This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with (...) Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Gestalt theory in The Structure of Behavior is central to his entire corpus. Yet commentators exhibit little agreement about what lesson is to be learned from his critique, and provide little exegesis of how his argument proceeds. I fill this exegetical gap. I show that the Gestaltist’s fundamental error is to reify forms as transcendent realities, rather than treating them as phenomena of perceptual consciousness. From this, reductivist errors follow. The essay serves not only as a helpful (...) guide through parts of The Structure of Behavior for newcomers, but also offers a corrective to recent trends in philosophy of mind. Such influential commentators as Hubert Dreyfus, Taylor Carmen, and Evan Thompson have, I argue, risked serious misunderstanding of Merleau-Ponty’s view, by mistakenly treating “circular causality” as central to Merleau-Ponty’s own acausal view of forms. -/- [The version archived at Philpapers is closer to the author's preferred format. Formatting requirements in the published version make the section/subsection hierarchy needlessly difficult to follow. There are some changes to content in the published version. Please cite only the published version.]. (shrink)

The Gestalt psychologists adopted a set of positions on mind-body issues that seem like an odd mix. They sought to combine a version of naturalism and physiological reductionism with an insistence on the reality of the phenomenal and the attribution of meanings to objects as natural characteristics. After reviewing basic positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, we examine the Gestalt position, characterizing it m terms of phenomenal realism and programmatic reductionism. We then distinguish Gestalt philosophy of mind from instrumentalism and (...) computational functionalism, and examine Gestalt attributions of meaning and value to perceived objects. Finally, we consider a metatheoretical moral from Gestalt theory, which commends the search for commensurate description of mental phenomena and their physiological counterparts. (shrink)

J.H. van den Berg was a member of the Utrecht school of phenomenology that flourished in Holland during the 1950s and early 1960s. He was a psychiatrist who had a private practice and he taught at the University of Leiden. Along with other members of the Utrecht school, not all of whom were psychiatrists, he was among the first to apply the insights drawn from existential-phenomenological philosophy to psychology and psychiatry. As with the philosophers, he emphasized that subjectivity was engaged (...) with the world and its activities had to be described. He emphasized that insights into experience as lived, or the phenomenal level, was what was critical for psychologists to understand. (shrink)

This article critically examines the relations between Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and more conventional psychological ideas. It does so by concentrating on Lacan’s notion of the ‘mirror stage’. Lacan and some of his followers have suggested that psychoanalytic theory is ‘beyond psychology’. It is argued that Freud believed that psychoanalytic theory was beyond conventional psychology in a synthetic rather than rejectionist way. Lacan cited the work of orthodox psychologists such as Wolfgang Köhler, James Mark Baldwin and Charlotte Bühler as providing evidential (...) basis for his ideas about the mirror stage. The rhetoric of these citations is examined in detail. It is suggested that Lacan makes a distinction between the ‘facts’ of psychology and the interpretation of the facts. However, close rhetorical examination shows inaccuracies in his citations about the behaviour of children and chimpanzees in reaction to mirror images. Moreover, the evidential basis that he cites is neither supported by contemporary psychology, nor, more seriously, did it suggest what Lacan was claiming at the time of his writing. (shrink)

Konrad Lorenz suggests that adequate grounds for classifying some behaviors as innate are to be found in the results of what he calls “the deprivation experiment“: ”… the experiment of withholding from the young organism information concerning certain well-defined givens of its natural environment.” (Lorenz 1965, p. 83). Thus, a stickleback fish is deprived of the information that its rival has a red belly. The stickleback is then confronted, for the first time, with a red-bellied rival (or a red-bellied dummy). (...) If that stickleback responds with species-typical rival-fighting behavior, then (according to Lorenz) the experiment has established that the stickleback possesses certain innate information about its natural environment. On the other hand, should the stickleback fail to respond in this way, Lorenz tells us that ”…we should not be justified in asserting that this response is normally dependent on learning. (shrink)