explain introspection as according to the gestalt theory?

-- Manoucheka Emmanuel (BlueNvey1@yahoo.com), April 13, 2004

Answers

I don't think that Gestaltists had any particular explanation of introspection. What did you have in mind?

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), April 13, 2004.

Manoucheka Emmanuel e-mailed to me:
"Im doing a paper on Gestalt Psychology and i found some stuff on introspection and i wasnst sure what it had to do with Gestalt psy. But how would you compare gestalt Psychology with Behaviorism?"

And I responded:
Where did you find it? You have to be careful with the term "introspection." It was used mainly as a pejorative term by behaviorists to paint everyone who wasn't a behaviorist with the same brush, even though other schools of thought differred one from another in myriad ways. Behaviorists might have claimed that Gestaltists "endorsed" introspection only because Gestaltists were willing to ask people what they saw when viewing, e.g., an illusory figure, but that's a far cry from the detailed, analytical, and ultimately unreliable introspective research that, say, Titchener did.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), April 15, 2004.

You might have a look at pp. 420-421 (mistakenly given as pp. 419-420 in the index) of Wolfgang Köhler's "Scientists from Europe and Their New Environment," reprinted in Henle, M. (1971). _The selected papers of Wolfgang Köhler_ New York: Liveright. (The original, for which I do not have the correct pp. numbers, was published in Crawford, R. (1953). _The cultural migration: The European scholar in America_. U. Penn. Press.)

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), April 18, 2004.

Introspection was a method used by structuralist and we all know that the premises of structuralism was a bit different to that of the Gestaltist.

-- joseph yusiong (jpty_3302@yahoo.com), September 30, 2004.