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Wolfgang Köhler Quotes

1887–1967 Germany

Wolfgang Köhler (21 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

Germany
Psychologists

Also known as: Wolfgang Kohler

Random Wolfgang Köhler quote

9 quotes

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

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a chimpanzee kept in solitude is not a real chimpanzee at all.

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.

I do not deny that objective experience is imbued with acquired meaning in many respects... Probably no experience escapes from the influence of meaning.

Physics is becoming the study of organization. In this way ... it will converge with biology and psychology.

At the present time it is of course quite customary for physicists to trespass on chemical ground, for mathematicians to do excellent work in physics, and for physicists to develop new mathematical procedures... Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science.

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.

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.

[Thinking] respond to an objective constellation of millions of stimuli by developing, first of all, an organised field, many and perhaps the most essential properties of which have no physical partner among the single stimuli.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Wolfgang Köhler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.