Background
Köhler, Wolfgang was born in 1887 in Tallin, Estonia.
Köhler, Wolfgang was born in 1887 in Tallin, Estonia.
Universities of ubingen and Bonn. Studied physics (under y*ax Planck) and psychology (under Karl ■ (urnpf) at University of Berlin. PhD on psycholof hearing.
Laught psychology and philosophy, University of
Berlin. 1913-1920, Director, Anthropoid Research Station, Prussian Academy of Sciences, Canary Islands. 1922, Director, Psychological Institute.
Professor of Philosophy, University of Berlin. Taught psychology at Swarthmore College and Dartmouth College, USA. 1959, Visiting Research Professor, Dartmouth College.
London: Macmillan &Company Ltd, pp. 113-35. Boring, E. G. ( 1930) ‘The Gestalt pyschology and the Gestalt movement’, American Journal of Psychology, 42: 308-315, Ithaca; NY: Cornell University. Ellis, W. D. (1938) A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Kegan Paul. Trench, Trubner. Hamlyn, D. W. (1957) The Psychology of Perception, New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Katz, D. (1950) Gestalt Psychology: Its Nature and Significance, trans. Robert Tyson, New York: Ronald. Nagel. E. (1961) The Structure of Science, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 380-97. Petermann, B. (1929) Die Wertheimer-Koffka-KöhIersehe Gestalt-theory, Leipzig. Riser, O. L. ( 1931 ) ‘The logic of Gestalt psychology’. Psychological Review 38: 359-68. Robinson, D. N. (1978) ‘Thomas Reid’s Gestalt psychology’ in T. L. Beauchamp and S. Barker, Thomas Reid, Philadelphia: Philosophical Monographs. Wolfgang Köhler was a leading Gestalt psychologist whose wide-ranging interests included physics, animal intelligence, the philosophy and psychology of perception, linguistic theory, epistemology, value theory and the mind-body problem. He founded with Wertheimer. Koffka and others the journal Psychologische Forschung, which became the major journal of Gestalt psychology for several years. Although not Jewish, he published a letter in a Berlin newspaper strongly criticizing the Nazis after their rise to power. It was shortly after this that he moved to the USA. His William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1934 were published as The Place of Value in a World of Fact (1938 ). A controversial character, Köhler was throughout his life a passionate advocate of Gestalt psychology. Influenced both by Husserl’s phenomenology and by the insights of physics, he sought to apply the central insight of Gestalt psychology—that the whole is different from the sum of its parts to a wide range of problems not only in psychology but in physics, biology and philosophy. Gestalt psychology had been widely criticized on the grounds that, contrary to its key assertion, the whole could never be different from the sum of its parts. Köhler sought to counter this by showing that even in physics many systems are recognized in which the properties of the parts of the system depend on the state of the system as a whole. Such systems range from large-scale entities such as the solar system through to the electrostatic fields of laboratory experiments. They are quite unlike mere machines, the properties of which, in Kohler’s philosophy, are indeed rigidly determined by the properties of their parts. Such systems, moreover, have a further property in common with psychological Gestalten, that of dynamic self-regulation. Psychological systems, Köhler argued, such as perception, memory and intelligence, are appropriately explored in terms of a dynamical rather than a mechanical model, and it was this which Gestalt psychology supplied. The holism of Gestalt psychology underpins a number of Kohler’s philosophical theories. In The Place of Values in a World of Fact he developed a general notion of the ‘requiredness’ of experienced phenomena. Köhler was not concerned with the nature of value as such. Requiredness’ was the general property of ‘tending to completion’ by which the Gestalt is characterized: for example, a circle with a small segment missing tends to be seen as a complete circle. Similarly, we are often aware that our recollection of, say, someone’s name is incorrect before we recall the correct name. Phenomena such as these are interpretable as instances of the whole being different from the sum of its parts: something is required for completion of the mental phenomenon, something which is not given in the features of the experience itself. Evaluation, Köhler argued, as the direct perception of what ought to be, is but a special case of this requiredness of the phenomenal world. Köhler made no attempt to develop a detailed theory of particular kinds of value, such as moral or aesthetic. He regarded his ideas merely as a general framework for the work of philosophers m these particular fields. However he made larger claims in other philosophical areas. Thus he believed that his notion of requiredness provided a solution for the problems raised by the Humean theory of causality as regularity of connection. In Kohler’s view causation is not inferred from observing effects regularly following causes- Rather it is a direct perception in which, by analogy with the circle closing, cause is demanded by or required of effect m order to complete the phenomenal experience and hence its objective counterpart. His account of the mind-body problem illuS' trates a different element in his thinking, h,s theory of the ‘isomorphism’ of the phenomenal and the physical. He distinguished between phenomena on the one hand, and nature on the other. Among the latter we can distinguish states of the brain and other physical things. All three, however—phenomena, brain states and states ot the outside world—to the extent that they are related, will be isomorphic or similar in forma white square in a black field in the physical worm will appear phenomenally as a white square in a black field which in turn will be represented by a corresponding ‘white square m isomorphism docs not claim that white square^ black field brain states are the same ‘kind of thing as white square/black field states of the world. Its claim is rather that the formal relations obtaining between states of the world is preserved in the corresponding relations between states of the brain. Köhler acknowledged that phenomena and brain states might one day be shown to be the same; to this extent he was a monist. But in msisting on the distinctness of the physical and Phenomenal he was an epistemological dualist. The mind-body problem, though, he regarded as a Pseudo-problem. It was a problem about the location of percepts: in one sense these are inside the body; m another sense they are outside the body. But the body is a percept among others. Hence we should speak rather of percepts being located both in the phenomenal space which includes the Phenomenal body, and in the physical space which •ncludes the physical brain. According to this way °f speaking, Köhler claimed, the sense in which the phenomenal page is outside my phenomenal Body is no more problematic than the sense in vvhich it is on the phenomenal table. Köhlers psychological theories were widemnging and complex. He rejected behaviourism as failing to recognize the reality of subjective experience; but he also criticized introspectionism as putting theory before the facts—the introspectionist simply denies the reality of such experiences as 'seeing' the circle with a gap in it as a complete circle. Gestalt theory, he believed, linked with his principle of isomorphem, provided an appropriate qualitative psychol- °8y within which to explore both the content of Phenomenal experience and its physiological bas‘sPhilosophically Köhler has been accused of oversimplification. His account of the mindorain problem, for instance, begs the key question °f the relationship between physical object and Percept, a relationship which is in some respects at °dds with his principle of isomorphism. As a Psychologist, his studies of insight and other richly cognitive performances in apes helped to uiaintain interest in complex mental operations i ring the behaviourist period. His ideas stimuated many useful hypotheses and they remain a m°del for the emergent philosophical psychology °f the new cognitive sciences.