Status Updates From Gestalt Psychology: The Def...

The behavouristic explanation of learning pretends to be close to the explanations of the natural sciences with employing a sort of mechanism that establishes a connection between two related mental events. Yet, Köhler points out, they simplify the process too much, ignoring the fact that even in nature, a connection can only establish itself between entities of a certain inner configuration.

Köhler's criticism of behaviourism hits the mark. He truly anticipated a lot of Merleau-Ponty's solutions to the inadequacies of contemporary psychology by hinting at a new framework that will transcend the Cartesian dualism that gave birth to numerous seemingly insolvable contradictions. Yet his book remains more critical and it wasn't until Merleau-Ponty that the framwork was explicated.

Since I'm searching for a synthesis between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, it's really nice to see what their common denominator in their understanding of gestalt psychology had to say about the problems of contemporary psychology. Runs really close to Phenomenology of Perception's quest of finding a synthesis between the empiricist and idealist traditions of pscychology.