Gestalt theory: A revolution put on pause? Prospects for a paradigm shift in the psychological sciences

Abstract

This paper will discuss whether there are chances for a paradigm shift, i.e., a shift away from the (almost without much thought) taken-for-granted sequential, from piece-to-whole mainstream understanding of a cognitivist, now almost 70-year old information processing perspective to a perspective that takes as its starting point the whole, and hence meaning. The whole may stand for an object as embedded in its immediately salient as well as inconspicuous environment, where parts cannot be made sense of without knowing and understanding their roles in the larger configurations. It may stand for an organism or an organismic collectivity as embedded in its environment, a person or a collectivity of people in their embedded immediate and phenomenal field, which we will also not understand unless we understand their larger environmental, societal and cultural embeddedness. In today's scientific climate where the mainstream information-processing perspective is serving as an unchallenged, often hidden assumption within neuroscience and computer science, I will look for recent, promising developments which might nonetheless be paving the road to a perspective so long ago proposed by the Gestaltists yet somehow “lost in translation”. In that sense, Gestalt theory, which till today has been widely distorted as a theory that talks about ‘a bunch of grouping principles in (static) vision’, is the very first dynamical theory within the psychological sciences that meticulously proposed this with a firm philosophical grounding, something that is ever more missing within theory building in psychology.