CAN THE SUBJECT CREATE HIS WORLD?
by Wolfgang Metzger (1974)
1st part
Perception in the System of Psychology [p.
57:]
In talking to younger psychologists, one
finds that many of them seem to believe that
perception is something at the surface of
the mind, a kind of borderline problem, and
that preoccupation with it is obsolete. They
look with disdain at every psychological
problem that does not at least deal with
personality, motivation, or social intercourse.
But when discussing problems in which simple
facts of stimulus and reaction play a role,
as for example in behavior therapy, they
prove that they would have done well to occupy
themselves a little more with the fundamentals
of perception. It is hard to get them clear
on the differences between a stimulus in
the physiological sense, such as impingement
on receptor cells, and a valence or Aufforderungscharakter
in the sense of Kurt LEWIN, or an IRM in
the sense of ethology. Obviously they have
never been confronted with facts that can
only be understood by carefully distinguishing
between an impact on a sense organ and a
characteristic of a percept that has come
into existence through such impacts, and
which therefore cannot again act on a sense
organ of the same organism but only on the
perceiving subject. Subjects correspond somehow
to organisms, but are percepts themselves
existing within the same phenomenal world
as the objects to whose valences or IRMs
they react. Psychologists of the younger
generation tend to forget that, taken strictly,
all social interaction is primarily interaction
between percepts, interaction which only
by cybernetic mechanisms is transferred to
the participating organisms and copied by
them, so that the interaction of the organisms
is but a mediating correlate of what happens
in the phenomenal worlds of the interacting
subjects. And if this is the case, the theory
of perception plays a fundamental role for
every other field of psychology (cf. METZGER,
1965, 1968,
1969; GRAEFE, 1961).
[p. 58:]
Objects and Percepts
Phenomenal worlds are not exact reflections
of the physical world. What is lacking in
them, if compared with it, can be seen in
any physics textbook. But on the other hand
they have quite a number of essential characteristics
that cannot be found in the physical world:
the secondary and tertiary qualities of percepts
and situations and the valences and tensions
existing between them have no counterpart
in the corresponding physical facts. But
still they represent the physical facts so
reliably, and their deviations from them
correspond so highly, that different subjects
in spite of their different standpoints can
consider their respective phenomenal worlds
as identical, that is, as, for all practical
purposes, one and the same objective reality.
How do these phenomenal worlds come about?
The question has at least partially been
answered by psychophysics, if this term is
taken in a sonewhat loose sense. The decisive
point is that there is no direct communication
between physical objects and percepts corresponding
to them, but that between them there is a
more or less long and complicated chain of
causation whose critical link is the stimulation
of receptors, that is, the initial penetration
of the organism. This point is decisive.
For the only basis of a phenomenal world
is the totality of stimulations of millions
and millions of receptor cells in their ever-changing
distribution, as called forth by the changes
in the objects themselves and by changes
in the relations between objects and organisms
as caused by the subject itself, whether
impulsively or intentionally.
Percepts are never structurally identical
with the varying configurations on the receptor
level. Percepts are units or wholes coherent
in themselves and segregated from each other;
stimuli are not. Percepts are tri-dimensional
and move in a tri-dimensional space; underlying
stimuli are distributed over two-dimensional
surfaces of the body, such as retinae or
the skin of the fingertips. Percepts have
(approximately) constant attributes such
as size, shape, surface color, and so on,
just as their physical counterparts do, while
the underlying stimulus configurations vary
continuously. For these reasons percepts
are in decisive characteristics more like
objects than like the stimuli intercalated
between objects and percepts. Thus some thinkers
(such as Max SCHELER) have been inclined
to assume a direct, extrasensory connection
between the two ends of the chain. Another
attempt at accounting for the astonishing
correspondence between the two ends of the
causal chain between object and percept that
must be [p. 59:] noted here is J. J. GIBSON's;
if I do not misunderstand him he holds that
this chain is circular in the sense that
it finally returns to ist starting point
(GIBSON, 1966). The formulations of these
authors raise many new and unsolved problems.
Therefore the conventional conception is
preferable according to which there is neither
direct connection nor identity between object
and percept. This leaves the basic theoretical
question of how and by what factors varying
stimulus configurations are transformed into
stable percepts.
A World Created by Mental Acts
The oldest source in which it is held that
the ego creates its own world by an act of
will is J. G. FICHTE's Introduction to Philosophy
(Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre,
1797), in which he tries to interpret KANTian
epistemology. But his arguments are so highly
speculative and so far from empirical evidence
that in this connection he shall only be
mentioned.
Twenty years later, in 1818, Arthur SCHOPENHAUER
dealt with a concrete problem of perception.
His problem is how it happens that objects
are seen where they are, instead of at the
place of the physiological processes in the
retina or in the cortex. According to his
hypothesis, the subject follows the light
rays back to the point on the surface of
an object from which they diverge to the
foveae of the two eyes, and, recognizing
the angle between them, is able to reconstruct
its place. With this, he in a way anticipates
the theory of judgement or inference brought
forward by HELMHOLTZ in about 1860.
The starting point of HELMHOLTZ's theory
is that invariably the nervous stimulations
(we should say excitations) are directly
perceived, but never the objects themselves.
(Or in a more general and less hypothetical
formulation: the immediate basis of object
perception is invariably the sum of stimulations
of receptor cells but never the objects themselves.)
HELMHOLTZ continues his argument as follows:
"But there are mental activities that
enable us to form an idea as to the possible
causes of the observed actions on the senses.
In their result, these activities are equivalent
to a conclusion or inference from analogy";
this is the well-known theory of unconscious
inference. (From this follows his explanation
of visual illusions as "erroneous interpretations"
[Urteilstäuschungen].) HELMHOLTZ does not
deny that there are certain differences between
the hypothesized analogical inference made
by the subject and his observable free acts
of conscious [p. 60] inference: the former
are instantaneous; they are unconscious,
and
- as Wolfgang KÖHLER (1913) adds - concerned
with unconscious material; they are irresistible,
that is, cannot be corrected by better knowledge.
There is one more fundamental difference
that was not yet known to HELMHOLTZ and KÖHLER:
conscious inferential thinking becomes the
more difficult the higher the complexity
of the problem situation grows. However,
with the phenomena that HELMHOLTZ intended
to explain by unconscious inference, this
relation is exactly reversed: the more complex
the situation, the more irresistible and
unambiguous the effect (METZGER, 1934).
Actually there are many more problems left
open. Everybody knows what "an idea
to a possible cause" is, and that an
idea such as a pure thought or a mental image
is quite different from a true percept, that
is from a thing of our environment that can
be seen and manipulated. And the question
arises how this special kind of idea is related
to the palpable things in our surroundings
through processes originating in the retina
and skin receptors. Another problem is the
unavoidable inference that the subject must
sit in the middle of the organism and from
there observe all the stimulations around
him, forming ideas as to their possible causes,
ideas which by a rather miraculous additional
act are "projected" or "externalized"
beyond the surface of the organism into its
nearer or farther surroundings.
KÖHLER (1913) points to the fact that no
unconscious inferences are assumed by HELMHOLTZ
if a plausible objective explanation for
a phenomenon exists, as in the case of color
mixture. Actually, HELMHOLTZ´s theory applies
to all those phenomena which cannot be understood
without the assumption of lateral interaction
of simultaneous nervous processes (Querfunktionen,
as WERTHEIMER called it in 1912). Lateral
interaction was not yet believed to be possible
in the nervous system at HELMHOLTZ`s time.
Unconscious reasoning as well as unconscious
sensations were constructs that could be
dispensed with as soon as this possibility
had been acknowledged.
Nevertheless, HELMHOLTZ´s theory is still
alive. More than forty years after KÖHLER`s
criticism it has been revived by TAUSCH (1954),
KRISTOF (1961), and GREGORY
(1962), but was refuted again by ZANFORLIN
(1967), FISHER (1968), and METZGER et. al.
(1970). One more instance of a relapse into
HELMHOLTZian speculations can be found in
an article on decision [p. 61:] theory by
SWETS et al. (1964). We owe to these authors
not only the wellknown concept of sensitivity,
but also the concept of choice of criterion
in threshold observations, which means a
valuable step forward in this field. But
their decision theory makes sense only in
the peculiar situation of threshold exposure,
when the subject, presented with the task
of detecting something hardly perceptible,
is forced to make decisions observable by
himself and by the experimenter. But the
authors go further and try to apply their
new-found principle to perception in general,
with paradoxical consequences. Their generalization
would imply that, for example, (1) while
looking at a human face, a crowd in the street,
a landscape, or a bunch of flowers, thousands
of decisions would be necessary at one and
the same moment, and that (2) all these decisions
would never be noticed - in constrast to
the observable deciding activity in threshold
experiments.
But the whole waste of unconscious activities
need not be assumed, because if the perceiver
contents himself with clearly supraliminal
differences, as is the case in all naive
everyday vision in which no searching attidude
is maintained, there is nothing to decide.
The most recent publication in which HELMHOLTZ´s
theory expressly adopted is "Die Psychophysiologischen
Grundlagen des Wahrnehmens" ("The
psysiological foundations of perceiving")
by Egon KÜPPERS, a German psychiatrist (1971).
But the abundance of fictitious mental activities
introduced by him goes far beyond HELMHOLTZ.
There are still other types of mental-act-theories
of perception. In his Sinnespsychologische
Untersuchungen (Sensory Psychological Investigations)
of 1917 (which, by the way, are full of interesting
and reliable observations), Julius PIKLER
offers a theory of binocular depth perception
according to which the subject is able to
observe separately the two retinal images
of the right and left eyes, to interpret
them as geometrical projections of solid
bodies, to compare them and from their deviations
to draw conclusions as to the distance and
shape of the object represented by them.
The "Komplextheorie", first brought
forward by MÜLLER (1903, 1923) and later
with slight alterations by PETERMANN (1929,
1931), deserves special mention, along with
the "Produktionstheorie" of MEINONG
and BENUSSI (1904). These are theories of
unit formation and unit segregation in perception
that agree in the assumption of a special
mental activity on he part of the subject.
He organizes the perceptive field out of
the crowd of unconnected elementary sensations
by "producing" real - as opposed
[p. 62:] to merely imagined - relations between
them or by directing collective or unifying
attention to them.
These theories have the advantage of being
based on activities of the subject that under
certain conditions can actually be observed.
Everybody knows what attention is, and can
discriminate between an attentive and an
inattentive state of mind. Beyond this, everybody
knows the difference between seeing, for
example, four points either as the corners
of a square or as the ends of a cross, and
can experience how by a change of attitude
one of these apprehensions of the configuration
can be changed into the other. (By the way,
these two are not the only alternatives!)
In the theories of production or collectice
attention this observable unifying mental
activity is generalized to all cases of unit
formation, and where it - as in the vast
majority of cases - cannot be observed, it
is thought to work unconsciously. BÜHLER
(1913) and KÖHLER (1926) have pointed to
the numerous facts that contradict such assumptions.
The range of deliberate unification proved
to be surprisingly narrow; unit formation
in innumerable cases does not follow intentional,
and to that extent observable, unifying or
segregating efforts, and so many objective
"cues" controlling attention behavior
must be introduced by these authors right
from the outset (MÜLLER, 1903), that finally
the concept of attention is reduced to an
x that occasions the subject to build very
definite units, an x that can be omitted
without any loss if the "cues"
of these theories are considered as factors
acting immediately upon the perceptive field.
To sum up, none of the know theories of "creating"
one´s own world by mental acts has proved
to be adequate to facts.
A World Created by Overt Action
Theories according to which the phenomenal
world originates in overt action by the subject
have two philosophical roots, one epistemological,
one ideological.
As to the first, it is the notion that "the
soul" or mind is nonspatial, as was
held by DESCARTES, and that attention can
be but punctual, for in a nonspatial mind
no two things can be present simultaneously.
Wholes can therefore be built up only through
the following three steps: (1) by scanning,
that is, by apprehending one element after
another; (2) by keeping all those elements
in mind simultaneously (at present we would
say in short-term-memory); and (3) by finally
unifying or synthesizing them into a whole,
as KANT points out in the introduction of
the first edition of his
[p. 63:]
"Kritik der reinen Vernunft" (Critique
of Pure Reason). This notion was handed down
through LOTZE (1842, 1856) to WUNDT (1908)
and finally to McDOUGALL, PIAGET (cf. AEBLI,
1963), and to Soviet psychology.
WUNDT specified it into the assumption that
perception of shape, not only tactile perception
but also visual, comes about by tracing contours
with the sense organ - with the fingertips
or with the fovea. About fifty years later
PIAGET renewed this assumption, this time
not for the percept but for the concept;
which structutally makes no difference. The
concept of a thing, touched or seen, is,
according to PIAGET, the total of movements
by which it was explored.
Still, in 1971, this assumption is repeated
as an established truth (see KÜPPERS). But
as early as 1902, G. M. STRATTON had definitely
disproved it by recording eye movements and
showing that eye movements by which a subject
tries to follow a simple outline, are anything
but copies of that outline, and vary trial
to trial in an unpredictable way. STRATTON´s
experiment was repeated in Münster a few
years ago with different configurations and
instructions but the same result. This could
have been derived immediately from our knowledge
of voluntary eye movements - which obviously
has not so far been integrated into our theory
of visual organization. Without exception,
voluntary eye movements are jumps that cannot
be controlled in detail by the subject. During
these jumps, as a consequence of the blurring
effect of quick displacements of contours
over the retinae, nothing can be seen. In
other words, reception of visual structures
is possible only for the eye at rest, and
that means simultaneously. This is why a
whole landscape can be recognized during
a lightning flash in the night, though it
lasts no longer than one-tenth of a second
; that is, much less than the reaction time
of the oculomotor system, so that it is dark
again before the slightest movement of the
eyes can be set going.
In haptics the situation is somewhat different.
Because of the tiny area of the touching
fingertips and the greater velocity of local
adaptation, there is practically no recognition
of structures without gross movements. But
only by chance are these tracing movements.
Recognition of structure is possible without
tracing, as BÜRKLEN
(1917) has shown and my own unpublished observations
have confirmed.
The ideological root of creation-theories
in perception can best be seen in a statement
of PETERMANN when he criticizes Gestalt psychologists,
saying that for them the perceiving subjects
is "nothing but" a passive "battlefield
of stimuli," to which one could reply,
"Why should it be
[p. 64]
otherwise?" When WEIZSÄCKER (in 1940)
propounds his "Gestaltkreis" theory,
general anthropological considerations play
a much greater role than the presentation
of empirical data. There is a remarkable
correspondence between WEIZSÄCKER´s views
and those of American transactionalists who
also try to recenter perception research
on what is done by the perceiver, and in
this connection more than once emphasize
that "each one of us ... creates for
himself the world in which he has his life´s
experiences" (ITTELSON, 1960, p. 19).
But this is not meant as seriously as it
sounds. it is preceded by the remark that
"if everyone perceived entirely differently
from everyone else, it is difficult to imagine
how any agreement or social activity could
be possible" (p. 16). The fact that
agreement is possible is accounted for not
only by common interests and purposes but
also by neighboring and to that extent overlapping
positions including a similar orientation
in space and time - which, in order for different
perceivers to assimilate their worlds to
one another, must not be created but found
(cf. E. J. GIBSON, 1966). But the last part
of the sentence is not the author´s but the
reader´s remark. The convergence toward familiar
ways of perception research goes on when
the concept of equivalent configurations
of "externality-impingement" is
introduced and experimental work on visual
"depth cues" is reported in detail.
These cues play a role exactly analogous
to the unity cues in MÜLLER´s and PETERMANN´s
theories of collective attention here controlling
visual depth to such a degree that there
is not much freedom for creativity left,
except in the case where cues have contradictory
effects. The role attributed to past experience
in the origin of cues is about the same as
in other American perception research. Finally
the creativity of the perceiver comes down
to the fact that "the experienced consequences
of every action provide a check on the perceptual
prediction on which the action was based,"
just as in the process of scientific inquiry
(p. 35), which would not make any sense if
the perceiver´s world were his free creation.
By these arguments "transaction"
is reduced to the concept of an interplay
between acting and observing objective consequences
of action in which it makes no more sense
to ask: which came first, the chicken or
the egg. That there are stimulating new perspectives,
as well as the remnants of nineteenth-century
introspectionism, in transactionalist psychology
is shown by the role that is attributed to
the mystical activity of "externalization,"
which was shown to be an unnecessary construct
by KÖHLER as early as 1929.
The last and most important ideologically
determined branch of percep-
[p. 65:]
tion research to be mentioned here is of
the Soviets. The emphasis laid by them on
the role of overt activity of the perceiver
is unmistakably derived from the central
position that "labor" plays in
their whole philosophy of life (cf. SOKOLOV,
1966; ZINCHENKO, 1966). Hence their preference
for intentional operations such as searching,
analyzing, matching, arranging, counting,
copying, building up out of given material,
operations that furnish more thorough, more
detailed or more exact information on objects
that have been perceived already or are being
perceived during this additional scrutiny.
The True Meaning of Action in Perception
If instead of philosophizing we try to make
a list of bodily activities, concious and
unconscious, that occur during perception,
we get the following collection (which is
perhaps not quite complete): Receptors are
exposed to stimulation by certain objects
(as by looking about, grasping, bending to
a keyhole or climbing an a fence in order
to peep, also by turning over the leaves
of a book); the area accessible to receptors
is enlarged (as by wandering about in a large
building or in the streets of a city, or
by groping in the dark, also by traveling);
sense organs or objects are moved so that
stimulus configurations shift to the most
sensitive part of the receptor (as in fixation
reaction of the eye or by bringing objects
to the fingertips or to the tip of the tongue);
receptivity of the sense organ is optimized
(as for example in the eye by accommodation,
convergence, retinal adaption, modifying
width of pupil, and so on); the head is moved
unintentionally so that by motion parallax
the near and the distant can be distinguished
(TSCHERMAK, 1939; KLIX, 1962); the same effect
can be reached by passive transportation
(GIBSON, 1950); the head turns and tilts
unintentionally so that the source of a sound
can be localized not only to the left or
right side but also above or below and to
the front - or back - of the perceiver (WALLACH,
1939); local adaption slows down and perceived
structures are prevented from fading (for
example, by the minute unconscious oscillatory
movements of the eyes [DITCHBURN, et al.,
1952] or the intentional gross rubbing of
the fingers in haptics, as in Braille reading
[BÜRKLEN, 1917]; qualities of the material
are abstracted (as roughness by rubbing,
hardness by pressing or biting, elasticity
by bending and so on); details of a perceived
structure are intentionally explored by wandering
eyes or systematic scanning, verbal, tactual,
and visual, sometimes, but not necessarily
including tracing; outer conditions of perception
[p. 66]
are improved (as in moving a watch toward
the ear, stopping one´s breath, shutting
the windows that open on a noisy street,
taking eye glasses on or off (or wiping them),
turning on a light, going toward windows,
blinking, sniffing, leaving and re-entering
a room in order to recognize a smell, licking
a finger and lifting it up in order to feel
a faint air draft, shaking a hollow object
or lifting it in order to find out whether
it contains something, and so on, rolling
an egg in order to find out whether it is
raw or boiled, lighting a match and holding
it to a piece of fabric in order to know
whether it is wool, and so on); objects are
subjected to planned operations in order
to know them more exactly
(as matching, arranging, counting, copying,
building them up out of given material and
so forth); one´s own limbs are moved in order
to observe them (as in the child preparing
for voluntary movement by building up visual-kinesthetic
coordination, or in an adult restoring it
after experimental disturbance [HELD, 1966;
SMITH and SMITH,
1966]; music is accompanied with rhythmic
movements; music or words are recited, written
characters are reproduced in order to know
them better.
There is no sharp borderline between "natural"
and more or less impulsive testing activities,
on the one hand, and planned and systematic
testing methods as developed in natural sciences,
on the other.
All these activities have one trait in common:
none of them "produce" or "create"
anything. their very purpose is to make things
react in various ways and thus lay open their
nature and, at the same time, to optimize
the receptivity of sense organs in order
to draw from them as much information as
possible.
The Influence of Emotion and Motivation
The above statements about the nature of
the subjects´s activities in perception are
not invalidated by pointing to the modifications
of the perceptive field by "subjective"
factors such as emotion and motivation. It
is true, the conception of a causal chain
leading from the object through the sense
organs and the afferent nerves to the psychophysical
niveau and thus calling forth the world of
percepts is a simplification. Percepts are
not mere effects of stimulation in an empty
field. Rather they are reactions of the organism
to the impingements coming through the senses
and, to that extent, depend on the nature
and momentary state of the organism, as well
as on the nature of stimulation. Considering
this, we must not be surprised about the
modifications of our phenomenal perceptual
world in
[p. 67]
consequence of changing motivational states:
the recentering, the standing out of objects
relevant to these states, the acquisition
of varying valences by these objects, and
so on. But all this has nothing to do with
our problem, for the following reasons.
(1) These changes are not due to an activity
of the subject, be it impulsive or intentional.
They follow immediately from a modification
of the nervous system itself.
(2) These changes are not instances of creativity.
They come about by an increased (or diminished)
sensitivity to specific objective facts by
which the efficacy of their influence on
the subject is enhanced (or lessened). In
the moment when, instead of this increase
of sensitivity, creative processes in the
strict sense of the word take place, perception
becomes prejudiced, distorted, illusionary,
and in higher degrees hallucinatory and paranoid,
that is, it is no longer cognition in the
sense of reproduction of reality but a kind
of daydream occasioned by the present stimulation
and therefore no longer fit for information
and mutual understanding.
Conclusion: The Less Creation, the More Information
Perception is not a way of adding new facts
to the world - this is the task of art and
invention - but to find what there is before
perceiving begins, but which has not yet
been found by the present perceiver. In everyday
perception the possibility of changing the
observed object by the very act of observation
need not bother us, though it plays a role
in psychotherapeutic situations. There the
endeavor to find out what is the matter with
the patient may initiate real changes in
him, so that after "observation,"
in some cases, he is no longer the same person
as before. Apart from this particular case,
in a perceiver creativity can only consist
in inventing better and better methods of
putting questions to phenomena and of making
them answer these questions. But finally
everything depends on listening to the answers.
a judge who is talking all the time instead
of having the witness speak does not get
the information he needs.
To state the decisive point explicitly once
more: the phenomenal or perceived world is
one of the most ingenious inventions of organisms.
These cannot directly orient themselves in
their wider physical surroundings. But they
acquire this possibility by a detour. They
develop a kind of enclave within themselves,
in which through the sensory apparatus a
copy of the surroundings as well as a copy
of the organism itself is built up. Between
these copies - the phenomenal world and the
phenomenal
[p. 68]
ego - the interaction exists that is lacking
between the organism and its physical surroundings.
By connecting the subject with the executive
by cybernetic means, the organism becomes
able to act and react adequately also in
and to its wider physical surroundings. But
if this is the case, the appliance will function
mostre satisfactorily only if the processes
representing the surroundings are controlled
from outside as exclusively as possible,
that meand, if interference from the side
of the subject is minimized. From this it
can be understood what it means to be passive
when perceiving, and even to be a "battle-field
of stimuli." This kind of passivity,
which to some of us, as it seems, is beneath
human dignity, is the presupposition of prosperous
action, particularly of group interaction
and of successfully improving the world when
we find that is should be better.
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