Abstract
USING AS RESEARCH TOOLS Gestalt psychology and Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology, and the results of previous chapters as data, we examine Albert Einstein’s thinking that led to the relativity of simultaneity (i.e., creative thinking in the individual), and the genesis of quantum theory during the period 1913–1927 (i.e., the growth of a theory among several scientists). The scenarios of these two episodes in the history of science are developed here in conformity to the guidelines of Gestalt psychology and genetic epistemology, while striving for the historical accuracy in Chapters 1–4. Chapter 5 introduced the portions of Gestalt psychology that will be used here. Regarding genetic epistemology, the direction of the investigation in this chapter is best set by Piaget himself in the epigraph to this chapter.
What occurs when, now and then, thinking really works productively? What happens when, now and then, thinking forges ahead? What is really going on in such a process? . . . Two directions are involved: getting a whole consistent picture, and seeing what the structure of the whole requires for the parts.
M. Wertheimer (1959)
Genetic epistemology attempts to explain knowledge, on the basis of its history, its sociogenesis, and especially the psychological origin of the notions and operations upon which it is based . . . . The fundamental hypothesis of genetic epistemology is that there is a parallelism between progress made in the logical and rational organization of knowledge and the corresponding formative psychological processes.
J. Piaget (1970a)
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Notes
Holton (1973) quite rightly surmised that the “origin of themata will be best approached through studies concerned with the . . . psychological development of concepts in young children.” The ellipses replace the phrase “nature of perception,” which I do not consider as basic enough.
Meyerson (1962) concluded his analysis of conservation laws of mechanics thus: “These principles or laws are, as we see, among the most vast and the most important generalizations to which the human mind has attained to this day.” Although Piaget disagreed fundamentally with Meyerson’s conclusion (regarding conservation laws) that there are facets of reasoning that “will remain incomprehensible, inaccessible to reason, irreducible to purely rational elements” (Myerson), he agreed with Meyerson on the importance of conservation laws.
For other discussions of Piaget’s work in relation to history of science see Kuhn’s “Concept of Cause in the Development of Physics” (Kuhn briefly surveys the notions of cause and explanation through the history of science and finds no parallelisms with those in Piaget’s psychological studies); and Kuhn’s “Structure for Thought Experiments” (with the aid of notions that are theory laden from his view of the growth of science, Kuhn compares the development of the concept of speed from Piaget’s experiments with how Aristotle and Galileo treat this concept)—both of these essays are in Kuhn (1977). See also Bohm (1965) for an analysis of “Physics and Perception” in which Bohm combines genetic epistemology with notions of perception to argue that “our actual mode of perception of the world [is closer to that] suggested by relativistic physics than it is to what is suggested by prerelativistic physics.” Bohm, however, overemphasizes notions of perceptions not posed by Piaget (in genetic epistemology perception is a derivative notion), and the usefulness of genetic epistemology is to construct notions of permanence or of invariance. The upshot is a rather positivistic view of scientific research that, nevertheless, is intrinsically interesting for its foray into cognitive psychology.
It is apropos here to outline Gruber’s (1974) application of Piaget’s genetic epistemology to the case study of Darwin. Gruber uses Darwin’s B, C, D, E, M, and N notebooks from 1837–1839 to analyze the transformation of Darwin’s ideas on natural selection. A gradual transformation of Darwin’s thinking can be discerned that exhibits the assimilation/accommodation mechanism with concommitant imagery both representative (e.g., Darwin’s “tree of life”) and metaphorical (e.g., wedging and artificial selection). In the course of the transformations, according to Gruber, there are sets of ideas that “remain more or less intact even though the larger system of which they are a part changes appreciably; I therefore call them invariant groups” (italics in original; Gruber (1974). An invariant group in one of Darwin’s early theories is conservation of the approximate number of extant species. Gruber refers to this sort of group as a “conservation schema” which covers also a “commitment to search for continuity in nature.” A second invariant group is the “equilibration schema” which is comprised of adaptation, adaptive change and continuous series of forms. From this analysis Gruber has drawn useful insights on a theory as a “way of handling the personal flow of information.”
Hanson also took certain laws to be conceptual Gestalts or pattern statements. For example, Newton’s law of gravitation, writes Hanson, is a conceptual Gestalt because it “made the laws of Kepler cohere for Newton as they did not cohere for Kepler himself . . . “ (Hanson, 1958).
Compare with B.L. Whorf (1956), who writes: “Newtonian space, time and matter are no intuitions. They are recepts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.”
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Miller, A.I. (1984). Scenarios in Gestalt Psychology and Genetic Epistemology. In: Imagery in Scientific Thought Creating 20th-Century Physics. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0545-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0545-3_8
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