| Summary: | "The present book has emerged from work within a department that included both philosophy and psychology, and discouraged the exclusivity that inevitably accompanies strict specialization and rigid compartmentalization. This assignment provided an opportunity to view epistemology from the standpoint of a psychologist and to approach the psychology of perception with the eyes of an epistemologist. While such double vision sometimes resulted in a confused blurring of images, it also seemed, on occasion, to give rise to the conceptual analogue of stereoscopic vision: matters that from either standpoint alone appeared flat and unprofitable acquired for the first time a surprising solidity and sharpness of contour. The psychologists' facts gained intelligibility from the philosophers' theories, while the conceptual schemes of the philosophers received substance and relevance from the observations of the psychologists. That the two groups are widely divergent in their language, concepts, methods, and results is evident. Some philosophical theories, though enormously subtle, derive as a rule from casually performed uncontrolled observation. Some psychological doctrines, on the other hand, result from carefully planned experiments, but are developed with a disdain for theoretical rigor that cannot but exasperate the philosopher. It would be futile to consider the question as to which party stands to learn more from the other. There seems little reason to doubt that psychologists could gain considerably from the work of the philosophers, and especially from that part of the history of philosophy which constitutes the history of pre-twentieth century psychology. It is my hope that some suggestions as to what philosophy could contribute to the study of perception is conveyed by the first part of this book, especially the two chapters on gestalt psychology. I have been especially concerned, however, with the contributions that psychology can make to philosophy. Instead of proceeding from the top down, by allowing certain philosophical tenets to force us to structure the psychological facts in a certain way, I have preferred to move in the reverse direction by showing how various observations of the laboratory point the way to a certain philosophic approach. It is urged repeatedly that the framework of an effete tradition tends to stand between us and the data of observation, and it is suggested that the damage done by the armchair speculative psychologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can best be undone by the experimental psychology of the twentieth. The present undertaking is by design very limited. No survey of the large field of the psychology of perception is attempted, no complete epistemology is aimed at, and no final solutions are offered. I have been content to concentrate upon what seems to me to be a cardinal error of recent Anglo-American philosophy, with a view to showing that the coercive "facts"--Whether "atomic," "brute," or simply "hard"--which an entire generation of philosophers has been trained to accept at face value are actually hypothetical constructs, that the "indubitables" of the armchair are not to be found in the laboratory, and that psychological science has demonstrated once and for all that the cognitive enterprise is immensely more complex and far more engaging than the simple game of observation of givens and subsumption under laws which scientistic positivism has so frequently recommended. That the present approach leads to no final philosophy is a conclusion rather than an oversight"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).
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