Shapes of Forms: From Gestalt Psychology and Phenomenology to Ontology and Mathematics

380 Pages·1999·8.948 MB·English

by  Liliana Albertazzi (auth.), Liliana Albertazzi (eds.)

SHAPES OF FORMS
SYNTHESE LIBRARY
STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Managing Editor:
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University
Editors:
DIRK VAN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley
THEO A.F. KUIPERS, University ofGroningen, The Netherlands
PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University, California
JAN WOLEN-SKI, lagiellonian University, KrakOw, Poland
VOLUME 275
SHAPES OF FORMS
From Gestalt Psychology
and Phenomenology
to Ontology and Mathematics
Edited by
LILIANA ALBERTAZZI
Department of Sociology and Social Research,
University of Trento, Trento, Italy
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-90-481-5098-4 ISBN 978-94-017-2990-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2990-1
Prmted an acid-free paper
Ali Rights Reserved
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Origina1ly published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1999
No part of this publication may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
inciuding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. LILIANA ALBERTAZZI / Form Aesthetics: Introduction
2. PAOLO BOZZI/Experimental Phenomenology:
A Historical Profile 19
3. ALF ZIMMER / What is Form? The Contributions of
Psychology to an Old Epistemological Problem 51
4. GIOVANNI BRUNO VICARIO / Forms and Events 89
5. MICHAEL STADLER, SABINE PFAFF, PETER KRUSE /
Towards a Theory of Figural Form 107
6. RICCARDO LUCCIO / On Pragnanz 123
7. MANFREDO MASSIRONI, MARIA CHIARA LEVORATO /
Formal Characteristics in Verbal Description and Spatial
Representation 149
8. IVOR GRATTAN-GUINNESS / Forms in Algebras and their
Interpretations: Some Historical and Philosophical Features 177
9. ALBERTO PERUZZI/An Essay on the Notion of Schema 191
10. ROBERTO POLl / Qua-Theories 245
11. LILIANA ALBERTAZZI / Form Metaphysics 257
12. JOHN F. SOWA / Ontological Categories 307
13. JACEK JADACKI / On Forms of Objects 341
Index of Names 361
Subject Index 365
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first idea for this volume arose out of the International Summer School in
Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence on the topic of Form, organized in
Bolzano, Italy, 1-5 July 1993, by the Central European Institute of Culture.
My thanks go to the former President of the Institute, Professor Claudio Nolet,
for his constant and valuable support.
The Editor
VI
LILIANA ALBERTAZZI
FORM AESTHETICS: INTRODUCTION
1 WHAT IS A FORM?
The concept of form has been of central importance in philosophical and
scientific reflection since its beginnings. One thinks, for example, of the Ionian
physicists and their hypothesis that many aspects of the world depend on the
form of atoms. Similarly, innumerable variations on Plato's world of ideas/
forms and Aristotle's dialectic of matter/form have characterized Western
thought throughout its history. Of universal currency is Galileo's thesis that
the book of nature is written in the language of the geometric forms, and that it
is only necessary to learn how to read it. The various theories of form that have
been developed in the twenty-five centuries of Western civilization instruct us
that there is no single or fundamental theory of forms. The problem thus
becomes one of those theoretical cruxes that enable us to understand the
meaning and deeper-lying characteristics of a theory. A book about form,
therefore, may pursue the purely theoretical purpose of developing an
aesthetics of knowledge, in the sense of analysis of the forms that emerge
qualitatively from the physicallevel.
Moreover, the development of research connected with artificial intelligence
and the cognitive sciences obliges us to confront further components of the
traditional problem of form and to ask ourselves once again: 'What is a form?'
Among the answers now forthcoming to this question, some seem irritatingly
traditional: for example, that there exists a world of experience which displays
the features of an intuitive physics, more Aristotelian than Galilean, and that
the procedures of semantic categorization employed by natural language are
more closely connected to perception than we would have been willing to admit
even only a few years ago.
These answers refer to concepts of form which assume a perceptive and
phenomenological nature, and they thus recover the original meaning of
scientific traditions that had grown outmoded or had been radically distorted.
Indeed, it was Gardner himself, when tracing the history of cognitivism, who
asked whether we have truly moved forward from Gestalt psychology and the
Wiirzburg school, or whether in fact we are merely rediscovering what they
already knew. 1
I shall examine two cognitive theories that are today generally assumed to be
irreconcilable: that of Gibson and that of Gregory.
L. Albertazzi (ed.), Shapes of Forms, 1-17.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 LILIANA ALBERTAZZI
The supporters of an ecological theory ofp erception maintain that the same
laws of organization operate in both thought and perception, an example being
the Gestalt law of field, which would exclude the perception of phases. By
contrast, the proponents of a constructivist theory claim that perceptive
processes and the processes of thought follow the same inferential logic.
In brief, Gibson's theory rejects the constructivist point of view and affirms
that perception is a direct organization of the available information.2 Con
versely, Gregory argues that perception is the result of our brain's processing
data about a world and that it can be explained in terms of stored mental
representations.3 For Gregory, perception is hypothesis, with the correlated idea
that the mind must translate sensory information into a language of the mind.4
Both conceptions share the idea that perception proceeds in a single direction
from stimuli to meaning, and that massive transformations in sequence are
required to break these structures down for analysis. Nevertheless, although the
two positions have a large amount of experimental evidence in common, they
are apparently incompatible.
And yet, at least in part, the polemic that divides the two theories on the
cognitive processes involved in the phases between distal and proximal
stimulation could profitably draw on theories developed prior to the 1930s.
The theory ofp roduction developed by the Graz school, for example, assumed
that perceptive aspects and cognitive integrations are connected in the various
phases of the presentation. In modern terms, this suggests that the difference
between 'bottom up' and 'top down' in cognitive processes is more a difference of
degree than of kind internally to a form - that is, a structure consisting several
layers. At issue are the differences between a theory of perception founded on
eventualities ofp resentation and one founded on eventualities ofj udgement, or in
modern terms, between theories of representation that place more or less
emphasis on its 'inner' or 'outer' aspects, as well as the directions taken by
information input and output. Moreover, between the presentation and the
hypothesis lies the assumption (Annahme), which is a type of act which is not
yet a judgement - in the sense of a comparison among several and successive
presentations (hypotheses) - but contains a form of immediate conviction
deriving from the apprehension of the mode of being (So-sein) of a physical
object.5 This is an aspect of Meinongian theory which sank into oblivion but
which in the last fifteen years has been revived only with regard to logico
linguistic aspects of Meinong's semantics, whereas it would be much more
relevant to the theory of perception in which it originated. An assumption, in
simple terms, is a type of intermediate act between presentation and judgement
which enables apprehension of an object through awareness of its existence or
presence (Vorgegebenheit) and its ordering or structuring into an 'objective,.6
The 'hypotheses' referred to by Gregory's theory, and of which it is accused by
the Gibsonians - this in effect being the term most frequently used by Gregory
himself - are not always hypotheses; on occasion they are outright 'assump
tions' in Meinong's sense of the term. For example, in the case of Penrose's
FORM AESTHETICS: INTRODUCTION 3
impossible triangle, after apprehension of the perceptively given mode ofb eing of
that 'object', the visual system assumes that all three sides touch on all three
sides, whereas this happens on only one side. In fact, the sides touch only
optically, because they are separate in depth. In Meinong's words, Penrose's
triangle has been inserted in an 'objective', or in what we would today call a
"cognitive schema".
Re-examination of the Graz school's theory, as said, sheds light on several
problems concerning the theory of perception, and, as Luccio points out in his
contribution to this book, it helps to eliminate a number of over-simplistic
commonplaces, such as the identification of the cognitivist notion of 'top
down' with Wertheimer's 'von oben unten', and of 'bottom up' with his 'von
unten nach oben'. In fact, neither Hochberg's and Gregory's 'concept-driven'
perception nor Gibson's 'data-driven' perception coincide with the original
conception of the Gestalt.
In a Gestaltist configuration, in fact, 'top down' and 'bottom up' processes
act simultaneously, because perception is viewed as a set of numerous
processes with differing degrees of complexity. However, as Zimmer's article
in this book shows, these processes are not hierarchically ordered but interact
as forces of a field which tend towards stability according to a 'principle of
minimum'. Necker's cube is a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon. Since
competing processes are at work, constantly new spatial structurings and
restructurings are generated. Other examples are provided by the phenomenon
of spatial multi-stability, the perception of space from two-dimensional dis
plays, and the role of symmetry in the history of science.
A categorization of this kind - which broadly speaking we may call phenom
enological - has nothing to do with hermeneutic phenomenology. Nor does it
belong to the mainstream of analytic philosophy, although it shares a certain
expository simplicity and a number of themes with the latter, as evidenced by
several similarities between Husserl and Wittgenstein.7 Moreover, since its
original formulation by the School of Brentano, phenomenological inquiry has
always had an experimental aspect to it, as a discipline whose experimental
variables are mental contents ofd irect experience rather than physical stimuli or
physiological processes. 8 Experimental phenomenology, then, is not only a theory
ofc onsciousness, it is also a science which could be called a descriptive psychology
of perception. 9 This type of inquiry, which lies midway between metaphysics and
psychology, and which draws on laboratory experiments, displays a number of
variations in its base conception. By way of simplification, it was more
'cognitivist' among the Meinongians and more 'realist' in various branches of
Husserlian phenomenology. Nevertheless, it invariably addressed issues that are
still central to ongoing debate in the cognitive sciences - from the perception of
form to the transfer of a modified image over another. Frequently, moreover, it
obtained results that are today in the process of being re-discovered, as Gardner
observes, and to do so used refined conceptual tools which enabled the
integration of these results into a more general theory.
4 LILIANA ALBERTAZZI
An intuitive example is provided by research into perceptive illusions,
distortions, ambiguous objects like Rubin's vase, and paradoxical objects like
Penrose's already-mentioned impossible triangle. Such inquiry had already
been amply developed by Brentanist psychologists, both experimentally and
theoretically, given that the theory available to them (in this particular case
Meinong's theory of objects) was able to ascribe an ontological status even to
entities of this kind. One thinks, in fact, of the polemic between Benussi and
Koffka on ideal objects, and the dispute concerning presentations of a-sensory
provenance that set Graz and Berlin against each other - with Meinong,
Ameseder, Hofler and Benussi on one side, and Koffka and Buhler on the
other, to cite only the best-known names.lO This, however, is an ontological
problem that has broader implications than a mere dispute between schools. As
shown by Grattan-Guinness's article in this volume on the objects of algebra,
or by Jadacki's contribution on the objects of logic, it traverses the whole of
mathematics, starting from discussion on the nature of the complex, irrational
or negative numbers variously defined false, impossible or chimerical.
As for phenomena of temporal inversion, like the acoustic tunnel, or those
involved in the perception of causality that Michotte analysed, these are
entirely coherent with Brentano's metaphysical analyses of the velocity and
direction of perceptive continua. Indeed, many of these phenomena were
already being investigated by experimental psychology at the beginning of this
century. Curiously, current debate in the cognitive sciences displays the same
conflict over the theoretical interpretation of experimental debate that split the
exponents of descriptive psychology: I refer in particular to the conflict
between Graz and Berlin.
All these themes centred, and still centre today, on the concept of representa
tion (or better, the inner stratification of the morphogenesis of the representative
modules), beginning with the first stages of concrete presentations, visual and
auditory presentations in particular.
One of the starting-points of the contemporary cognitive sciences is, in fact,
the assumption that knowledge essentially consists of the manipulation of inner
representations variously defined as neurophysiological states, mental images or
symbolic codifications. From these premises, also on the promptings of
researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence, various theories have
been developed, for example Fodor's connectionism, Johnson-Laird's mental
models, and Fauconnier's mental spaces.11
In general, therefore, a Brentanian or phenomenological programme is
required not only in philosophy but also in various areas of psychophysical
research, examples being the theory of vision and the temporary structure of
spatial representation; the recognition ofform: the analysis of the structure and
formation of mental images and experimental studies of memory; the ecology
of perception, phenomenologically-based structuralism and naive physics; and
finally cognitive semantics as a natural approach to semantics on a representa
tional basisY