Wolfgang Köhler: Form

Wolfgang Köhler was German-American psychologist and phenomenologist. Explore interesting quotes on form.
Wolfgang Köhler: 24 quotes0 likes

“At a given time some concrete forms are simply there in vision, not less than colors and brightnesses.”

Wolfgang Köhler

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 150

“How ‘real’ it is one feels when trying to form other groups…Most people will never get this other grouping as clear, stable, and optically real as the former one.”

Wolfgang Köhler

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 143; About group formation

“If we wish to imitate the physical sciences, we must not imitate them in their contemporary, most developed form; we must imitate them in their historical youth, when their state of development was comparable to our own at the present time. Otherwise we should behave like boys who try to copy the imposing manners of full-grown men without understanding their raison d’être, also without seeing that in development one cannot jump over intermediate and preliminary phases.”

Wolfgang Köhler

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 32

“For the most part similarities of various degrees will occur in one perceptual situation; and then specific perceptual units will be formed not simply because their members resemble each other, but because their mutual resemblance is greater than is that of such members and any other parts of the situation.”

Wolfgang Köhler

Source: Dynamics in Psychology, 1940, p. 135

“Our present knowledge of human perception leaves no doubt as to the general form of any theory which is to do justice to such knowledge: a theory of perception must be a field theory. By this we mean that the neural functions and processes with which the perceptual facts are associated in each case are located in a continuous medium.”

Wolfgang Köhler

Source: Dynamics in Psychology, 1940, p. 55