept, viz., from the first: quantity, from the second: order, and from the third: meaning or significance (in German: Sinn). Our psychology, then, must have a place for all of these. Let us discuss them one by one.

QUANTITY AND QUALITY.

Modern scientific psychology was started by quantification. Mental functions were shown to be expressible in purely quantitative terms (Weber’s Law), and ever since then the quantitative interest has done as much harm as good to the further development of our science. On the one side, we find those who want to measure everything, sensations, emotions, intelligence; and on the other, those who deny that true psychological problems are amenable to quantitative treatment; to them, psychology is the domain of quality, excluding quantity. In my opinion this famous antithesis of quantity and quality is not a true antithesis at all. It owes its popularity largely to a regrettable ignorance of the essence of quantity as used in physical science.

Modern science, it is true, begins with quantitative measurement. The present-day physicist devotes the greatest efforts to making his measurements finer and finer; but he will not measure anything and everything, but only such effects as in some way or other contribute to his theory. It is impossible to discuss here all the functions of quantitative measurement in physics. But it is fair to say that a mere collection of numbers is never what the physicist wants. What he is frequently interested in is the distribution of measurable characteristics in a given volume and the changes which such distributions undergo. Both types of facts he describes by means mathematical equations which may contain a few concrete numbers but in which abstract numbers are by far the most important constituents. And the mathematical formula establishes primarily a definite relationship between these abstract numbers. Measurement has then the role to test the validity of the equation for the process which it is meant to describe, i.e., of the relationship established. Such a relationship, however, is no longer quantitative in the simple sense in which any one concrete number is; its quantity is no longer opposed to quality. The misunderstanding arises when one considers only the individual facts with their measured quantities, overlooking the manner of their distribution. But the latter is no less factual than the former, and it indicates a property or quality of the condition or process under discussion. A simple example should clarify this point: In a soap bubble the forces of cohesion between the soap particles pull them as close together as possible. They are held in equilibrium by the air enclosed by the soap membrane, whose pressure would increase if the bubble contracted. The soap, therefore, must remain distributed over the outside boundary of an air volume, and the distribution will be such that it will occupy as little space as possible. Since of all solids the sphere is the one which has the greatest volume for a given surface or the smallest surface for a given volume, the soap will distribute itself on a spherical surface. A statement like this seems to me to be as much qualitative as quantitative; the latter, because it says of each particle that it is here and not somewhere else; the former, because it assigns a definite shape with all its peculiarities to our distribution. Once our attention has been drawn to this point we shall find it difficult in a great many cases to decide whether a statement is quantitative or qualitative. A body moves with constant velocity; truly quantitative, but equally truly qualitative, and the same is true whatever kind of velocity we attribute to the body. Thus when the velocity varies with the sine or cosine of time, the body executes a periodic movement which is qualitatively quite different from a mere translatory movement.

We conclude from these examples: the quantitative, mathematical description of physical science, far from being opposed to quality, is but a particularly accurate way of representing quality. I will, without proof, add that a description may be quantitative without being at the same time the most adequate one. Of the two analytic equations of the circle: x’ + y’ = r’, and r = constant, the second expresses the specific quality Of the circle more directly and hence more adequately than the first.

And we can now draw a lesson for our psychology: it may be perfectly quantitative without losing its character as a qualitative science, and on the other hand, and at the present moment even more important, it may be unblushingly qualitative, knowing that if its qualitative descriptions are correct, it will some time be possible to translate them into quantitative terms.

ORDER.

Let us now turn to “order,” the concept derived from the sciences of life. Can we give a satisfactory definition of this concept? We speak of an orderly arrangement of objects when every object is in a place which is determined by its relation to all others. Thus the arrangement of objects thrown at random into a lumber room is not orderly, while that of our drawing room furniture is. Similarly we speak of an orderly march of events (Head) when each part event occurs at its particular time, in its particular place, and in its particular way, because all the other part events occur at their particular times, in their particular places, and in their particular ways. An orderly march of events is, e.g., the movement of the piano keys when a. practised player plays a tune; a mere sequence of events without any order takes place when the keys are pressed down by a dog running over the keyboard.
“ORDER NOT AN OBJECTIVE CATEGORY.”

Both examples may give rise to a particular objection or may lead to a special theory of order. Let us take up the objection first: “Why,” so an opponent, whom for the sake of convenience we shall call Mr. P, might ask, “do you call the motions of the piano keys in the second case less orderly than the first? I can,” so he continues, “find only one reason, and that is that you like the first better than the second. But this subjective feeling of preference is surely not a. sufficient reason for introducing a distinction allegedly fundamental, and for deriving from this distinction a new scientific category. And the ’same is true of your first example. You happen to like your drawing room, but I can well imagine a person, say a stranger from another planet, who would feet happier in your storeroom. Look at your two cases without any personal bias; then you will find that each object, whether in the drawing room or in the loft, is where it is because, according to mechanical laws, it could not be anywhere else; and just so is each key set into motion according to the stern laws of mechanics whether it be Paderewski’s fingers or a frightened dog which run over the keyboard. But if the ordinary old mechanical laws explain these events, why introduce a Dew concept, order, which confuses the issue by creating an artificial difference between processes which from the point of view of mechanics are essentially similar?”

REFUTATION OF THIS VIEW BY VITALISM.

To this argument another person (we will call him Mr. V) might reply as follows: “My dear fellow, it is very generous of you to disregard your own feelings in the matter, for I know how sensitive you are to badly furnished rooms and how fastidious your taste is with regard to piano music. I shall therefore exclude from my answer the person who is merely supposed to look at or live in one of our two rooms and to listen to the two sequences of tones, just as you said one should. But even so there remains a difference between the two alternatives in each of the two examples, and this difference is decisive, since it refers to the way in which the arrangement and the sequence have been brought about. In my ideal lumber room, each piece has been deposited as it happened to come without regard to any other. And since, as you pointed out yourself, every object in this loft is where it is according to strict mechanical laws, this lumber room is an excellent example of what mechanical forces will do if left to themselves. Compare this with our drawing room. Here, careful planning has preceded the actual moving of the furniture, and each piece receives a place that makes it subservient to the impression of the whole. What does it matter whether a table has at first been pushed too far to the left? Somebody who knows the plan, or who has a direct feeling for the intended effect, will push it back into its proper place: just so a picture hung awry will be straightened out; vases with proper flowers will be well distributed, all of course with the help of mechanical forces, but nothing by these mechanical forces alone. I need not repeat my argument for the two tone sequences, the application is too obvious. But my conclusion is this: in inorganic nature you find nothing but the interplay of blind mechanical forces, but when you come to life you find order, and that means a new agency that directs the workings of inorganic nature, giving aim and direction and thereby order to its blind impulses.” And so Mr. V, in trying to answer Mr. P’s argument, has developed the theory which I referred to at the beginning of this discussion. Remembering our previous discussion of nature and life, one will recognise this theory as a vitalistic one. As a matter of fact the strongest arguments for vitalism have been based on the distinction of orderly processes and blind sequences.

SOLUTION OF THE POSITIVIST – VITALIST DILEMMA.

But let us return to the argument between Messrs. P and V. We have already pledged our psychology to a rejection of vitalism. But can we disregard V’s answer to P’s argument, his defence of the distinction between orderly and orderless arrangements and events? We can not. And that lands us in a quandary: we accept order but we reject a special factor that produces it. For the first we shall be despised by Mr. P and his followers; for the second we shall incur the wrath of Mr. V. Both reactions would be justified if our attitude were truly eclectic; we should then appear to accept two propositions that are incompatible with each other. Therefore the task of our system is clearly defined: we must attempt to reconcile our acceptance and our rejection, we must develop a category of order which is free from vitalism. The concept of order in its modern form is derived from the observation of living beings. But that does not mean that its application is restricted to life. Should it be possible to demonstrate order as a characteristic of natural events and therefore within the domain of physics, then we could accept it in the science of life without introducing a special vital force responsible for the creation of order. And that is exactly the solution which Gestalt theory has offered and tried to elaborate. How that has been done we shall learn in the course of this book. But it is meet to point out the integrative function of the Gestalt solution. Life and nature are brought together not by a denial of one of the most outstanding characteristics of the former but by the proof that this feature belongs to the latter also. And by this kind of integration Gestalt theory contributes to that value of knowledge which we have called reverence for things animate and inanimate. Materialism accomplished the integration by robbing life of its order and thereby making us look down on life as just a curious combination of orderless events; if life is as blind as inorganic nature we must have as little respect for the one as for the other. But if inanimate nature shares with life the aspect of order, then the respect which we feel directly and unreflectively for life will spread over to inanimate nature also.

SIGNIFICANCE, VALUE.

We turn to the last of our categories: significance. What we mean by that is harder to explain than the two previous concepts, and yet here lies one of the deepest roots of Gestalt theory, one which has been least openly brought before the English-speaking public. The reason for this is easy to understand. There is such a thing as an intellectual climate, and the intellectual climate, just as the meteorological, varies from country to country.

And just as the growth of a Plant depends upon the physical climate, so does the growth of an idea depend upon the intellectual climate. There can be no doubt that the intellectual climates of Germany and the United States are widely different. The idealistic tradition of Germany is more than an affair of philosophic schools; it pervades the German mind and appears most openly in the writings and teachings of the representatives of “Geisteswissenschaften,” the moral sciences. The meaning of a personality prominent in history, art, or literature Seems to the German mind more important than the pure historical facts which make up his life and works; the historian is often more interested in the relation of a great man to the plan of the universe than in his relations to the events on the planet. Contrariwise, in America the climate is chiefly practical; the here and now, the immediate present with its needs, holds the centre of the stage, thereby relegating the problems essential to German mentality to the realm of the useless and non-existing. In science this attitude makes for positivism, an overvaluation of mere facts and an undervaluation of very abstract speculations, a high regard for science, accurate and earthbound, and an aversion, sometimes bordering on contempt, for metaphysics that tries to escape from the welter of mere facts into a loftier realm of ideas and ideals.

Therefore when the first attempts were made to introduce Gestalt theory to the American public, that side which would most readily appeal to the type of German mentality which I have tried to sketch was kept in the background, and those aspects which had a direct bearing on science were emphasised. Had the procedure been different, we might have incurred the danger of biasing our readers against our ideas. Living in a different intellectual climate they might have taken this aspect of Gestalt theory for pure mysticism and decided not to have anything to do with the whole theory before they had had a chance of becoming acquainted with its scientific relevance.

At the present moment, however, when Gestalt theory has been taken up as a main topic of discussion, it seems only fair to lift the old restriction and expose all its aspects.

THE DILEMMA OF GERMAN PSYCHOLOGY OUT OF WHICH GESTALT THEORY AROSE.

To do this I shall revert for a moment to the origins of our theory and to the leading ideas of its first founder, Max Wertheimer. What I said about the German intellectual climate does not apply to German experimental psychology. Rather, experimental psychology had carried on a feud with speculative psychologists and philosophers who, not without reason, belittled its achievements and claimed that mind in its truest aspects could never be investigated by scientific methods, i.e., by methods derived from the natural sciences.’ How could, so the argument would run, the laws of sensation and association, which then composed the bulk of scientific psychology, ever explain the creation or enjoyment of a work of art, the discovery of truth, or the development of a great cultural movement like that of the Reformation? The facts to which these opponents of scientific psychology pointed and the facts which the experimental psychologists investigated were indeed so far apart that they seemed to belong to different universes, and no attempt was made by experimental psychology to incorporate the larger facts in their system which was erected on the smaller ones, at least no attempt which did justice to the larger.

Weighing this situation in retrospect we are forced to take an attitude similar to that which we took with regard to the materialism-vitalism controversy. We must admit that the criticism of the philosophers was well founded. Not only did psychology exhaust its efforts in trivial investigations, not only had it become stagnant with regard to the problems it actually worked on, but it insisted on its claim that it held the only key to those problems which the philosophers emphasised. Thus the historian was right when he insisted that no laws of sensation, association or feeling – pleasure and displeasure – could explain a decision like that of Caesar’s to cross the Rubicon with its momentous consequences; that, generally speaking, it would be impossible to incorporate the data of culture within current psychological systems without destroying the true meaning of culture. For, so they would say, culture has not only existence but also meaning or significance, and it has value. A psychology which has no place for the concepts of meaning and value cannot be a complete psychology. At best it can give a sort of understructure, treating of the animal side of man, on which the main building, harbouring his cultural side, must be erected.

On the other hand we cannot disregard the attitude of experimental psychology. Its position was this: for ages psychology had been treated in the way which philosophers and historians claimed to be the only true one, with the result that it had never become a true science. Clever, even profound, things might have been said about men’s higher activities by speculative philosophers and “understanding” historians, but all these dicta bore the stamp of their authors’ personalities; they could not be verified and could not produce a scientific system. Science wants an explanation in terms of cause and effect, but the kind of psychology they opposed gave explanations in terms of motives and values. This, the experimental psychologists averred, was no explanation at all, whereas their work was concerned with true causal theories. If it failed at the moment to include the cultural aspects, it did so only because it was so very young. But a building had to be erected from the bottom and not from the roof. “Psychologie von unten” was their slogan. And there is much to be said for this attitude. If we believe that the sciences, natural and moral, are not merely a collection of independent human activities, some players playing one kind of game, others another, but that they are branches of one all-embracing science, then we must demand that the fundamental explanatory principles be the same in all.

The dilemma of psychology, then, was this: on the one hand it was in possession of explanatory principles in the scientific sense, but these principles did not solve the most important problems of psychology, which therefore remained outside its scope; on the other hand, it dealt with these very problems, but without scientific explanatory principles; to understand took the place of to explain.

WERTHEIMER’S SOLUTION OF THE DILEMMA.

This dilemma must have been prominent in Wertheimer’s mind even when he was a student. Perceiving the merits and faults of both sides, be could not join either, but he had to try to find a solution of this acute crisis. In this solution two principles could not be sacrificed: the principles of science and of meaning. And yet these very two were the origin of the whole difficulty. Scientific progress occurs very often by a re-examination of the fundamental scientific concepts. And to such a re-examination Wertheimer devoted his efforts. And his conclusions can be stated in a few simple words, although they demand a radical change of our habits of thought, a change in our most ultimate philosophy. To explain and to understand are not different forms of dealing with knowledge but fundamentally identical. And that means: a causal connection is not a mere factual sequence to be memorised like the connection between a name and a telephone number, but is intelligible. I shall borrow a simile from Wertheimer (1925) – Suppose we entered Heaven with all our scientific curiosity and found myriads of angels engaged in making music, each playing on his own instrument. Our scientific training would tempt us to discover some law in this celestial din. We might then set out to look for regularities of such a kind that, when .angel A has played do, angel C would play re, then angel M fa, and so on. And if we were persistent enough and had sufficient time at our disposal, we might discover a formula which would make it possible for us to determine the note played by each angel at each moment of time. Many philosophers and scientists would say that then we had explained the music of the heavens, that we had discovered its law. This law, however, would be nothing more than a factual statement; it would be practical, making prediction possible, but it would be without meaning. On the other hand, we might try to hear the music as one great symphony; then if we had mastered one part, we should know a great deal about ‘he whole, even if the part which we had mastered never recurred again in the symphony; and if eventually we knew the whole we should also be able to solve the problem which was resolved by our first attempt. But then it would be of minor significance and derivative. Provided, now, that the angels really played a symphony, our second mode of approach would be the more adequate one; it would not only tell us what each angel did at any particular moment but why he did it. The whole performance would be meaningful and so would be our knowledge of it.

Substitute the universe for Heaven and the occurrences in the universe for the playing of the angels and you have the application to our problem.

The positivistic interpretation of the world and our knowledge of it is but one possibility; there is another one. The question is: Which is really true? Meaning, significance, value, as data of our total experience give us a hint that the latter has at least as good a chance of being the true one as the former. And that means: far from being compelled to banish concepts like meaning and value from psychology and science in general, we must use these concepts for a full understanding of the mind and the world, which is at the same time a full explanation.

The Common Principle in the Preceding Discussion

We have discussed quantity, order and meaning with regard to their contributions to science in general and to psychology in particular. We extracted each of our categories from a different science, but we claimed that despite their different origins, they are all universally applicable. And as a matter of fact, in our treatment of the issues involved in each of our three categories – we have found the same general principle: to integrate quantity and quality, mechanism and vitalism, explanation and comprehension or understanding, we had to abandon the treatment of a number of separate facts for the consideration of a group of facts in their specific form of connection. Only thus could quantity be qualitative, and order and meaning be saved from being either introduced into the system of science as new entities, the privileges of life and mind, or discarded as mere figments.

Generality of the Gestalt Category

Do we then claim that all facts are contained in such interconnected groups or units that each quantification is a description of true quality, each complex and sequence of events orderly and meaningful? In short, do we claim that the universe and all events in it form one big Gestalt?

If we did we should be as dogmatic as the positivists who claim that no event is orderly or meaningful, and as those who assert that quality is essentially different from quantity. But just as the category of causality does not mean that any event is causally connected with any other, so the Gestalt category does not mean that any two states or events belong together in one Gestalt. “To apply the category of cause and effect means to find out which parts of nature stand in this relation. Similarly, to apply the Gestalt category means to find out which parts of nature belong as parts to functional wholes, to discover their position in these wholes, their degree of relative independence, and the articulation of larger wholes into sub-wholes.” (Koffka, 1931.)

Science will find Gestalten of different rank in different realms, but we claim that every Gestalt has order and meaning, of however low or high a degree, and that for a Gestalt quantity and quality are the same. Now nobody would deny that of all Gestalten which we know those of the human mind are the richest; therefore it is most difficult, and in most cases still impossible, to express its quality in quantitative terms, but at the same time the aspect of meaning becomes more manifest here than in any other part of the universe.

Why Psychology?

Psychology is a very unsatisfactory science. Comparing the vast body of systematised and recognised facts in physics with those in psychology one will doubt the advisability of teaching the latter to anybody who does not intend to become a professional psychologist, one might even doubt the advisability of training professional psychologists. But when one considers the potential contribution which psychology can make to our understanding of the universe, one’s attitude may be changed. Science becomes easily divorced from life. The mathematician needs an escape from the thin air of his abstractions, beautiful as they are; the physicist wants to revel in sounds that are soft, mellow, and melodious, that seem to reveal mysteries which are hidden under the curtain of waves and atoms and mathematical equations; and even the biologist likes to enjoy the antics of his dog on Sundays unhampered by his weekday conviction that in reality they – are but chains of machine-like reflexes. Life becomes a flight from science, science a game. And thus science abandons its purpose of treating the whole of existence. if psychology can point the way where science and life will meet, if it can lay the foundations of a system of knowledge that will contain the behaviour of a single atom as well as that of an amoeba, a white rat, a chimpanzee, and a human being, with all the latter’s curious activities which we call social conduct, music and art, literature and drama, then an acquaintance with such a psychology should be worth while and repay the time and effort spent in its acquisition.

Autor: Gilberto Leonardo Oviedo – Profesor del Departamento de Psicología de la Universidad de los Andes.
Fonte: http://res.uniandes.edu.co/view.php/375/1.php

Resumen
El presente artículo define el concepto de percepción en psicología, con base en los aportes de la teoría Gestalt (teoría de la forma). Se presentan los antecedentes filosóficos del concepto de percepción en la obra de los pensadores asociacionistas y posteriormente se establece el debate introducido por los representantes del movimiento Gestalt. Se hace una revisión de las principales leyes de la percepción con especial énfasis en el principio de los buenos contornos y el holismo perceptual. Finalmente, la conclusión presenta la importancia que tiene para la psicología como disciplina científica la presentación de la percepción como un proceso caracterizado por los procesos de abstracción y búsqueda de la simplicidad o pregnancia.

Palabras Clave
Percepción, Gestalt, psicología de la forma.

Abstract
This article presents the contribution of the Gestalt theory (Theory of the form) in the definition of the perceptual concept. It begins with the philosophical analysis of the formulated by the asociacionist and then follow with the subsequently debate established between this philosophical view and the representatives of the Gestalt movement.The main laws of perception, with special emphasis in the principle of the good contours and the holism are particularly examinated. Finally, the conclusion presents the relevance of the concept to the psychological discipline, of perception as a mental process that privilege sim

Keywords
Perception, Gestalt, psychology of forms.

Antecedentes y contexto histórico del concepto percepción

La percepción es uno de los temas inaugurales de la psicología como ciencia y ha sido objeto de diferentes intentos de explicación. Existe consenso científico en considerar al movimiento Gestalt como uno de los esfuerzos más sistemáticos y fecundos en la producción de sus principios explicativos.

El movimiento Gestalt, nació en Alemania bajo la autoría de los investigadores Wertheimer, Koffka y Köhler, durante las primeras decadas del siglo XX. Estos autores consideran la percepción como el proceso fundamental de la actividad mental, y suponen que las demás actividades psicológicas como el aprendizaje, la memoria, el pensamiento, entre otros, dependen del adecuado funcionamiento del proceso de organización perceptual.

El contexto histórico dentro del cual se desarrollan sus estudios tiene un importante significado para la comprensión de sus aportes.

En los comienzos del siglo XX la fisiología había alcanzado un lugar importante dentro de la explicación psicológica. Suponía que todo hecho psíquico se encontraba precedido y acompañado por un determinado tipo de actividad orgánica.La percepción era entendida como el resultado de procesos corporales como la actividad sensorial. El énfasis investigativo se ubicó en la caracterización de los canales sensoriales de la visión, el tacto, el gusto, la audición, etc. La psicofisiología definía la percepción como una actividad cerebral de complejidad creciente impulsada por la transformación de un órgano sensorial específico, como la visión o el tacto.

La Gestalt realizó una revolución copernicana en psicología al plantear la percepción como el proceso inicial de la actividad mental y no un derivado cerebral de estados sensoriales. Su teoría, arraigada en la tradición filosófica de Kant (Wertheimer en Carterette y Friedman, 1982), consideró la percepción como un estado subjetivo, a través del cual se realiza una abstracción del mundo externo o de hechos relevantes.

“La percepción visual no opera con la fidelidad mecánica de una cámara, que lo registra todo imparcialmente: todo el conglomerado de diminutos pedacitos de forma y color que constituyen los ojos y la boca de la persona que posa para la fotografía, lo mismo que la esquina del teléfono que asoma accidentalmente por encima de su cabeza. ¿Qué es lo que vemos?… Ver significa aprehender algunos rasgos salientes de los objetos: el azul del cielo, la curva del cuello del cisne, la rectangularidad del libro, el lustre de un pedazo de metal, la rectitud del cigarrillo” (Arnheim, 1995, p. 58-59).

El primer supuesto básico desarrollado por la Gestalt es la afirmación de que la actividad mental no es una copia idéntica del mundo percibido. Contrariamente define la percepción como un proceso de extracción y selección de información relevante encargado de generar un estado de claridad y lucidez conciente que permita el desempeño dentro del mayor grado de racionalidad y coherencia posibles con el mundo circundante.

Se puede afirmar que, de la enorme cantidad de datos arrojados por la experiencia sensorial (luz, calor, sonido, impresión táctil, etc.), los sujetos perceptuales toman tan sólo aquella información susceptible de ser agrupada en la conciencia para generar una representación mental. La percepción, según la Gestalt, no está sometida a la información proveniente de los órganos sensoriales, sino que es la encargada de regular y modular la sensorialidad. El hecho de recibir de manera indiscriminada datos de la realidad implicaría una constante perplejidad en el sujeto, quien tendría que estar volcado sobre el inmenso volumen de estímulos que ofrece el contacto con el ambiente. La Gestalt definió la percepción como una tendencia al orden mental. Inicialmente, la percepción determina la entrada de información; y en segundo lugar, garantiza que la información retomada del ambiente permita la formación de abstracciones (juicios, categorías, conceptos, etc).

La revolución copernicana de la Gestalt

Consideró Wertheimer (1912) que la percepción no es una actividad pasiva como se creía en las teorías anteriores. En los siglos XVIII y XIX, se había asumido la tesis de la Tabula Rasa planteada por el filósofo John Locke en el siglo XVII (Boring, 1992), según la cual la mente es una hoja en blanco sobre la cual escribe la experiencia y donde la mente es una blanda masa sistemáticamente moldeada por la influencia de las sensaciones. Por el contrario, es el interés de Wertheimer demostrar que la percepción no es el resultado de la recepción y acumulación de impresiones producidas por el mundo circundante sino aquello que denomina como un proceso de organización psíquica. La psicología de la Gestalt intenta demostrar que la actividad perceptual no es un proceso causal.

La visión causalista afirma al mundo natural como causa, es decir, generador de constantes estímulos físicos como la luz, el sonido, los aromas, etc., encargados de impactar los sentidos, con lo que introduce un proceso neurofisiológico al cual el sujeto no se puede sustraer. Supone también que la función del aparato perceptual es la de estar enterado de la forma en que la naturaleza se manifiesta.

El efecto producido por la influencia material es la generación de estados internos tales como las ideas y procesos de orden categorial. Las ideas son entonces estados internos que informan sistemáticamente de la constitución del mundo físico y sus transformaciones, en los que el sujeto es un registrador de dichos acontecimientos. La tesis de la Tabula Rasa tuvo un profundo impacto en pensadores como Berkeley, Hume (S. XVIII) y James y John Stuard Mill (S. XIX) y se constituyó en uno de los pilares fundamentales del empirismo británico (Boring, 1992). El empirismo planteó que el conocimiento se deriva de la experiencia, entendida como “la aprehensión sensible de la realidad externa…antes de toda reflexión” (Ferrater Mora, 1983, p. 296). Es decir, la experiencia es todo hecho de origen material que lleva al sujeto a formarse una idea concreta de la naturaleza del mundo circundante. El empirismo es el movimiento conceptual que lleva a su máxima expresión la idea de que todo estado psíquico tiene su origen en la sensación.

Uno de los rasgos sobresalientes del empirismo fue su tendencia al elementalismo (supuesto según el cual tanto la sensación como las ideas se forman con base en unidades simples). Se denomina con el término idea a la huella dejada por el impacto sensorial; es la versión mental de los eventos del mundo material. La idea constituye una unidad simple, un dato que registra cada acontecimiento de manera unitaria y elemental.

Boring aclara el sentido y la importancia de las ideas cuando afirma que para el empirismo “las ideas son unidades de la mente. Una idea es el objeto del pensamiento” (Boeing, 1992, p. 194), con lo que pone de manifiesto que, desde esta postura teórica, la vida psíquica es una actividad de tipo unitario o elemental. Las ideas son átomos mentales con base en los cuales el sujeto lleva a cabo diferentes actos psíquicos.

Una vez descubierto el hecho de que la sensación y la idea son unidades simples de información del mundo externo, los empiristas plantean el concepto de asociación mental. Es decir, el momento en el cual la conciencia toma las ideas sensoriales, las integra unas con otras y forma estados complejos como la noción de objeto o la noción de realidad. La mente es definida como un mezclador de ideas sensoriales que se encarga de unir, integrar o asociar estos átomos de la conciencia con base en principios como el de contigüidad, expuesto por James Mill, o la semejanza, planteada por John Stuart Mill (Boring, 1992). James Mill consideraba que la mente recibía una inmensa cantidad de datos y los organizaba según su contigüidad espacio-temporal. Así, por ejemplo, una silla es un conjunto de experiencias sensibles elementales como el tamaño, color, peso, etc., que, en el momento de ser recibidas por el sujeto crean en él la impresión de una idea compleja o de un objeto definido en el que las ideas simples quedan mezcladas dentro de un solo estado mental.

Existen muchos otros principios asociacionistas, como la asociación por contraste o por repetición, que pueden ser consultados en autores como Boring (1992) y Garret (1958).

La crítica de la Gestalt al asociacionismo

La psicología de la Gestalt planteó una primera crítica al asociacionismo: lo acusó de sensacionismo, fundamentándose en la argumentación kantiana. El hecho de considerar la sensación como el punto de partida de todo acto mental es un equívoco en tanto desconoce por completo los elementos a prioride la conciencia, como es la tendencia a la conceptualización: “las percepciones no nos proporcionan nuestros conceptos, sino que nuestras percepciones nos son dadas de acuerdo con nuestras maneras intrínsecas e innatas de percibir el mundo. Estos moldes, filtros o “categorías” innatos, como las llamaba Kant, incluyen causa y efecto, tiempo y espacio” (Wertheimer, citado en Carterette y Friedman, 1982, p. 101). En este orden de ideas, la Gestalt asume un nativismo perceptual, es decir, el supuesto de que la mente tiene criterios o categorías para organizar los datos de la experiencia y que dichas categorías no están sometidas al influjo de los aprendizajes y por el contrario, las experiencias y los datos obtenidos son sometidos a su forma particular de organizarlos. Los estilos o modalidades de organización perceptual de la Gestalt son, entre otros, la tendencia a discriminar el contorno de los objetos (buenos contornos), la tendencia a privilegiar la información que más se repite en un objeto (similaridad), la tendencia a establecer niveles de contraste entre los datos que se presentan en una imagen (figura-fondo).

En segundo lugar, la Gestalt esbozó el concepto de inmediatez en la percepción. El término se plantea de manera contrastiva con el modelo analítico, en el cual se hace énfasis en la innumerable cantidad de factores mediadores entre los datos del mundo externo y la representación mental.

Según la Gestalt, la percepción busca de manera directa organizar la información del ambiente dentro de una representación mental simple. El modelo asociacionista, fundamentado en la física mecánica de su época, asume la percepción como un proceso que se lleva a cabo mediante una secuencia encadenada de unidades elementales que constituyen lo que denomina Köhler (citado por Gondra, 1996) la aplicación del método analítico. En el concepto de Köhler la tendencia de las ciencias en general a descomponer todos los objetos estudiados en unidades simples y describir su modo de integración por medio de leyes generales, es un estilo de pensamiento que asumieron sin tomar en cuenta sus consecuencias. “Creen muchos, y ha sido el dogma científico de generaciones pasadas, que no hay objeto que no haya de ser tratado mediante esta varita mágica. Una línea de curvatura continua no se comprende…si el matemático la deja intacta. Para alcanzar claridad, introduce en lugar de ella unos trozos muy pequeños, sencillos…y separados por puntos exactos… Así se reduce su mundo a un agregado de entidades pequeñísimas, situadas en lugares bien definidos, y entre esas entidades, la nada o el espacio vacío” (Köhler citado por Gondra, 1996, p. 491). En el concepto de Köhler, el filósofo austriaco Ehrenfels ya había advertido sobre las severas implicaciones en la psicología al plantear la importancia de las cualidades que pasan inadvertidas por parte del enfoque analítico de la ciencia.

“La forma de un árbol, de una estatua, de un edificio, nos parece ‘graciosa’; analicemos su forma y no vemos en los elementos que resultan del análisis nada que podemos calificar de ‘gracioso’. Hablamos de una torre, un pilar, de un hombre esbelto. Si los analizamos no encontramos en los elementos nada que posea aquella calidad. Pero la forma entera sigue siendo esbelta, a pesar de las prescripciones de la ciencia. Lo mismo podemos decir de otras cualidades como tosco, grosero, agudo, redondo, regular…Tenemos, pues, todo un mundo sólo perceptible en tanto que nos fijamos en realidades totales y extendidas. Lo sacrifica o lo olvida quien actúa a través de los ojos de la psicología analizadora” (Köhler citado por Gondra, 1996, p. 492).

Considera Köhler que es labor de la psicología de la percepción apropiarse de esta tendencia del sujeto a ver en el mundo cualidades, totalidades y describir su forma de presentarse y transformarse como representación mental. La percepción, según la Gestalt, no lleva a cabo el proceso que sigue un científico cuando estudia un fenómeno de su interés, el de encontrar átomos y después integrarlos progresivamente, sino que tiende de la manera más directa e inmediata a atribuirle cualidades que definan el objeto y permitan establecer con claridad su naturaleza y composición.

La Gestalt intenta demostrar la temporalidad de la percepción que se caracteriza por buscar de manera inmediata lo cualitativo de los objetos, y usa para sus propósitos la forma como cualidad fundamental. La inmediatez de la forma no implica un nivel de ordenamiento fundamentado en procesos analíticos. La Gestalt se define a sí misma como una teoría explicativa de la percepción no elementalista, y asume la denominación de holista. Köhler presenta específicamente la tendencia perceptual a la totalidad (holismo) a través de un caso como el de la ‘Osa mayor’ que aparece en el cielo:

“Es un ejemplo de agrupación observada por la humanidad desde hace muchos siglos. Vemos una nube tranquila y blanca en el cielo claro de un día de verano. ¿Por qué una nube? Por la misma razón y los mismos principios que cierto número de estrellas de claridad semejante, y con ciertas relaciones de vecindad, constituyen lo que se llama ‘una constelación’. Quien se limite a la consideración analítica del cielo no tendrá una nube, sino una sensación de azul, otra blanca; otra blanca de matiz diferente, otra más oscura, etc. La enumeración pasará de un modo indiferente de un elemento a otro, sin que tal consideración pueda dar la unidad en estos rayos de luz, que representan la única comunicación entre el objeto y nuestros ojos, ni la menor indicación de una unidad en el objeto ni su separación del contorno. Si no hubiera una tendencia óptica de agrupación y unificación, no habría objetos para nosotros” (Köhler, 1996, p. 498).

En términos generales, la labor de la percepción consiste en un intento de agrupación de la información circundante dentro de unidades simples que le permitan a la conciencia adquirir noción de objeto y con ello afinar su capacidad abstracta. La percepción es entendida como un permanente acto de conceptualización. Los eventos del mundo externo son organizados a través de juicios categoriales que se encargan de encontrar una cualidad que represente de la mejor manera posible a los objetos.

El principal esfuerzo histórico del movimiento gestáltico fue demostrar experimentalmente la íntima relación entre percepción y conceptualización. Para ello se recurrió al trabajo dentro del laboratorio que arrojó como resultados las leyes de la percepción.

Los principios gestálticos: las leyes de la percepción

En el año de 1912, MaxWertheimer realizó la primera evidencia experimental que permitió demostrar la tendencia de la percepción a la abstracción a través del denominado movimiento estroboscópico, fenómeno Phi o ilusión de movimiento. En este experimento les presentó a los sujetos experimentales dos barras de luz que aparecían de manera intermitente en periodos de tiempo diferentes (Garret, 1951).

Cuando la intermitencia o el tiempo de presentación entre los dos estímulos (barras de luz) se realizó en un intervalo entre los 40 y los 200 milisegundos (Goldstein, 1988, p. 315), se experimentó la impresión de un movimiento continuo entre las dos barras, tal como sucede con algunos de los avisos luminosos.

El Fenómeno Phi demuestra, según Wertheimer (1912), la tendencia del sujeto a percibir la relación entre estímulos. El hecho de percibir una luz que se desplaza dentro del espacio existente entre las dos barras, permitió concluir que la actividad perceptual posee la capacidad de salirse de los límites de los datos objetivos para añadir una cualidad tan importante como el movimiento.

El estudio de Wertheimer (1912) planteó la enorme importancia del estudio de las ilusiones -entendiendo por ilusión la tendencia de la actividad perceptual a añadir información a los datos objetivos, en aras de la obtención de una representación mental-.

La actividad psíquica trasciende ampliamente los datos materiales y construye entidades mentales como las ilusiones, las cuales llevan al sujeto a concebir el objeto según su estado representacional.

La ilusión de movimiento ha sido uno de los temas más polémicos dentro de la investigación perceptual. Se han realizado múltiples variaciones del experimento de Wertheimer, como los trabajos sobre ilusión de movimiento sobrela piel (Garret, 1958).

Concepto de forma

El término Gestalt es traducido al castellano como forma o contorno. Los límites de un objeto constituyen una información relevante para la generación de abstracciones.

La importancia del concepto de forma dentro de la explicación de la percepción, es quizás uno de los aspectos nodales dentro de la Gestalt.

Fiel a su tradición filosófica, la Gestalt plantea que en la relación sujeto-objeto, el sujeto es aquel encargado de extraer información relevante del objeto. Esta información rescata la estructura misma del objeto, es decir, aquello que resulta esencial para hacerlo idéntico consigo mismo y permitirle diferenciación de otros objetos, o en otros términos, hacerlo discriminable.

La forma de los objetos, denominada con mayor precisión con el concepto de contorno o borde, constituye todo aquel conjunto de información relevante y oportuna que permite representarse el objeto.

La conciencia, en el momento de percibir un objeto externo como la mesa, no solo tiene un conjunto de informaciones sobre este objeto llamado mesa sino que tiende a tener noción de la meseidad. Es decir, esta mesa es un objeto que en esencia es algo plenamente identificado, ordenable, reconocible y con el cual puedo relacionarme como algo que conozco y puedo imaginar mentalmente, recordar, rotar imaginariamente y hacer cálculos y predicciones. En este orden de ideas, el hecho de organizar los objetos a través de su forma equivale a tener de ellos una versión racionalo en términos más exactos geométrica, que ofrece una idea clara, precisa e inconfundible de lo que la caracteriza. Darle forma a un objeto equivale a darle sentido, a hacerlo propio y permitirle mostrarse de manera inconfundible a la conciencia, y con ello facultar la posibilidad de desarrollar estados imaginativos como el poderlos contrastar con otros, pensarlos en otros contextos, compararlos en diferentes momentos de la memoria, etc. La Gestalt es una teoría encargada de plantear la tendencia de la conciencia a la racionalidad. El fin último y principal labor de la conciencia, es el de traducir las experiencias cotidianas a entidades conceptuales con base en las cuales se pueda seguir adelantando un proceso de abstracción.

Pregnancia

La tendencia de la actividad mental a la abstracción dentro de la mayor simplicidad posible recibe el nombre de pregnancia.

Según Katz, “la ley de pregnancia fue formulada por Koffka del siguiente modo: la organización psicológica será siempre tan excelente como las condiciones dominantes lo permitan. El término excelente abarca propiedades como la regularidad, simetría, armonía de conjunto, homogeneidad, equilibrio, máxima sencillez, concisión” (Katz, 1967, p. 45).

Kannizza, uno de los más actuales representantes de la Gestalt, afirma que el concepto de pregnancia -también denominado ‘buena Gestalt’- puede ser demasiado genérico y, por lo tanto, es preferible precisarlo utilizando los conceptos de simplicidad, regularidad, estabilidad, pero, sobre todo, de coherencia estructural de carácter unitario del conjunto (Kaniza, 1986, p.40).

Como se dijo anteriormente, percibir es categorizar o, dicho de otra forma, agrupar los datos del entorno con base en cualidades. La pregnancia describe la tendencia mental a la organización de los eventos externos dentro de ciertos parámetros encargados de garantizar la calidad de las representaciones psíquicas.

En el momento de acudir a los conceptos de regularidad, simplicidad, estabilidad, etc., lo que se hace es referirse al hecho de que la percepción organiza aquellos datos a los que accede con facilidad para clasificarlos dentro de categorías simples. Así, por ejemplo, un objeto esférico como una pompa de jabón facilita notoriamente el formarse una idea de su tamaño, de la textura de su superficie, de la redondez que se repite de manera continua e indefinida, lo que permite con enorme facilidad imaginar aquellas partes que no son directamente visibles.

En la pompa de jabón, todos los componentes se encuentran organizados de manera continua alrededor de la circularidad. Significa que todos sus elementos contribuyen permanentemente a la formación de un mismo concepto que es fácilmente comprobable: la regularidad de la información en torno a lo circular. La pregnancia del círculo y sus variaciones es un tema recurrente en la psicología de la Gestalt: “una buena forma (buena Gestalt) es la que está bien articulada. Tiende a dejar su huella en el observador, a persistir, a recurrir. Un círculo es una buena forma” (Boring, 1978, p.633).

Proximidad

Una forma de agrupamiento de la información proveniente del mundo externo es el principio de proximidad. Wertheimer (citado por Kannizza, 1986, p. 30) afirma que “los elementos próximos tienden a ser vistos como constituyendo una unidad antes que los elementos alejados”.
La distribución espacial de los objetos es uno de los más importantes criterios para realizar el trabajo de abstracción. La variable distancia entre los elementos permite llevar a cabo la organización perceptual. Köhler (citado por Gondra, 1996, p. 496) lo plantea en los siguientes términos:

“Tenemos desde el punto de vista objetivo, seis líneas paralelas: 11 11 11. Si tratamos de describir lo que vemos en nuestro campo visual, hemos de añadir que no son propiamente seis líneas sino tres grupos de líneas. Parece que hay una formación espontánea de grupos y que no importa además que se trate de líneas o de hombres, o de sillas, o de pilares de columnas de una iglesia. Estas agrupaciones son factores trascendentales en la arquitectura, y mediante ellos produce el artista efectos encantadores: así con constelaciones de ventanas y pilares, etc. Físicamente no hay grupos reales, cada una de esas líneas es tan indiferente a su próxima inmediata como a todas las demás”.

Semejanza o igualdad

Katz define este principio perceptual afirmando que “si son varios los elementos activos de diferente clase, entonces hay, en idénticas condiciones, una tendencia a reunir en grupos los elementos de igual clase” (Katz, 1967, p. 29). La percepción clasifica la información según el grado de semejanza que mantengan los estímulos entre sí. Otro de los criterios empleados por el aparato perceptual para la construcción de representaciones psíquicas es la búsqueda de la homogeneidad. En este orden de ideas, aquella información que tienda a repetirse con mayor frecuencia es predominantemente atendida y captada, por encima de aquella que es difusa y muy poco frecuente.

Los estímulos homogéneos son agrupados de tal forma que conforman un bloque ordenado que lo hace distinto de los demás estímulos. La siguiente figura es un claro ejemplo:

Tendencia al cierre

La ley del cierre guarda una íntima relación con el concepto de pregnancia; toda información que contribuya a la conformación del concepto de contorno es privilegiada por sobre aquella que no contribuye a darle bordes o límites definidos a los objetos.

Autores como Katz (1967) interpretan que la información que contribuya a formar una percepción de superficie resulta importante. Una línea punteada no es percibida como un conjunto de puntos dispersos sobre el espacio, sino como unidad integrada que comunica la orientación común de los datos y la noción de la superficie que ofrece una línea continua.

En particular las formas geométricas como el círculo, el triángulo, el cuadrado, etc., tienen la capacidad de dar a entender la totalidad de su forma con tan solo percibir parte de ellas. Así, por ejemplo, un triángulo al que le falta un ángulo puede evocar con facilidad la noción de la triangularidad.

Relación figura-fondo

Este principio es, en el concepto de autores como Garret (1958), el más importante en el estudio de la percepción por reunir los anteriores y permitir explicar gran parte de los agrupamientos.

Los principios perceptuales hasta ahora mencionados describen la forma en que la actividad perceptual se encarga de constituir noción de objetos; sin embargo, la relación figura-fondo se ocupa de establecer aquello que Guillaume llama “la organización externa e interna de las formas” (Guillaume, 1964, p. 68). El notorio énfasis puesto en el concepto de contorno como elemento inherente a la forma, aún no explica el modo en que se puede llegar a tener informaciones sobre cómo un objeto puede estar articulado con otros conformando un paisaje.

Guillaume presenta un claro ejemplo experimental realizado por Metzger en el cual a los sujetos se les coloca frente a una “pantalla blanca débilmente alumbrada por un proyector y que llena todo su campo visual. En estas condiciones la pantalla misma no es vista como una superficie localizada a cierta profundidad. El color parece llenar todo el espacio” (Guillaume, 1964, p. 68). La experiencia desarrollada por Metzger llega a establecer que, si no hay una variación en la estimulación, el sujeto deja de percibir los datos de la pantalla y no puede darse un trabajo de organización. No sólo resulta difusa y aburridora la experiencia sino que el sujeto después de un tiempo deja de percibir visualmente. Esto significa que el sujeto requiere de niveles de contraste para llegar a obtener información o de lo contrario está expuesto a un bloqueo temporal en la obtención de información.

Se denomina con el nombre de “fondo” al elemento de homogeneidad que ofrece un grado de información constante e invariable que le permite al sujeto tener una impresión sensorial fácilmente constatable. Así mismo, se llama “figura” a todo elemento que ofrece un alto nivel de contraste o de ruptura y permite encontrar una variación que le dé sentido, límites y características a ese elemento de homogeneidad que es el fondo.

“Todo objeto sensible existe en relación con un cierto fondo; esta expresión no solo se ajusta a las cosas visibles, sino también a toda clase de objeto sensible; un sonido se destaca sobre un fondo constituido por otros ruidos o sobre un fondo de silencio” (Guillaume, 1964, p. 69).

Las diferencias entre figura y fondo son muy significativas. La figura se caracteriza por tener una forma muy definida, fácilmente ubicable espacio-temporalmente. La presencia de contornos permite darle a la figura cualidades tan importantes como relieve, tamaño, textura y permite fácilmente referir a un interior y a un exterior; “la figura ofrece más estabilidad, más resistencia a la variación” (Guillaume, 1964, p. 73).

El fondo, por el contrario, carece de límites o contornos, tiene un carácter indefinido y tiende a hacerse cada vez más homogéneo con respecto a la figura, aunque en él se introduzcan ligeras variaciones. Sin embargo, existen relaciones complementarias entre figura y fondo que han sido desarrolladas a través de las imágenes reversibles (figura 5), donde el aparente fondo puede cobrar carácter de figura, al igual que alguien que escucha a otro en medio de muchas voces deja de atender a su interlocutor para rescatar información del murmullo constituido por las múltiples voces. Las figuras de Rubin y de Escher son un claro ejemplo de ello.

Han sido desarrollados otros principios perceptuales, pero los anteriormente mencionados constituyen una muestra representativa del estilo de abordaje y explicación que hace la Gestalt de la actividad perceptual.

Conclusiones

El concepto de percepción encontró en la teoría de la Gestalt uno de los más importantes esfuerzos de explicación.

El movimiento Gestalt, para poder explicar la percepción, debió realizar una profunda revisión filosófica de los supuestos científicos con base en los cuales se la definía y abordaba. Realizó una severa crítica al movimiento empirista-asociacionista, y propuso estructurar un nuevo modelo de abordaje conceptual asumiendo la percepción como un proceso de formación de representaciones mentales. Planteó igualmente que es función de la percepción realizar abstracciones a través de las cualidades que definen lo esencial de la realidad externa.

El principal producto de su trabajo experimental son las leyes de la percepción, las cuales se encargan de describir los criterios con base en los cuales el aparato perceptual selecciona información relevante, la agrupa dentro de la mayor armonía posible (pregnancia) y genera representaciones mentales.

Bibliografía

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Ferrater Mora, J. (1983). Diccionario de filosofía de bolsillo. Madrid: Alianza editorial.

Garret, H.E. (1958). Las grandes realizaciones en la psicología experimental. México: Fondo de Cultura económica.

Guillaume, P. (1964). Psicología de la forma. Buenos Aires: Psique.

Goldstein, E. B. (1984). Sensación y percepción. Madrid: Debate.

Gondra, J. M. (1996). La psicología moderna. Bilbao: Desclée Brouwer.

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Katz, D. (1967). Psicología de la forma. Madrid: Espaza-Calpe.

Koffka, K. (1969). Principios de la psicología de la forma. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

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Wertheimer, M. (1912). Estudios experimentales sobre la visión del movimiento. Zeitschrift der Psychologie, 61, 161-265. Versión en castellano: Sahakian, W. S. (1968). Historia de la psicología. México: Trillas.

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