Intuition in the Scientific Process and the Intuitive Error of Science by Hayo Siemsen, Ernst Mach Institute for

Philosophy of Science, INK, FH Emden/Leer (University of Applied Sciences) Abstract The role of intuition in the psychology of the scientific process has been systematically overlooked for millennia. Even today, many scientists (intuitively) assume that all scientific thought, such as concept formation or research into the unknown, is completely conscious and rational (i.e. logical). They consider anything not fitting to this schema as unscientific. It has been known for a long time that by careful inspection, this assumption does not correspond to the facts. Not even in mathematics, the science supposedly the most free from empirical constraints. Since Archimedes account for Eratosthenes of his own thought process in his method there have been many similar accounts by scientists, such as Henri Poincar, E.W. Beth, Ernst Mach, etc. From their accounts, one can assume as a hypothesis that intuition is an actually widespread phenomenon in scientific thought and the scientific process in general. This phenomenon is often just not recognized, i.e. it becomes hidden by a rationalization in retrospect. If intuition is not an error in thought, but even an integral part of the (abstract) scientific process, it must be an integral part of all thought processes. The interesting question is why intuition has been overlooked for so long. In principle, this attitude results from a bias towards conscious thought in psychology versus unconscious thought. The latter is seemingly less accessible to introspection and behavioural approaches of measurement. But this bias is also the result of our fundamental concepts of psychology and of the philosophy of science in general. Even widely used fundamental concepts, such as induction and deduction are biased towards conscious thought. By including the unconscious into the frame of basic scientific concepts, for instance induction and deduction, the concepts become inherently inconsistent and lose their empirical meaning. The bias thus becomes an error (i.e. either an inconsistency with the facts or an internal inconsistency). Many basic scientific concepts are in this sense not metaphysical, but metapsychical. How then shall one avoid this Intuitive Error of Science? An epistemologically consistent conceptual framework for intuition is required. The concept of intuition needs to correspond to the known psychological facts. Other concepts (from psychology and science in general) have to be adapted to this concept. Intuition has not been neglected by all most of the scientific community. Indeed some of the most prominent scientists have already suggested solutions for this problem, such as William James, Hugo Mnsterberg, Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet or Max Wertheimer in psychology and especially Ernst Mach in the psychology of science. There has also recently been a renewed interest in this topic (for instance The New Unconscious, Hassin et al. 2005 or Where Mathematics Comes From, Lakoff & Nez 2000). The following chapter will try to combine the existing ideas with the facts from psychology of science and draw the outline of a consistent conceptual framework for the role of intuition in the psychology of science. It will also evaluate the implications on modern (cognitive) psychology and the psychology and philosophy of science in general. Keywords: intuition, error, consciousness

When we analyze our thoughts, even the most abstract, we have to notice that they directly or indirectly contain the elements of our sensual perceptions in an undefined form and newly interconnected. (Ernst Mach 1906a, p. 603)

1. Human knowledge and the basic intuitions of science What is the meaning of intuition? Are there physiological and psychological phenomena, which can only be fully and consistently described by postulating such a concept? Up to now, intuition is nearly always described in relation to consciousness. It has thereby been defined as delimiting introspective thought1. Tacitly, it is even often used in delimiting reflective (i.e. rational) thought. The question is, if this view is a) necessary and b) consistent with the known facts in this direction. The initial view on this question will be by looking into the basic intuitions of science. These necessarily form a part of our own assumptions as scientists as well as a part of our concept of intuition.2 V.S. Ramachandran (as a prominent example of a contemporary neuroscientist) for instance states that Ironically, after extensive training in Western medicine and more than fifteen years of research on neurological patients and visual illusions, I have come to realize that there is much truth to [the Indian] view that the notion of a single unified self inhabiting the brain may indeed be an illusion. Everything I have learnt from the intensive study of both normal people and patients who have sustained damage to various parts of their brains point to an unsettling notion: that you create your own reality from mere fragments of information, that what you see is a reliable but not always accurate representation of what exists in the world, that you are completely unaware of the vast majority of events going on in your brain. (Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998, p. 207/208) Contrary to Ramachandrans further assumption that his evidence is new, these empirical insights in psychology are actually nearly 150 years old with very similar conclusions drawn by many prominent psychologists of that time (see James 1885, 1904, 1905a, 1905b, Mach 1886, Ribot 1889, Binet 1889, Wernicke 1879, 1880, etc.; see also Mnsterberg et. al. 1910).3 The interesting question is why these empirically based conclusions have not led to the clarification Ramachandran calls for? My hypothesis would be that the reasons are threefold. First, there was too much cultural rubble left over from the World Wars. Science has built on this rubble without taking the time to systematically clear it up. Many eminent scientists died or emigrated from Europe, mainly to the US.4 The long-term effects of this can for
For the purpose of this article it should be clarified from the beginning, that thought and language are considered different concepts. Language is regarded as a sub-process in which thought is adapted to a communicable version of it. Language in its spoken, heard, written and read form is in turn a sub-process. The adaptation process of course has also in turn an influence on the initial thought process. Concepts are therefore primarily concepts of thought and only secondarily of language. This view is consistent even with the view of some prominent philosophers of language, such as Wittgenstein (see Visser 2002), although this shall not be argued in detail here. 2 As a methodological result of this dual relationship, some of the language used in this article might seem unusual to some readers. This language deliberately keeps to a relatively low level of construction (close to the axioms) in order to a) avoid or at least reduce the use of potentially self-referential concepts and b) be consistent with general concepts from other related areas, such as biology, physics, mathematics, epistemology, history or anthropology. The dual relationship also shifts the epistemological world view. This shift in turn changes many empirical meanings of fundamental concepts and consequently of all concepts constructed on them as well as the relations between these concepts. 3 For instance Piaget (Beth & Piaget 1966, p. 140) in writing about the main psychological results of Marbe and the Wrzburg school of psychology recalls Binets disillusioned outburst: thought is an unconscious activity of the mind. 4 In the history of psychology, for instance, the gestalt concept did not take hold in the US within the concept of thinking (or epistemology) and had to be reinvented, for instance as emergence concept. Both concepts give explanations for a holistic view, but the gestalt concept at least in its original non-physicalistic version
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example be empirically observed in science education, see Siemsen & Siemsen (2009). Secondly and this certainly enhanced the effects of the first there have been cultural and epistemological problems in enculturating these ideas from Europe to the US. In Europe, much of the traditions were destroyed in the process, except in some remote countries less affected by the turmoil of the wars (see Siemsen & Siemsen 2009). In the US, the enculturation process5, especially the incomplete translation of foundational texts, the shift in empirical meanings in the translation of central concepts or the understanding of the meaning of ideas, led to many misunderstandings and the creation of historical myths based on erroneous facts.6 Finally, the conclusions one needs to draw from Ramachandrans empirical observations in order to retain epistemological consistency are strongly counterintuitive to very basic human intuitions at least concerning the intuitions learnt in current Western cultures. The epistemological gestalt shift results in a shift in ones world view. It therefore presents a major cognitive gap, a step too large to take for many people. Therefore, the study of intuition can help in understanding these intuitive conflicts and how to resolve them by finding a freer (also intuitively rooted) position. It can help in bridging the cognitive gap. It is very difficult to avoid already inducing ones (partly intuitive) assumptions on intuition into the concept of it, because intuition is conceptually so close and dependent on the concept of knowledge. Knowledge by definition is the foundational concept of epistemology (i.e. the philosophy of knowledge). If we change the concept of intuition, we also by necessity change the concept of knowledge and thereby the concept which on a meta-level defines what intuition is about in the first place. One thus needs to analyze what I will in the following call double-dependency. It is a double-dependency in this case between psychology and the metapsychical.7 I assume (as a hypothesis) that a fundamental epistemological issue has been the origin of much confusion concerning the concept of intuition: The necessary consistency of the concept of knowledge in knowledge of as well as in knowledge about and the interrelations in-between these two usages of knowledge. A methodological problem arises especially because the two usages are mainly observed by different (and competing) sciences: by psychology and physiology for knowledge of and philosophy or philosophy of science for knowledge about. Each science uses a different focus on the phenomena. It thereby develops its own meanings from them. In turn, this raises the question of how to reconcile these different perspectives. Even for many people researching around this field, it seems for instance unclear, if they deal with different perspectives or different types of knowledge. This of course is an epistemological question, which needs to be resolved before any consistent meaning of the concept of intuition can be stated. The following chapter will pursue the question of the meaning of intuition from a specific philosophy of science perspective (Erkenntnistheorie, literally translated cognition
postulates a consistent psychological (thought economical) explanation which one can research, while the emergence concept relies on a more mystical appeal to the principle inexplicability of complexity. The central question of what the empirical meanings of complexity and simplicity are remains unresearched. As we shall see, this belongs to the area of metaphysics and metapsychology. The main problem is that the epistemological origins of the gestalt concept became forgotten (see later). 5 The term here is used in the sense of Jerome Bruner as a dual process of adaptation. The idea is adapted to a different culture and the culture can also become adapted to the idea (see Cole 2000). 6 For instance the concept of psychophysical parallelism in the description of the relation between the physical and the psychical is one out of several possible descriptions, but unfortunately one, which intuitively suggests the idea of two distinct processes running alongside of each other. Thus a false conception might arise from the word, and where a fundamental question is concerned a term leading to misunderstandings can do endless harm. (Semon 1923, p. 61) I recently asked a German historian of science about this. He answered that of course he knew that the concept of parallelism is a wrong description for the psychophysical concept at least in its later phases of development, but he continues to use it, because all the US-Americans use it. 7 The metapsychical is for psychology what metaphysics is for physics. The concept does not need more detailed description at this time. This will be developed during the article.

theory). This perspective is very similar to the one William James developed in his late years as a result of his empirical observations. These observations brought him to doubting the existing philosophical concept of consciousness.8 I am sharing his doubt, but not necessarily the way, how he stated the conclusions he drew from it. I will instead follow the ideas of the person from whom James, at least to a larger part, took the inspiration for the development of his own idea. It is the person who according to James himself9 he continuously intensively discussed with his colleagues and students. It is one of the three persons10 who had the most epistemological influence on James, namely Ernst Mach.11 2. The historical genesis12 of the concept of knowledge: epistemologies of intuition Which epistemologies of intuition are influential today? In order to initially describe the main epistemologies and clarify their differences, I will use a metaphor, which is frequently invoked by different representatives of each epistemological direction: the phase-difference of the water level. If one takes a river (or sea) as a metaphor for thought, then for the materialists, the physical river is thought (seen from an observer standing besides the river). For the dualists, either there are icebergs in the water, which are partly above the surface (which represents the metaphorical phase transition between consciousness and unconsciousness), or the river represents the thoughts having material undercurrents obscuring the clear view of the upper part. For the neutral monists, the river in the metaphor would represent the thoughts and consciousness its surface. With this picture in mind and as a result of considerations from philosophy of science (described in detail afterwards), one can categorize current ideas about thought into dualism and monism with different variations, depending on how mind and matter are seen in relation
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The concept of the unconscious used in the following is explicitly not the concept as Freud and his students developed it. As Mnsterberg et al. (1910) have already noted, Freuds conceptual frame is constructed on very specific assumptions, many of which I regard as metaphysical. The concept of the unconscious used here just denotes that it is not accessible to introspection. As a result of the following deconstruction of the concept of consciousness, also the concept of the unconscious becomes usable only in the context of describing introspection. 9 See Thiele (1978, pp. 169/173). James writes about Mach (1882): I dont think anyone ever gave me so strong an impression of pure intellectual genius. In 1902, thereby shortly before criticizing the concept of consciousness and developing his radical empiricism, James thanks Mach for the dedication of the third German edition of Machs Popular Science Lectures: [] I trust [] that you and I may [] contribute jointly to the establishment of the truly philosophic way of thinking which I believe to be on the whole our way! [] I am now trying to build up before my students a sort of elementary description of the construction of the world as built up of pure experiences related to each other in various ways, which are also definite experiences in their turn. There is no logical difficulty in such a description to my mind, but the genetic questions concerning it are hard to answer. I wish you could hear how frequently your name gets mentioned, and your books referred to. We will later come back to the relation between James radical empiricism and the genetic questions. 10 According to the biographer of James, Perry (1935). 11 According to Boring (1950; 1957, p. 392/393), Mach exerted a great influence on psychology. [ He] furnished the epistemology of the relation of psychology to physics which Klpe and Titchener later adopted and made the rule for modern parallelists. As has been stated before, Machs concept of psychophysics has been unfortunately misunderstood by the parallelists. This has led to epistemological inconsistencies, which will be central to this article. 12 Genesis is understood here as the general process resulting from the interrelated genetic processes of the biological development (phylogeny), the development of the individual from birth (ontogeny), the cultural development, the development of science as part of culture, etc. (for the question of the interrelations between these processes, see for instance Boas 1911; 1938 or Zilsel 1931; 1976). In this type of analysis, there is of course the problem of reverse engineering, i.e. in any genetic reconstruction several ways are possible of which one needs to take the most probable according to research at the given time. Even if the historical details of the genetic process cannot be known anymore, experiments and observations from anthropology and developmental psychology can be found and repeated. Thus, several genetic perspectives are brought together into consistency.

to each other and how the relation between rational and empirical thinking is evaluated. Four main epistemologies have thus been used in order to describe intuitive phenomena: 1. Dualism, postulating mainly one of two possibilities: a. either intuition and consciousness belong to the mental world in which case intuition is often regarded as superior to consciousness in its qualities b. or intuition belongs to the material world in which case it is often regarded as inferior to consciousness 2. Monistic materialism (mostly in the sub-forms of mechanism, physicalism and behaviourism), in which consciousness is an illusion (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett) 3. Psychomonism relating everything to mind. Sub-forms include idealism, panpsychism or mind-in-the-machine analogies in which we infer problems in operating a machine as a (malign) will of the machine 4. Neutral monism, in which consciousness is a construct. It has in principle two variants: a. reconstruction by allowing only the given facts (e.g. in the radical empiricism of William James)13 b. reconstruction by taking a genetically early position (early childhood, etc., e.g. Ernst Mach) Epistemologically, all these approaches and their variants can internally be mostly consistent, but not all describe the same facts or consider the same circumstances under which they appear, nor are all their axioms necessarily consistent to each other. The different approaches can be compared in order to see, if they can describe the diversity of facts and in how far they are dependent on teleology, i.e. by postulating their concept of consciousness (which is supposed to be one result of the analysis) already into their main assumptions. As a result, a more general concept of intuition can be developed. The genesis of ideas leading to the Copernican question of world views How does one need to conceptualize these epistemologies in order to understand the epistemological shift of the late William James (and Mach)? In the following I will provide a brief overview of the historical developments14 which led to Jamess epistemological gestalt shift and their influence on current psychology. For this I will begin with what is at least according to Bertrand Russell one of the most firmly established (i.e. thus intuitivized) distinctions in popular philosophy (Russell 1921; 1922, p. 10). Within the categories of mind and matter15, in principle all people16 (in Western cultures) believe that they are ultimately either one (monism) or that they are two (dualism).
One can object here (see for instance Tolman 1989) that James himself saw an inconsistency between monism and pluralism and preferred to side with the latter. From a Machian perspective, this is a pseudoquestion. From different senses we would also not infer that they belong to different worlds, but one. If there are different (and potentially inconsistent) descriptions (interpretations) of this world from different perspectives that is another question. In this sense, James epistemologically remains a monist. 14 For the current purpose, this historical view will only concern one time layer (in the sense of Koselleck 2003), namely the epistemological perspective from the late James and Mach. 15 Mind and matter are also popular concepts in much of the psychological literature, categorizing what has also been called the psychophysical. Unfortunately, from a genetic perspective, mind and matter are both already highly constructed concepts. They are relatively far away from the empirical physical and psychical phenomena and heavily dependent on metaphysical conventions (as shown in detail later in the article). For my own investigation, such fixed concepts would unnecessarily narrow down the inquiry right from the beginning. Instead in the following, I will use the deliberately vague concepts physical and the psychical, which just represent the phenomena, whatever their later interpretation. Similarly, the popular distinction between mind and brain will be disregarded. These categories assume that exclusively the brain thinks, i.e. is involved in higher acts of interpretation, while the lower senses just measure. The distinction between what is
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These fundamental belief systems probably developed out of different syntheses concerning two fundamental human questions: The concept of human knowledge relative to Gods knowledge and the question resulting from the introduction of the idea of monotheism: if there is one God, how can there be good as well as evil in the world?17 Though still fundamentally based on these questions, the change initiating most modern interpretations and therefore the current approaches to what thought is, has been what became known as the the Copernican revolution (see for instance Kuhn 1957, Cohen 1985). It was a new synthesis of touchable18 physics on earth and the necessarily more visually oriented (at the time becoming increasingly wavelength dependent) translunar physics by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Because of consistency, the revolution synthesis also implied an adaptation of the concept of thought.19 If formerly fundamental and undisputable systems, such as the Ptolemaic geocentric model, could underlie fundamental revisions, what if anything could be considered safe knowledge? How could one discern illusions or errors in knowledge? It thus becomes a central question, what an illusion is in the first place in terms of world views. As Mach noted, we cannot have several world views at the same time. It is very tedious to continuously construct and adapt all resulting concepts. In the interpretation of Aristotle (see later for a more detailed analysis of Aristotle), illusions could not exist in sensory perception, but only in the interpretation of them (one would call this qualia in current terminology). The problem is the psychophysical relation. Is it possible to make a consistent conceptual cut between sensory perception and interpretation? As the physiological facts of sensory perception, e.g. how the retina is arranged, the time intervals in which stimuli can still be differentiated, etc., already involve a high degree of (biological) interpretation. No such consistent conceptual cut exists empirically. At least none exists,
higher and lower already involves a lot of constructive interpretation and is therefore an epistemologically unsafe starting point (i.e. metaphysical and not empirical). 16 This is not only true for scientists as Carter (2002, p. 58) notes. One might therefore assume that this belief is transmitted in early childhood, just like the intuitive basis of the concept of knowledge (see Bransford et al. 1999). As these concepts tend to be relatively stable in life, the question is, if and in how far they are changed by academic studies. Considering that these questions are not consciously addressed in most academic studies, one could assume that most scientists rely on a folk theory of epistemology. 17 This idea can be traced back at least to Zoroaster or his successors (see Eliade 1975). In the Gths (Zoroaster 1900), the supreme god Ahura Mazd creates the two spirits Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu. Angra Mainyu decides to become evil, while Spenta Mainyu as the spiritual principle becomes good and remains one with Ahura Mazd. When the spirits meet, they decree life and death and how all at the last shall be ordered. They are afterwards representing the principles of best mind (as the good principle) and worst life (as the evil principle). The interpretation of this mythical idea has been the source for countless interpretation and attempts of synthesis in many cultures and in philosophy. The two spirits can be interpreted as mind and matter, but as we can see from the original text, it is open to different and sometimes very subtle interpretations. In a modern interpretation without explicit reference to Zoroaster, William James for instance calls the result a pseudomonism, where the unitary principle can only be known by its two aspects of mind and matter (see later for quotation). The mythological theme of the two spirits can also be found in the biblical story of the Genesis (see also Eliade 1975), although here they do not play such an initially dominant role. The roles of Spenta and Angra Mainyu are later theologically becoming apparent again as the Holy Spirit and the devil (the older gods daeva and their worshippers, whom Zoroaster fought, deciding for the wrong side). In other syntheses by different Gnostic ideas in early Christianity, aspects of the two spirits appear again closer to their Zoroastrian form. In Platonist theology, their aspects appear in the personification of the demiurgos, i.e. the public worker or (conscious) maker of the world. Here the aspect of the decision (whether it is independent of the maker or not) becomes that of omniscient cognition, i.e. our current concept of consciousness. Jungians will easily spot the archetypal adolescent initiation theme in this conceptual development. For a more detailed analysis, see Siemsen (2010c). 18 The term is deliberately vague and includes, for instance, tactile, haptic, motor, enactive, orientation and other sensual experiences. The reasons for this and other conceptual vagueness will become clear later. 19 Duhem (1908) first brought this to scientific conscience and analyzed it.

which would be consistent with the psychophysical facts.20 If the empirical meanings cannot be consistently divided between concepts, also no epistemological cut can be introduced at this point. It would equally not be consistent. All postulation of such an epistemological cut is therefore based on nave physics or nave psychology. Depending on the initial training of the researcher as natural scientist or as psychologist, the facts appearing from a more elaborate inquiry of the other perspective remain unknown or interpreted as epiphenomenal anomalies. Both views are nave in the sense that they disregard many facts and the circumstances under which they appear. Mach (1906a) describes this in his article for psychologists in lAnne Psychologique: The physicist relies on concepts so abstract, that he during his work tends to forget the countless sensual elements, which serve as basis for his measures and apparatus. He holds the result of his research for something objective, which can be generally applied and that deserves more trust than the special perception. [] The physiologist studies the organism of the human or the animal as a pure physicist and chemist. But as soon as an analogous induction prompts him to add perception to the purpose of his research, he fancies that he is leaving the objective and entering the area of the unknown, intangible. He does not think about that the physicist does constantly make use of these analogous inductions, for example when he sees the moon, which is only accessible to his eye, as a tangible mass []. The psychologist is submitted to the prejudices of physics, as the biological callings urge every human to behave as a physicist , the psychologist assumes the contrariety of two heterogeneous worlds; whereas for the physicist the psychological world seems intangible, he instead sees in the latter something immediately given, the necessary starting point; but from his philosophical position, the physical world is projected into an unreachable distance. In Machs view, there are no illusions (Mach 1905). Error is an integral part of the knowledge process and what is regarded as error often depends on the point of view and the frame of reference. The error of illusions only seemingly exist within a given reference framework. If one changes the perspectives, illusions suddenly disappear. If one puts a stick partway into water, it appears broken. When one takes it out, it is whole again. What is the illusion, the part of the stick above or the part underneath the surface? When one learns about optics and light refraction in different media, there suddenly is no illusion anymore. It is a physical (and physiological) phenomenon. Similarly, many optical illusions, such as Mach bands, i.e. bands of adapted brightness appearing around a sudden border of sharp black-white contrasts, still exist in a third person perspective and can be photographed.21 The main question of the Copernican system versus the Ptolemaic one is a question of reference. There is no inherent reason for not taking the earth as the main reference. Indeed in most of our astronomical observations we still do this. It would simply be tedious to recalculate everything as it would be seen from the sun. The question of the Copernican system was more: If the sun is much larger than the earth and the other planets, should one see the sun at the centre or the earth? From the perspective of this question, one would intuitively tend to take the larger body as a reference. Of course after Kepler, Galileo and Newton one can also argue that this system of reference is easier (more economical) for description, as one has to calculate a lot less epicycles. But this was not yet the case for the Copernican version, which equally had many epicycles to calculate (see Kuhn 1957). Even today, one could fly to the moon with a Ptolemaic system of reference. Though by now, there would be many more epicycles to calculate and the process would be very tedious.
For a detailed analysis, see for example Uexkuell 1957. For a newer account of the same idea, see Nagels article How is it like to be a bat? (1974). 21 As an anecdote, the photographer, who was supposed to take a picture of the effect for Mach on a rotating disc, repeated his photography several times, because he initially thought that the result was an error.
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So the question between the Ptolemaic and the Copernican world view is not easy to decide. It is basically a matter of the thought economy of one theory describing many facts instead of adding more and more anomalies to a theory describing fewer facts and fewer of the circumstances under which they appear. We could now equally propose the centre of the galaxy or the calculative centre of the universe (where the big bang is supposed to have happened) as the centre of reference. Here, many good intuitions would be speaking for this, but even more speaking against. Nevertheless, our world view is a matter of convention. The historical genesis of the empirical and rational descriptions of the world before James and Mach Which fundamental philosophical ideas did the Copernican revolution initiate concerning the scientific world view? The major philosophical approaches regarding this question were based on two observations of the Copernican revolution: that it was seemingly based on rational critical thought (adapting the thoughts to each other) and that it was based on empirical observations (adapting the thoughts to the facts).22 Following these observations, two different schools of thought developed. The main proponent of an initially rational interpretation has probably been Ren Descartes with his famous (intuitive) dictum cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). The main proponent of the second, the empirical interpretation of thought became David Hume with his famous example of the white raven.23 To be sure, both schools of thought allowed for the influence of the other idea to different degrees. But both supposed that their champion had given the initial impetus and therefore deserved to be at the basis of their philosophical reconstruction. This would later result in different interpretation of what metaphysics meant, in its positive and (especially) negative sense. The question is what constitutes good (i.e. scientific) and bad (i.e. erroneous) metaphysics. Two attempts of synthesis of these two ideas will be important for our analysis: Isaac Newton in physics and Immanuel Kant in philosophy. Newton followed the open question why the moon in Keplers heavenly mechanics does not fall to earth like an apple.24 He answered it in separating the property of mass (heaviness) from the concept of (touchable) matter. In the process, Newton used Descartes (intuitive) assumption that space and time were absolute and independent, which led to Machs critique on Newton. Kant initially set himself the goal of abolishing all metaphysics (i.e. not empirically derived entities). He did so from his perspective. But from a Machian perspective, he missed the a priori and the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich).25 These, Kant himself expected to be highly intuitive and therefore empirical. From a Machian perspective, they are, except for
The expressions in both parentheses are taken from Mach. At the current stage, this type of description should not be considered necessary, but helpful for some conceptual clarifications, especially because of the sketchy historical-genetic overview without detailed analysis. For more details, see Duhem (1908) or Siemsen (2009a). 23 This was later restated by Karl Popper as the black swan example (see also Taleb 2007). If we only saw white swans before, we would assume as a fact that that all swans are white. Only when we see our first black swan we notice that all swans are white is only a hypothesis (and a false one). Equally the hypothesis everything falls down is heuristic, albeit the statistical probability of us experiencing it to be false according to quantum physics is extremely low. Such probabilities can of course become extremely high if we do something very much outside of our regular (daily) experience, such as go into space or wearing special spectacles, which turn the world upside down for our eyes. Of course in the latter case, we would think of this as an optical illusion (again trusting the motor part of our senses more than the visual part), but we can only do so, if we compare the experience to our normal experience considered to be part of our intuition. This explanatory illusion hypothesis in turn creates a black swan problem, but on the more general perception level as we will see later. 24 Interestingly, in modern depictions of this intuition, the moon is often dropped out of the picture. This is an example of poorly understood intuitions without their historical genesis, like a form without content. The empirical meaning of the concept of gravity is lost in this process. 25 Mach was wondering If the great Koenigsbergian [i.e. Kant] in his metaphyisical clean-up has not forgotten some fungus spore, which has been proliferating all over ever since. (Mach 1893b; 1923, p. 588).
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their genetic metaphysical interpretations, which after a while became dominant with his successors. In both cases, Newton and Kant, intuition starts to become the proxy for long-term empirical experiences. From our perspective at this point, the differentiation between empirical and metaphysical intuition becomes important, or more precisely the differentiation between the empirical and metaphysical part of intuitions. As James had noted, many of our intuitions are formed by default. We often do not encounter a direct empirical feedback, especially on metaphysical ideas. We tend to interpret the missing feedback as a positive feedback. As intuitions are by definition unconscious, it makes the process of differentiation difficult within the classic rational framework. For this, a genetic framework is required. The development of such a methodological framework became possible with the publication of Charles Darwins Origin of the Species in 1859. After the theory of evolution was able to consistently describe many facts accumulated in geology, biology and other sciences without taking recourse to a teleological goal, the question of human knowledge (for instance in relation to animal knowledge or Gods knowledge) acquired a specific twist: What is human knowledge as a result of an evolutionary (genetic) process? Humans now could not consistently be described without looking into their evolution, unless one would disregard a large number of geological and biological facts and take recourse to an ad-hoc creation hypothesis. The strength of Darwins theory was that it could describe these facts without recourse to teleological and therefore inherently anthropomorphic explanations.26 Anthropomorphic explanations depend on postulating an Aristotelian final goal or final cause, which runs into the white swan hypotheses-type problem of human experiences. One assumes that we know what is final, although our experience is limited. It is very metaphysical (i.e. not empirical) to extrapolate current knowledge to all future knowledge. In a sense, one thereby assumes to know Gods thoughts. Even in the case of assuming an initiation to Gods knowledge, the question remains how one can then safely assume to have Gods thoughts. Could human thought and scientific thought as a specific part of human thought be described without teleology? The first (after Darwins Origin) to address this question was Ernst Mach. He famously criticized the anthropomorphic assumption of causality as a natural law27 and (resulting from this) Newtons intuitive assumptions of absolute and independent space and time. The result was the development of the new physics, i.e. quantum mechanics and relativity theory (see for instance Einstein 1916).28 Other world views: Dualism, materialism, etc. After explaining the point of view of neutral monism, this view will in the following be applied to the other world views. The neutral monism perspective was central to the world view of William James and Ernst Mach. Both (together with Alfred Binet, see Siemsen 2010b) have been very influential in the long term, because they laid the epistemological foundations for many resulting fruitful ideas in science, especially also in psychology. But these resulting ideas have often been founded only on aspects of their epistemology, especially not encompassing (and often not understanding) their shift in world view, which made this epistemology possible in the first place. From the perspective of neutral monism (in the sense of James and especially Mach), the other world views, such as dualism as well as material and psychical monisms, have
This aspect was interestingly mentioned in the defence of Darwins theory especially by one of the most speculative of Darwins successors, Ernst Haeckel (1905). 27 According to Mach (1911), the concept of causality is a psychical (thought economical) result of human curiosity and inquiry. Mach started to write about these ideas already in 1863, four years after Darwins Origin and much before Darwin or Haeckel would publish on this question. 28 The example will be elaborated below in an analysis of intuition in science.
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inconsistencies, which are based on the central question of this chapter, i.e. the question of consciousness and of intuition. James and Machs criticisms are based on these fundamental inconsistencies, which will therefore in the following be elaborated in more detail. As the chapter actually argues that these other views are based on specific definitions of the concept of consciousness, which are not consistent with the facts, it is important to have a look into what effects these definitions have on the higher construct level of these other world views, first dualism and then the other monisms. Dualism is founded on the intuition of the self being conscious of itself (Descartes cogito ergo sum, which can in a similar way already found with Aristotle). It takes into account that there are physical and mental phenomena and that both cannot be reduced onto each other without losing some central properties. From a monistic perspective, the philosophical price is that all entities need to be mentally duplicated and described in two ways. This makes later adaptations of the concepts difficult, as additionally the relation between the two has to be adapted as well. Dualism makes two important assumptions, namely that the self and that consciousness exist a priori. They are some form of direct perception or Gods thoughts with no construction involved in the process. Unfortunately, many phenomena in psychology (such as multiple selves or multiple consciousnesses) point to the fact that both experiences the experience of a self as well as the experience of a consciousness are already highly constructed to begin with. Ramachandrans initial quote leads into the same direction. But then, one has to leave the belief in dualism. Dualisms intuitive basis is fundamentally not consistent with Ramachandrans (and many other psychologists) observations, so it leads to empirical contradictions. Materialism is a form of monism. Its principle concept of matter is based on strong physical assumptions, which often can only be consistently provided by certain forms of folk physics. In its more refined forms of behaviourism and mechanism, it is based on Newtonian physics as in both forms the concept of matter is still assumed to be consistent.29 In modern physics there is no concept of matter consistent with all known physical phenomena on which materialism could be based upon. There are only different (internally inconsistent) concepts of matter describing these different phenomena. The type of physics used by materialists is mostly not made explicit, but intuitively assumed. The difference can be analyzed by the physical context in which the concept of matter is used, for instance if air is considered material (in folk physics it often is not and all examples are conspicuously taken from solid bodies). In current physics, gases, such as air, are considered material bodies. Also it is telling, if objects are considered material. Contrary to bodies, which are considered physical, objects are metaphysical. Objects (or rather particles30) in physics, such as electrons, quarks, etc. are partly only energetic (i.e. they have no mass counting as material body). Some particles can mainly be mathematically described and are in so far metaphysical (a thing of thought and not of empiry, see Wilczek 2002, 2004a). Here one can see that the origin of materialism lies in the sensual intuition of touching and observe the limitations of its application in modern physics (see also Avenarius 1891). In this view, physical phenomena are considered to be independent of the observer and his psychology.31 Materialism thereby assumes that our concept of matter is not
Thus, as Zilsel (1941; 1976, p. 168) observes, The mechanistic conception of nature is anthropomorphical and interprets natural processes after the pattern of human actions. 30 The concept of particles fits better than that of an object to the physical phenomenon as they are derived by parting empirically (i.e. sensually) better known entities. 31 In quantum mechanics, the observer is necessarily a part of the phenomenon as the very act of observation changes the phenomenon. According to Pauli (Laurikainen 1989), this also implies that the psychology of the observer becomes part of the phenomenon. The observer interprets what the circumstances of the phenomenon are and what is considered and observed as a phenomenon in the first place. Physical instruments, for instance, depend on how we build them, i.e. which ideas (based on our experiences) we build into them.
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anthropomorphic and non-teleological, i.e. it is independent of previous and current human interpretation and future developments in science. The intuition is that the touching/haptical experience is the initial perception and the preferential one in detecting illusions, i.e. inconsistencies in sense perceptions. This concept of matter would then at first view constitute a safe basis (i.e. a basis independent of future changes in science) for constructing all of science on it. The mechanistic hypothesis additionally assumes that because mechanics has been so successful in describing physical phenomena and human manipulation of these phenomena, it can be taken as a conceptual basis for all of science. As a result of assuming psychical phenomena as epiphenomena of physical phenomena (physical phenomena thereby must be considered to be not metaphysical), all introspection and first person accounts of psychical phenomena are rejected. Materialists try to supplant them by the so called third-person perspective of an independent observer. Thereby, the approach tries to avoid the problems within consciousness, but at the cost of introducing the constructedness of consciousness and limitations of measurement as problems of the observation. As an example of the possibility of in principle unsubjective observation, Martians are postulated, who would be able to observe human consciousness without actually sharing it. Unfortunately, from an empirical perspective (which most materialists certainly claim to hold), Martians must currently be supposed to be an unobservable entity. Therefore, all speculation on how Martians would behave must not be classified as a thought experiment, but as a purely metaphysical fictional speculation.32 Conceptually, the actual descriptions of Martians (for instance by Dennett 2006), have a remarkable anthropomorphic similarity with humans.33 Even the tentative ideas from Uexkuell (1957) about the world views of animals already show fundamentally different experiences leading to what as a result must be radically different worlds. Maybe Martians would not have culturally developed the concept of consciousness and therefore regard it as a pseudoproblem in the first place. All such thoughts are as speculative as postulating any ignorabimus limit to knowledge34. We simple do not know, in what ways the world view of future generations might be different from ours. Our limits of knowledge might in the future look like a result of local theories of knowledge, the reference of which to general knowledge just became obsolete together with the concepts and facts it included. Today we do not worry anymore about a growing number of epicycles nor do many people remember what they were good for in the first place. Assumptions that these patterns might change in the future are anthropomorphic. Mach (1920, p. 434) writes on materialism: For most natural scientists and many philosophers, who do not admit it, the thought that all psychical could be deducible to the material in private is very congenial. Even if this materialism has a catch, it is not the worst possibility; it stands at least with one foot on secure ground. But if all psychical should be understandable physically, why not the other way round? [] Is the other [psychical] foot standing in the air? I would prefer [] to stand on both feet.35 From Machs perspective, the
As Vaihinger (1911; 2008) stated in his (Machian inspired) philosophy of the As If (Philosophie des als ob), fictions are not wrong a priori, but they need to have a descriptive (explanatory) value, which in this case they do not have. Because of their high anthropomorphic character, Martians as explanatory fictional entities for science are rather misleading than enlightening. 33 If one wants to think about the question, how a Martian would think, one should first try to imagine a Martian very different from human experience, maybe as the planet Solaris described by Stanislav Lem in the novel Solaris. Interestingly, in Lems novel, the human scientists first start learning anything meaningful about the planet when they start psychologically observing themselves after all mechanistic observation has failed. 34 This is similar to the homununculus problem (see Wegner 2005) in which one assumes a (mostly implicit) homununculus directing our thoughts. One thereby simply redefines the problem into another one without solving it. 35 The argument that physics has been the most successful science (as many intuitive materialists claim) is no argument for the physicist Mach. Such historical success can be misleading, as the 2000 years of success for the Ptolemaic world view shows. Additionally, modern physics is not reducible to classical mechanics (which is
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inconsistency of the concept(s) of matter poses little problem. [M]atter must be regarded merely as a highly natural, unconsciously constructed mental symbol for a complex of sensuous elements []. Still less, therefore, should the monstrous idea ever enter our heads of employing atoms to explain psychical processes; seeing that atoms are but the symbols of certain peculiar complexes of sensuous elements which we meet with in the narrow domain of physics. (Mach 1886; 1919, p. 152/153) There is no necessity to become dualist thereby for the one, who considers both feet as equal and both floor spaces under the soles to belong not to two different worlds. (Mach 1920, p. 434)36 3. The critique from William James and Ernst Mach on the existing world views James and Mach developed their new world view as a safer basis, which would avoid the inconsistencies of the other world views existing at their time. For instance, William James develops his idea of what he calls radical empiricism from an empirical critique of dualism: All the schools Scholastic, Cartesian, Kantian, Neo-Kantian are in agreement on this, all admit to a fundamental dualism. It is true that the positivism or agnosticism of our own day which prides itself as coming under the physical sciences freely assumes the name of monism. But it is a monism in name only. It posits an unknown reality, but then tells us that this reality always presents itself under two aspects, on the one side consciousness and on the other matter. (James 1905a; 1967, p. 184)37 Now psychology takes precisely for its domain the field of the facts of consciousness. It postulates these facts without criticizing them, and opposes them to material facts; and, also without criticizing the notion of the latter, psychology relates them to consciousness by the mysterious bond of knowing, of apperception, which is for psychology a third kind of fundamental and ultimate fact. By following this approach contemporary psychology has enjoyed great triumphs. It has been able to fashion a sketch of the evolution of conscious life by conceiving the latter as adapting itself more and more completely to the environing physical world. It has been able to establish a parallelism within dualism, that of physical facts and cerebral events. (James 1905a; 1967, p. 185) Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of substraction, but by way of addition the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function may be of two different kinds.(James 1904; 1967, p. 172) It is very difficult, or even absolutely impossible, to know solely by intimate examination whether certain phenomena are of a physical nature occupying space, etc. or whether they are of a purely psychical and inner nature. [] in the final accounting it could well be that all our usual classifications may have derived their motives more from practical needs than from some faculty we possess of perceiving two ultimate and diverse stuffs which together are supposed to comprise the scheme of things. (James 1905a; 1967, p. 189) According to James psychological critique on philosophers, intuition in this sense takes two roles in introspection: one the one hand it frees attention from already intuitivized
mainly the one with the alleged success, but considered outdated and wrong from a current perspective, see Wilczek 2004b). Materialism intuitively assumes that the concept of matter is necessarily foundational to physics and that it does not change over time. Unfortunately these assumptions are not true. One could for instance with at least equal reasons consider energy as foundational concept of physics as Wilhelm Ostwald has done. The concept has undergone considerable changes and there currently cannot even be considered any broad consensus among physicists as to the exact meaning of matter. For instance anti-matter is defined as (at least in one property) the opposite of matter. The basic intuition of materialists is that matter exists tangibly and constantly. Now anti-matter by definition annihilates matter. What stays constant in this process is energy and not matter. Do materialists believe in anti-matter if physics says that it experimentally exists? Even within its own epistemological framework, the assumptions of materialism lead to rather large paradoxes. 36 Because psychomonism as a theoretical position in science is relatively rare, it shall not be considered in detail here, especially as many arguments on materialism apply analogously. 37 One can recognize here indirectly the idea from Zoroaster of Ahura Mazd and the two spirits.

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properties, on the other hand it hides these properties from further introspection. It even sometimes hides the empirical basis of the concept itself from which it derives its meaning (see for instance Mach 1905 or Kaila 1930). As a result, philosophers (and mathematicians) attribute the character of pure to concepts, which they assume to have become abstracted from all roots of concrete experience. This has for instance been one of the claims of formalism, i.e. the idea, that one can consider only the form of something, devoid of any contents. What instead happens psychically, is that the empirical meanings gathered by concrete experiences become so intuitivized and repressed into the unconscious (here the Freudian notion fits relatively well), that it appears to introspection as if one can use the concept without. But under close inspection of intuition, this can be shown not to be the case. But James not only criticizes philosophers for their psychically inconsistent concept of consciousness, but also psychologists (and physiologists) for adopting this concept uncritically, especially by giving it a physiological meaning (which of course is problematic if it is a psychical or psychophysical construction). For the origin of this epistemological inconsistency, one has to go back to the origin of the use of consciousness in physiology. Wernicke (in 1879 and in a further discussion in 1880), as a psychiatrist and one of the first to adapt the concept of consciousness to brain functions, describes the inherent problems: The sum of the memory images (Erinnerungsbilder) transferred spatially the whole cortex I called consciousness and thereby had won a spatial and anatomic basis for a psychical thing, which could not be exactly defined. But I did not miss the awkwardness, which lies in such a naming. As the mental processes up to now had never been brought into a definite relation with the brain, but had been the object of an own discipline, which is philosophy, therefore it was not to be expected, that the concepts put up by philosophy would correspond with the ones derived from the properties of the brain. One therefore has to, where an expression for mental properties, conditions or processes is used, determine its sense as exactly as possible, but the terminology of Philosophy could not everywhere be avoided, because it at the same time makes up an indispensible part of our German vocabulary. So it was with the word consciousness; because of linguistic usage it seemed justified, but criticisable as a philosophical terminus. This problem unfortunately seems to have become forgotten in later use in a process of intuitive hiding, just as James has predicted. What then of course becomes especially problematic here is the unconscious inheritance of the intuitive meanings of consciousness conveyed by millennia of philosophical tradition in Western scientific concepts. As becomes clear from Wernicke, the use of the concept of consciousness in physiology was not due to a synthesis, but a matter of default. It is therefore still necessary to work on a synthesis in the sense of James. The effects of intuition on mathematical thought Can William James hiding of intuitive thought be observed as a general phenomenon of the psychology of science? I will take the role of mathematics in developing scientific thought and the intuitions of science as an example, as here the effects of this phenomenon are most prominent. From the point of view of intuition, it is for instance curious that mathematics should be considered the clearest of all sciences.38 The clearness depends on the point of
It is not by chance that what is considered the foundational article of pragmatism by C.S. Pierce is titled How to Make Our Ideas Clear. This was then also the point, where the logician Pierce saw the difference to the psychologist James (in a letter to James published in Perry 1935, p. 437): I just have one lingering whish []. It is that you, if you are not too old, would try to learn to think with more exactitude. [] but perhaps I do not sufficiently take account of other psychical conditions than purely rational ones. I have often [] pointed out how far higher is the faculty of reasoning from rather inexact ideas than of reasoning from formal definitions; and though I am so bound up in my narrow methods as often to lament that you could not furnish me with the exact forms that I am skilled in dealing with [] Pierce admires James skill in coming close to the truth nevertheless and especially his ability of transmitting ideas to an audience understandably. The origins of
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view. While mathematics is the most clear from a logical perspective, it hides the psychological process leading to new mathematical ideas. Thus, from the psychological point of view, especially regarding the analysis of the intuitive process, it is very unclear. What do I mean by this psychological opacity? Mathematics played an important role in the psychological development of science. For instance, in the case of the Copernican versus the Ptolemaic world view, mathematics helped to describe the phenomenon, i.e. the anomalies of planetary movement discovered after the Aristotelian synthesis. Mathematics was used to attach the anomalies of planetary movement to the theory in retrospect as epicycles. These auxiliary descriptions, as well as idealizations, such as Newtonian frictionless movement, after a while became an intuitively integral part of the theory. Scientists started to assume them as empirical.39 Through the abstraction of mathematics, scientific ideas and intuitions can be described more economically. But at the same time, their empirical or metaphysical origin becomes more obscured as a result. Epistemologically, one therefore has to keep the roles of the physikos and the mathematikos clearly apart in order not to be confused in intuitive processes (see Krafft 1964). As we will see later, these roles additionally have methodological implications for the formation of intuitions in science. One might still think that these intuitive phenomena in science happened long ago and have no bearing on modern scientific thought. The (intuitive) mathematician Hadamard provides an example for such phenomena in modern mathematical thinking, regarding the origins of formalism as it was developed by Hilbert. Hadamard (1945, p. 87/88) describes it as [] another rigorous treatment of the principles of geometry, which, logically speaking, has been fully freed from any appeal to intuition, has been developed on quite different basis by the celebrated mathematician Hilbert. His beginning, which is now classic among mathematicians, is Let us consider three systems of things. The things composing the first system, we will call points; those of the second, we will call straight lines, and those of the third system, we will call planes, clearly meaning that we ought by no means to inquire what those things may represent. Logically, of course and this is all that is essential the result announced is fully attained and every intervention of geometrical sense eliminated: that is, theoretically unnecessary to follow the reasoning from the beginning to the end. Is it the same from the psychological point of view? Certainly not. There is no doubt that Hilbert, in working out his Principles of Geometry, has been constantly guided by his geometrical sense. If anybody could doubt that (which no mathematician will), he ought simply to cast one glance at Hilberts book. Diagrams appear at practically every page. They do not hamper mathematical readers in ascertaining that, logically speaking, no concrete picture is needed. From this, Hadamard (1945, p. 112) concludes: This carries, in the first place, the consequence that, strictly speaking, there is hardly any completely logical discovery. Some intervention of intuition issuing from the unconscious is necessary at least to initiate the logical work. The question is more, if the results of intuitions are already in consciousness at the time when the introspection begins. One sees that there can be apparent logicians, who are logical in the enunciation of their ideas, after having been intuitive in their discovery. [] There is often a great difference between the discovery of an idea and its enunciation. (Hadamard 1945, p. 113) Thus, reason and logic are (re)constructed in retrospect. We shall

pragmatism shall not be further considered here, but they bear a close relation to the topic discussed here and have not been properly researched as yet. 39 This happened for instance in the assumption of the quest of saving the phenomena. The question then becomes, what is the meaning of saving. As a result, the metapsychical relation between the physikos and the mathematikos changes and needs to be observed in detail, see Kraft (1964).

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have a closer look into Hadamards hypothesis and its bearings on the relation between the mathematikos and the physikos later. Since Hadamards time, one telling aspect has changed in the intuition of mathematicians. Today, many mathematicians would doubt the role of intuition. The idea of pure mathematics is built on this assumption. One can see this as an example of the intuitive process in science: Constant repetition of mainly theoretical concepts also increases their strength in intuition (see for instance Binet 1910). This has happened several times in mathematics during history, for instance through Euclid. Because of Euclids omission of describing the intuitive methods he must have used40 and due to his dominance in geometry, many people started assuming that geometry is independent of the empirical experience and measurement of bodies. Emotion and the role of empiricism In order to mentally work against the problems related to this type of intuitive abstraction at the beginning of scientific construction processes, James and Mach proposed to implement empiricism as a continuous checks and balances of intuitivized habits of thoughts. One would think that this is done by experience anyway, but as James (1905b; 1967, p. 206) observed: I speak also of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble, but which we hold for true although unterminated perceptually, because nothing says no to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight. To continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. James then continues even more emphatically We live as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path. According to Perry, James wrote on the margins of Machs Erkenntnis und Irrtum (Knowledge and Error): W. J., but not emphatic enough (see Thiele 1978, p. 174). Mach would probably have agreed to the first and second quotation from James, but not to the last. One can see here the difference in James more speculative and Machs more careful analysis. If one observes children when they learn walking, they need to lose their balance. We need to fall in order to take a step. If they take the step before they are surefooted enough, they are really likely to fall, which of cause they try to avoid. The result is an adaptive process between daring and carefulness. As a child, James would have had more bleeding noses, Mach would have been more careful in trying. The latter method is not necessarily the slower in learning as James supposed in his comment if one notices and eliminates the problems earlier with it. Their different solutions are thus also due to their difference in character. Did Mach with his approach find a problem which the late James overlooked? James intuition which he expresses in the sentences above is obviously dependent on character. It is dependent on a specific construction of the self. Here he fully follows Bergsons emotional concept of intuition. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. (James 1904; 1967, p. 183) James generalizes from his own intuition to the character of everybody (every self), which at least in the case of Mach as we saw does not fit as a description. James intuition in this case is not universal, although he assumes it to be universal. And in this sense then, Machs approach to intuition has its advantage over James: it is more widely applicable. James speaks of it as we shall see later, but he does not apply it thoroughly as it is counterintuitive to some of his intuitions. Here we can also observe that the more intuitions are foundational (for instance to the concept of self), the more difficult they
This effect (the process of the origin of ideas becoming unconscious) in mathematics will be described more in detail later.
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are to change, which is also an inherent difficulty to the ideas from James and Mach on intuition in principle. A property cannot exist without empirical reference. One can easily test this by trying to teach somebody the abstracted property without its empirical meaning. The answer in those cases very often is that the person is considered just too stupid to understand. That this assumption is an insufficient explanation, can be tested by teaching the empirical meaning with the property. The difference tends to be empirically staggering (see for instance Siemsen 1981, Siemsen & Siemsen 2009, Siemsen 2009b). Pure (as in pure mathematics) thus acquires the meaning of everything else hidden in intuition. James and Machs genetic questions James discussed this point with Mach (see Mach 1896, p. 151 footnote) and Mach basically agreed with James perspective. Nevertheless, Mach saw this similar to Avenarius introjection (i.e. the mistaking of the inner for the outer world by continuous efforts to objectivise) as merely one specific form of a more general phenomenon of the psychology of science. James and Avenarius found specific forms of the workings of intuition in science. These forms were initial simplifications, which in the long run resulted in inconsistencies. Mach proposed that this is a more general psychological phenomenon in science: the process of intuition resulting from an economy of thought. The Machian principle of thought economy is a continuous optimization41 process, constantly requiring adaptation. It is a genetic process. Science is just a specifically refined version of it. James in the end of his article on Does Consciousness Exist? gives a summary of the genetic task for psychology after discarding the concept of consciousness: If one were to make an evolutionary construction of how a lot of originally chaotic pure experiences became gradually differentiated into an orderly inner and outer world, the whole theory would turn upon ones success in explaining how or why the quality of an experience, once active, could become less so, and, from being an energetic attribute in some cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an inert or merely internal nature. This would be the evolution of the psychical from the bosom of the physical, in which the aesthetic, moral and otherwise emotional experiences would represent halfway stage. (James 1904; 1967, p. 182) But a last cry of non possumus will probably go up from many readers. All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity, they will say, but our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what God as put asunder. My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I cannot help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. [ Consciousness] is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are. (James 1904; 1967, p. 183) As James states, he is criticizing the concept of matter as well as consciousness. If one takes an object and now considers it to be a body, does it change? And if so, what of it does change and why? Would it be a body without us thinking of it as one? Would we still consider it a body when its molecules, atoms, electrons have disintegrated in some thousands of years? If our perception of time would be the one of Konrad Lorenzs (1959) Chronos, for whom a thousand years are like a second, would we consider the object or the body as a process instead or not notice it at all as it would vanish in an instant? Does a body or an object
Economy in economics is the optimization of the result (from several variables) and not a minimum process such as Occams razor. As the environment and the process itself continuously changes, every optimum is suboptimal in the long run. Reaching a higher optimum thereby often requires adaptations (e.g. investments) involving a temporary reduction of the result.
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therefore exist only, because of our perception of time? James sees the solution to this conundrum in a genetic approach, a concept which he by-and-large took from Mach as we have seen from his letters in the beginning. Mach develops James critique into a genetic analysis.42 I think that one should not begin ones philosophical considerations with a ready, fixed theory which will not let go of us. The core of my explication lies in the demonstration of Fig. I43 of the Analysis. We get to it by observing our children and by thinking ourselves back into our early youth, as we just begin to differentiate between our body and its surrounding. There we do not know anything about matter and spirit, of physical and psychical, of object and subject, of stimulus and perception. All still consists of similar parts ABCD , which by themselves are neither physical nor psychical, but neutral, indifferent. Physical and psychical they become only because of the special form of dependency, which we take into account. [] Now we have to research everything either from the physical or from the psychic side. If one time the tunnel between the physical and psychical will be built or nearly built we will probably not be limited to this. [] The astronomers from today know that the Ptolemaic and the Copernican world view both are conventional practical limitations, and that one can allow oneself a freer type of question. (Mach 1920, p. 434) In the following, one area of intuitive phenomena will be described in detail, because of its specific role in science, namely phenomena of invention in the mathematical field. It shows exemplarily both sides: how intuition develops science and how science and the concepts of intuition and consciousness as part of it have developed. 4. Intuition and introspective cases of intuition in science The concept of intuition has a long history, in general language, but also in psychology. It was even used by people, such as Bergson and Poincar as a basis for philosophical and mathematical programs. The concept has therefore acquired many (often inconsistent) meanings. Is the concept of intuition still inconsistent today? My hypothesis is that it is still inconsistent (for examples, see for instance Hassin et al. 2005 or Lakoff & Nez 2000),
As I will show, Mach had these ideas before James, who rather took them from Mach and developed some similar ones on his own in parallel. 43 Fig. I in the Analysis of Sensations depicts the famous view from the left eye, in which one sees the room in which Mach is as viewed from his left eye (including perspective, his own body lying on the couch and his hand raised as if drawing this picture, as well as less detailing on the outer parts of the picture). The unusual part is that this view includes the frame of the view as part of it by depicting also the eyelid, nose and moustache, so the parts of ones view, which are normally abstracted from and not seen consciously, but only intuitively, especially if both eyes are open. In the Analysis, Mach comments that if one is observing an element A in the field of vision and investigates its relation to another element B of the same field, one transverses from the field of physics to the one of physiology or psychology if B passes the skin. It thereby seamlessly passes the usual (intuitive) epistemological cut between physics, physiology and psychology (where the phenomena and concepts of one would end and the other would begin). In this (and many other psychophysical experiments), Mach found no meaningful epistemological cut (especially not the skin) and thereby concluded that physics, physiology and psychology must ultimately be one. Conceptual unities, such as body or ego are only makeshifts, designed for provisional orientation and for definite practical ends (so that we may take hold of bodies, protect ourselves against pain, and so forth), we find ourselves obliged, in many more advanced scientific investigations, to abandon them as insufficient and inappropriate. The antithesis between ego and world, between sensation (appearance) and thing, then vanishes, and we have simply to deal with the connexion of the elements [], of which this antithesis was only a partially appropriate and imperfect expression. [] The philosophical spiritualist is often sensible of the difficulty of imparting the needed solidity to his mind-created world of bodies; the materialist is at a loss when required to endow the world of matter with sensation. The monistic point of view, which reflexion has evolved, is easily clouded by our older and more powerful intuitive notions. (Mach 1914, p. 13/14) The idea of this, Mach developed in 1870 after reading the philosopher C.F. Krause, who had written Problem: To carry out the self-inspection of the Ego. Solution: It is carried out immediately. In order to illustrate in a humorous manner this philosophical much ado about nothing, and at the same time to show how the self-inspection of the Ego could be really carried out, I embarked on the above drawing. (Mach 1914, p. 20). Possible to reprint?
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which is why I propose a deconstruction and reconstruction of the concept in the first place. But before, I will briefly give examples of two interrelated areas, which have specifically added to this inconsistency, namely language and concept formation. Problems of language and concept formation The first problem one encounters in this direction is one of concepts and their translation: Many of the concepts have been taken back and fourth between languages such as Greek, Latin, French, German and English. As a result, also their properties changed substantially, often without the scientists involved noticing. For instance the German word Anschauung, which was often used by Kant in different contexts, has been translated into English into so different terms as image, sensual, non-sensuous and pure visualization, intuition or apperception.44 A similar concept, but which is more based on memory called Vorstellung was translated in Machs Knowledge and Error as intuition. Additionally, of course, the meanings of these concepts by Mach and by Kant are very different. Even for one author and the same book it can be different. Machs Mechanics has gone through seven editions by Mach himself with several hundred pages added and changed in the process. One time there was even a book reprinting only the changes made in the latest German edition relative to the last English edition. Also during this time, Mach changed his world view at least two times. Because of this, he necessarily adapted the meaning of many of his concepts.45 The accumulation of such problems led to many misunderstandings and confusions still currently prevalent especially in the English speaking world. These effects have been additionally enhanced as a result of the enculturation problem already mentioned due to the World Wars and the breaks they caused in the transmission of knowledge. But these enculturation effects were already considered a problem before the wars. William James himself criticized (for instance in his lectures to teachers) the scientific fashions resulting from the arbitrary use of terminology. This problem led to confusion and imprecision in the meanings of concepts until today and has been especially prevalent in psychology. One aspect, which has a strong connection with this problem, is that an increasing epistemological wedge can be observed between the direct sensual experience and the theoretical reflection about it. This difference led James to the radical formulation of his empiricism. In order to avoid these confusions, the definition of intuition used here is a positive attempt of reconstruction in order to replace the concept of the unconscious in the genetic sense. My starting point46 is the concept of the unconscious, which I defined as not accessible to conscious introspection. From this starting point, a positive concept of intuition will be developed in the following by first looking into intuitive phenomena in mathematics. From this, the concept will be successively enlarged by adding more descriptions of unconscious phenomena of thought from other sciences and from the general genesis of thoughts. In the last part of the chapter I will try to form a consistent theoretical framework for developing the concept further. Based on this genetic adaptive approach, the intuitive phenomena mentioned here make no claim to completeness. On the contrary, by the multiplegenetic approach taken, probably more phenomena of intuition can be integrated or found in future research. Intuition in mathematics
On the difficulties that the translation of these concepts between German and English pose, even for professional translators, see for instance http://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=370933&idForum=1&lp=ende&lang=de. 45 For example, Mach adapted his central concept of thought economy from a minimum principle of parsimony to a much more complex optimization principle. 46 I am well aware that this is of course not necessarily the starting point of the reader. This is why in the previous part I tried to provide a historical-genetic account of the epistemological questions leading to this starting point.
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The following view on intuition will first concern empirical facts focused on a specific area, which then can be used to construct a common, more general empirical meaning of intuition. This area will concern the hardest area, which from the perspective of other epistemologies would be seen as the furthest away from the position elaborated here. If one takes a normal stand of assuming knowledge as the iceberg (partly above the water), what would most people from this perspective regard as the very tip of the iceberg? Probably mathematics. From a rationalist perspective, what would one consider the most rational one? Probably logic and mathematics. Both mathematics and logic see each other as a part of themselves. They also assume their foundations as similar and many foundational concepts (such as truth, construction, computation) are the same. As mathematics is considered the more initial of the two, it will be the first focus.47 For the purposes of this chapter, I will additionally focus on the question of the very, very tip of the iceberg, so on the process of how new mathematics is developed. This narrow initial focus will then successively be broadened by adding examples from other sciences and finally from the development of the intuitive process in childhood. These ideas are then applied to the broader empirical contexts of facts concerning intuition. The probably most known case of intuition in science and one described explicitly for psychologists48 is certainly Poincars experience on the genesis of mathematical discovery (Poincar 1908; 2003, p. 46) during discovering a new type of mathematical functions.49 I shall say for example, that I have found a theorem under such circumstances. This theorem will have a barbarous name, unfamiliar to many, but that is unimportant; what is of interest for the psychologist is not the theorem, but the circumstances. Poincar originally wrote the article for Alfred Binets Lanne Psychologique.50 A mathematical demonstration is not a simple juxtaposition of syllogisms; it consists of syllogisms placed in a certain order, and the order in which these elements are placed is much more important than the elements themselves. If I have the feeling, so to speak the intuition, of this order, so that I can perceive the whole of the argument at a glance, I need no longer be afraid of forgetting one of the elements; each of them will place itself naturally in
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As Wittgenstein noted (in F.P. Ramseys exemplar of the Tractatus 1922; 2003, p. 113) The beginning of logic presupposes calculation and so number. Genetic considerations would agree with this logical result. It will nevertheless be possible to show that in such other tip of the iceberg areas of science as logic or physics, the observations are probably similar. 48 Materialists (and behaviourists in particular in psychology) may object that many of the following observations are taken from introspection and not from a third-person perspective. This objection will not concern us here for several reasons: First, this article is explicitly based on a different epistemology. This epistemology considers no differences between the first and the third person perspective in their respective physical and mathematical intuitions, i.e. the measurements, calculations and apparatus, which the so called third-person perspective is mainly built upon. This is basically the same criticism, which the proponents of the third-person perspective in psychology use in the first place, only here it is applied metapsychological. As both epistemologies are aimed at dissolving an inherently dualist concept of consciousness, at least part of the way might be less different than it seems initially. This is because we secondly want to observe inconsistencies of the concept of consciousness by introspection, so seen from its own perspective (in this respect it confirms to the third-person perspective). The view I present here is internally consistent and (as I will argue) observes more of intuitive phenomena than a materialistic perspective. 49 It is interesting to note here that Poincar had the idea partly from a survey developed by the psychologists of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, Flournoy and Claparde. They also had a close contact with Binet. Clapardes student and successor at the institute was Piaget (for details and the relation to Mach, see Siemsen 2010b). Claparde then organized a series of lectures in 1937 at the Centre de Synthse on invention in various sciences to which Poincars student and successor Hadamard attended. Inspired from this, Hadamard (1945) continued more detailed research in Poincars direction. Many of the following examples are taken from this work. 50 Binet made an interesting reply to the article in which he basically states that Poincars description is not generalizable. He is not able to immediately synthesize Poincars results with his psychological concepts, although at the time he had developed concepts, which would have made this possible, such as his concept of mental orthopaedics. Unfortunately, Binet dies shortly afterwards. See also Siemsen (2010b).

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the position prepared for it, without my having to make any effort of memory.51 [] Discovery, as I have said, is selection. But this is perhaps not the right word. It suggests a purchaser who has been shown a large number of samples, and examines them one after the other in order to make his selection. In our case the samples would be so numerous that a whole life would not give sufficient time to examine them. Things do not happen in this way. Unfruitful combinations do not so much as present themselves to the mind of the discoverer. In the field of his consciousness there never appear any but really useful combinations, and some that he rejects, which, however, partake to some extent of the character of useful combinations. Everything happens as if the discoverer were a second examiner who had only to interrogate candidates declared eligible after passing a preliminary test. (Poincar 2003, pp. 49-52) Then Poincar introspectively describes his experiences: Every day I sat down at my table and spent an hour or two trying a great number of combinations, and I arrived at no result. One night I took some black coffee, contrary to my custom, and was unable to sleep. A host of ideas kept surging in my head; I could almost feel them jostling one another, until two of them coalesced, so to speak, to form a stable combination. [] Then I wished to represent these [Fuchsian] functions by the quotient of two series. This idea was perfectly conscious and deliberate; I was guided by the analogy with elliptical functions. [] At this moment I left Caen [] The incidents of the journey made me forget my mathematical work. When we arrived at Coutances, we got into a break to go for a drive, and, just as I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, though nothing in my former thoughts seemed to have prepared me for it, that the transformations I had used to define Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. [] (Poincar 2003, pp. 52/53) I then began to study arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connection with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. [] (Poincar 2003, pp. 53/54) One is at once struck by these appearances of sudden illumination, obvious indications of a long course of previous unconscious work. The part played by this unconscious work in mathematical discovery seems to me indisputable, and we shall find traces of it in other cases where it is less evident. (Poincar 2003, p. 55) Before coming to other examples, some general observations can be drawn from Poincars description.52 First of all, in Poincars description a substantial part of his thoughts are not accessible to his consciousness, even though he obviously focussed his conscious observation on his thoughts as intensively as he could. Secondly, by this focus one can observe that there are different unconscious processes (the one with the coffee is different from the sudden ideas). Thirdly, Poincar is quite clear about the fact that this unconscious process cannot be explained by giving it an automatic character. It involves interpretation and intuitions about new, i.e. previously unknown ideas. It is a creative process. It is automatic in the sense that it is seemingly not consciously wilful, but not automatic in the
Poincar in principle here describes a mathematical gestalt formation process. The importance of the gestalt concept for understanding this intuitive process will be discussed later. 52 The dependency of these observations on the meaning of consciousness itself became very clear from the observations before. The genetic way of analysis proceeds from this locally defined given and then compares it to observations from other perspectives. We will see then that (maybe unexpectedly) the choice of this specific starting point does not pose major difficulties in the generalization of the description. The epistemic claim here is of course only that of one possible description. If other starting points yield other descriptions will not be elaborated here, but as I chose the starting point deliberately opposite from the expected result, it would at least be difficult to find.
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sense of a machine or computer. The question therefore is not one of mechanicism, but of the concepts of will and consciousness. Finally, these unconscious processes are not rational, but guided by patterns from previous often also unconscious experiences. It is a process of adaptation of thoughts to the facts and to each other, i.e. fitting patterns to the facts into one single whole. Can this intriguing experience of Poincar be generalized for mathematics? Hadamard basically agrees that it can and gives several examples from his own experience. He systematically interviewed many eminent mathematicians of his time and found many similar experiences and only few divergent ones. Also historically, he finds mathematicians with similar experiences, for instance Gauss. As one more independent example, who had asked himself the same question, but wrote down the answer himself I will quote E.W. Beth. Beth additionally enquired independently on the related genetic questions. In his joint book with Piaget Mathematical Epistemology and Psychology53, he in principle agrees with Poincars description, but adds a more long-term process: I have noticed that a mathematical problem which interests me gives rise to three successive reactions, as follows: a first reaction, which is instantaneous; a second reaction after a few days; a third belated reaction only after several months. (Beth & Piaget 1966, p. 90) For him mainly the third reaction leads to the Poincartian process. Apart from Poincar, another example of intuition in mathematics is outstanding. On the one hand it is very old and on the other, it leads to a more general view on the question of intuition in science: Archimedes (1972, p. 383) in his Method describes for Eratosthenes the [] peculiarity of a certain method, by which it will be possible for you to get a start to enable you to investigate some of the problems in mathematics by means of mechanics. The procedure is, I am persuaded, no less useful even for the proof of the theorems themselves; for certain things first came clear to me by a mechanical method, although they had to be demonstrated by geometry afterwards because their investigation by the said method did not furnish an actual demonstration. But it is of course easier, when we have previously acquired, by the method, some knowledge of the questions, to supply the proof than it is to find it without any previous knowledge. Archimedes thereby uses an empirical (heuristic) method, which became a continuous inspiration for mathematicians (see Hadamard 1945). Georg Polya even elaborated this method towards a general methodology of finding mathematical theorems. Nevertheless, maybe Archimedes observation points to something more: an intricate genetic relation between the origins of sensation, of physics and of mathematics. One of these relations has been researched in detail by Mach,54 between the physiological and psychological origins of the perception of space, of the movement and measurement of bodies (and our body) in space and of geometry.55 Archimedes example thus provides an idea for
Interestingly, in the book, Beth takes a strong recourse to Mach and his epistemology, while Piaget in the same book describes the genesis of the relation between logic and psychology, but without any mention of Machs ideas. 54 Another one, namely the genetic origins of algebra, can be found in an early article of gestalt psychology from Wertheimer (1912), which will be cited in some length later. 55 What are the sensational origins of the basic intuitions of the geometer? Poincar and Mach both researched on this question. Late in his life, Mach published a series of articles on this in The Monist (1901-1903), which were republished as Space and Geometry (Mach 1906b) and in slightly adapted form in his Analysis of Sensations. Also Poincar had published an article On the Foundations of Geometry in The Monist in 1898. Mach (1901) mentions in a footnote that his article rests on researches begun almost forty years ago and that they are at variance with the views on sensible space of Poincar. Mach still agrees with Poincars subsequent discussions though. Poincar (1898, p. 1) thinks about how a single immovable eye could give us the notion of space and from this deduces that the notion of space is built up by the mind from elements which pre-exist in it. Mach (1914) instead assumes that the motor experience of space is genetically more basic than the visual sensations (especially concerning the orientational sensations of the inner ear, muscular, tactile and haptic sensations). All systems of space-sensation, however different they may be, are connected by a
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two lines of thought: a) The relation between physics and mathematics as sciences and b) the question of multiple methods of thinking in different sciences and in science in general. Methods of thinking in science Before the question, if the ideas in mathematics can be generalized for physics and even more to thought in general, I will first elaborate, if different methods of thought train scientists to think in a specific way, but not another, and if such specialization is necessary for science or for science education.56 Hadamard (1945, pp. 100) already provides a whole chapter on the topic on Different Kinds of Mathematical Minds. For instance he follows Poincars distinction between geometrically and algebraically thinking mathematicians as well as distinguishing intuitive and logical mathematicians. But these distinctions do not only concern their preferred field of work and of elaboration, but even the type of proofs they would find. Hadamard describes this, for instance for Poincar and Hermite. Poincars proofs were always immediately intelligible in their genesis, i.e. how Poincar had come to his idea. Of his teacher Hermite, Hadamard (1945, p. 109) remembers, that he on the contrary seems to have been so intuitive, that the accuracy [of his results] was certain, but whose origin in his brain and way of discovery he did not explain and we could not guess. The cognitive gap to his way of thinking was seemingly large57: Methods always seemed to be born in his mind in some mysterious ways. Hadamard describes even more extreme cases, such as Fermats theorem. In a posthumously discovered note, Fermat had stated that he could prove a specific theorem, which became one of the most famous puzzles in mathematics ever. It was actually proven more than 350 years later. A similar case is Galois (Hadamard 1945, pp. 110), who proved a theorem (shortly after which he died) requiring mathematical concepts, which at his time was not even remotely invented. Similar examples can also be found between different sciences, which promote different methods of thought, such as the natural sciences versus the social sciences. Are these phenomena given, or just an unintended and hitherto not explicitly analyzed by-product of the development of science? Can methods (and using multiple methods) be specifically trained? And if so, are there advantages of such training? Titchener was one of the first, who in psychology tried such training in an auto-education experiment (Titchener 1909, p. 98). He trained himself to think in concrete rather than abstract images,
common associative link, the movements which they serve to guide. Poincars immovable eye is therefore for Mach not a thought experiment, but a fiction, which misses the main genetic questions. For instance Mach experimentally details the connection between the motorical apparatus of the eye, without which Poincars immovable eye could not adjust its lens to see anything in the first place. The biologically given for Mach are for instance the asymmetries in perception between up and down, far and near and a little less asymmetrical but also slightly so left and right. At the first moment of sight, all the associations connected with the optical process, which may be utilized intellectually, are wanting. (Mach 1905, p. 111) Visual sensations gain their seeming dominance only later in childhood. Our Euclidean heritage for instance gives us a strong intuition of the dominance of visual sensation in geometry. Mach (1914, p. 112) notices this intuitive bias towards the visual, which makes it so difficult to imagine how blind geometers think: Even so acute a mind as Diderots can fall on occasion into the strange error of denying the blind any spatial imagination. Later Uexkuell (1957) has experimentally investigated the genetic question of the development of human spatial sensations in detail in relation to animals. As can be seen from the relation between Poincar and Mach, the examples in this article have a more intricate genetic relationship then it may initially seem. 56 The answer is slightly different as the starting point is different and therefore, the effects in education are more immediate. This will be briefly elaborated at the end of the article. 57 This relates to a specific question of genetic enquiry, namely the replicability of ideas. If one does not understand an idea, looking into how the idea was historically developed (including the difficulties) tends to be a good approach. Also this is a central question for the popularization of science (in the sense that everybody should be able to understand scientific ideas, see Siemsen 2010a). It is a basic question for science education. The basic hypothesis is that one can teach everything, but maybe we have not found a good way to teach for many things. For this one might need to look more closely into the intuitive ways of learning.

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because he thought that visual images would help him to avoid becoming too rigid and metaphysical in his way of thinking.58 He found that he achieved quite some success with this behavioural therapy. It is hereby not so much interesting what he trained, but that it was possible to train ones intuition regarding scientific thought. What Titchener did in fact from the point of view taken here was training the method of his intuition. Therefore, it seems to be possible to do so even at later age (Titchener was already well into his scientific career when he tried).59 A similar account to this psychology of metaphysics was given by the geologist Thomas C. Chamberlin.60 In an article for Science (1890), he proposed a method of deliberately pursuing multiple hypotheses in order to avoid premature explanation when it runs before a serious inquiry into the phenomenon itself. [] The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child springs into existence. [] There is an unconscious selection and magnifying of the phenomena that fall into harmony with the theory and support it and an unconscious neglect of those that fail of coincidence. There springs up, also, an unconscious pressing of the theory to make it fit the facts, and a pressing of the facts to make them fit the theory. [] Dust and chaff are mingled with the grain in what should be a winnowing process. But for Chamberlin, this does not speak against the use of theory without which facts collected become dead and unmeaning. It rather argues for a better process of the two aspects. When facts are sought and chosen, there are two types: the initial, open search of all aspects of phenomena and the later, experimental search along the line of specific questions and hypotheses. [The multiple working hypotheses method] differs from the former method in the multiple character of its genetic conceptions and of its tentative interpretations. Finally, Chamberlin adds a very Machian result of his methodological suggestion. The imperfections of our knowledge are more likely to be detected, for there will be less confidence in its completeness in proportion as there is a broad comprehension of the possibilities of varied action, under similar circumstances and with similar appearances. So, also the imperfections of evidence as to the motives and purposes inspiring the action will become more discernable in proportion to the fullness of our conception of what the evidence should be to distinguish between action from the one or the other of possible motives.61 From a Machian perspective, one should add that one can also apply multiple perspectives and multiple methods of inquiry or additional to multiple hypotheses instead. But all these will not ultimately make ones view impartial. Therefore one needs to be aware of the fact that science is always a narrowing of attention to a few aspects and maybe to the seemingly most important single one. Local investigation in terms of pursuing a single hypothesis, a single perspective, a single method or even of teleological nature is possible and sometimes very productive, if one does not forget the limitations relative to the general frame of investigation. In this sense the investigation of this chapter is also one-sided, but
Titchener (1909, p. 12) stated that More serious is the temptation to allow ones visual schemata to harden, to become rigid. I have constantly to fight against the tendency to premature systematisation. 59 This idea is typical for Machs epistemology. It is probably related to the strong long-term (again mostly intuitive) influence of Machs ideas on Titchener, which his student Boring (1950, p. 399) described, especially on the systematic (i.e. methodological) side. 60 Chamberlin was the intellectual competitor of Lyell (see Oreskes 1999), who was the intellectual father of Darwins ideas on geology and of the accumulation of many small changes over long periods of time resulting in seeming gestalt shifts. Chamberlin was inspired in his ideas by G.K. Gilbert, who although a geologist had a strong influence from ideas in physics and mathematics. The details of the genesis of the ideas concerned here still need detailed research. 61 Similar methods of accessing ideas from different parts of our intuition were developed by the Dadaists and Surrealists. There are for instance descriptions of deliberately creating automatic writings, not directed by a voluntary conscious reflection. These games were of course initially focussed on stimulating artistic creativity by following wild associations. Nevertheless, the method of using games later led to a focus of unlocking unconscious ideas. The applications of such methods in psychology, such as the Rorschach test, are well known.
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necessarily and consciously so. Even if sometimes the mentioning of its limitations may sound a bit tedious. Equally, when a theory is rejected, it tends to be rejected in totality (see also Kuhn 1962) including its good parts. Later, the good ideas are rediscovered, often under a different name, but with similar contents.62 Ideas can thus become conscious, unconscious and then conscious again. Actually, most ideas even in science have to be considered to be (and remain) unconscious, as Hayek (1975) noted.63 Also for individuals, ideas tend to become successively unconscious and intuitive, especially if acquired in ones youth. This is what Wittgenstein described with the metaphor of a ladder one can throw away after having climbed it.64 But if one throws away the ladder, the next people cannot follow anymore. The genetic origins of ones ideas become hidden. One does not tend to retrace ones steps in order to find the origin of potential mistakes in intuition. This as well can happen with the various influences of fundamental ideas. Nevertheless, it seems that this phenomenon does not apply to all ideas in a similar way. Even for fundamental epistemological ideas, there are strong differences. These differences have to do with the closeness of the ideas to the phenomenal or sensational (and genetically early) level of experience.65 If one compares for instance Kant and Mach, the former is certainly remembered more consciously with his ideas, while even strong Machians often do not later remember Machs influence. For instance, Einstein was, as we will see, strongly influenced by Mach in his youth. But as he told to his friend Besso in 1948 (Speziali 1972, Doc. 153): Now, as far as Machs influence on my development is concerned, it was certainly great. [] How far [Machs writings] influenced my own work is, to be honest, not clear to me. In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D. Hume on me was greater. [] However, as I said, I am not in a position to analyze what is anchored in unconscious thought. Intuition in physics After looking at the methodology of science in general, we shall now return to the second question, which Archimedes example poses: namely the applicability of the ideas on the psychology of invention in the mathematical field to physics and from there to other sciences and to thinking in general. For this I will turn to the person, who is regarded as the most prominent inventor in modern physics, namely Albert Einstein. Einstein (1916, p. 102) gives a detailed example of this type of intuitive influence. He commented in his obituary to Mach regarding the view of some other physicists, such as Planck: I think that even those who think of themselves as enemies of Mach, dont remember how much of Machs approach they have so to speak imbibed with their mothers milk.66 Einstein (1916, p. 102/103) continues on Machs method to train scientists against the trappings of intuition It is therefore no idle play, if we become trained to analyze the longtime prevalent concepts and to show, of which circumstances their eligibility and usefulness
Examples will be elaborated in the following, for instance for the concepts of mneme and meme and the concepts of gestalt and emergence. 63 The mention of Hayek is not coincidental here. He is known as an economist, but first studied psychology and wrote one of his earliest works The Sensory Order An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology based particularly on Machs ideas (Hayek 1952; 1963, p. vi). 64 Wittgenstein (1922, 6.54): My propositions [in the Tractatus] serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understand me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. Basically, Wittgenstein is thereby stating that logically speaking, the Tractatus is superfluous, while genetically, it is not. In this sense, the genesis process needs to be considered to be always prior to logic. The changing of world views is for instance not independent from metapsychological questions, such as the role of crutches or of intuition in the process. 65 The reasons will be elaborated in more detail later. 66 For an introspective example of what Einstein means with this expression, see Mautner later.
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depends upon, how they have grown in detail out of the conditions of experience. Thereby, their excessive authority is broken. After that, Einstein gives examples, how Mach helped him to break the excessive authority of Newtons notions of absolute space and time. In a letter to Hadamard (1945, p. 142/143) Einstein reflects on intuition: [] the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above mentioned elements. [...] this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought - before there is any connection with logical construction [] The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for. [] It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case, which can never be fully accomplished. Einstein then mentions Wertheimers research on what Einstein calls the distinction between mere associating or combining of reproducible elements and between understanding (organisches Begreifen). Einstein notes that he cannot judge the psychological analysis of Wertheimer. Hadamard agrees to this idea as an interesting point to follow (which will be done later in this chapter). According to Einsteins observations, the way how Hadamard phrases his questions (with consciousness as a well defined rational entity) are slightly misleading. Also Einstein sees logic as a cultural aim, which has little to do with the actual process of thought. He finds the focus on symbols, images67 and consciousness too narrow, hinting instead at sensations and especially motor sensations. This difference, otherwise not mentioned by any of the mathematicians, is probably due to the more empirical nature of physical investigation, even in such theoretical areas as Einsteins. His observation is insofar important, as it provides a direction towards the distinction between empirical sensations and the more metaphysical adaptation of thoughts to each other. This difference also has implications for the methodological question of forming the intuition of what physics is in the first place. If as part of a methodology, one tends to repeat metaphysical thought processes, one might for instance gain the intuition that they precede empirical thought processes. Additionally, genetically early processes of sensation, such as motor sensations may disappear completely into the unconscious. This might happen for mathematicians, but probably not as much for physicists, leading them to different introspective observations. Mathematicians would thus think they know physics, but actually remember it only in a sensationally reduced form. Empirically, it would not be the same. They look only at specific physical facts, but unconsciously neglect others. As an example, in the following I will

This view is very similar to Machs view on the relation between images and concepts and the relation between concepts in mathematics and in physics (Mach 1900). The concept is enigmatic for the reason that on the one hand it appears in a logical aspect as the most definite of psychical constructs; while on the other hand, in a psychological aspect, when we seek for its real visualisable contents, we discover a very hazy picture only. Now the latter, whatever its composition, must necessarily be an individual picture. The concept, however, is not a finished image, but a body of directions for testing some actually existing image with respect to certain properties, or of constructing some image from given properties. The definition of the concept, or the name of the concept, disengages a definite activity, a definite reaction which has a definite result. [] Just as a technical operation may serve for testing a given object [], or for constructing a new object [], so also a concept may be used in a testing or constructive sense. The concepts in mathematics are mostly of this character, whereas the concepts of physics which cannot create its objects, but finds them already present in nature, are ordinarily of the first-mentioned kind. But even in mathematics, figures arise independently of the inquirer, furnishing material for subsequent investigation; and in physics also concepts are constructed for economical reasons. But the fact that mathematics operates in the main with constructions of its own creation, containing only that which it itself has put into them, whilst physics must wait before it finds out how far the objects of nature answer to its concepts, this fact is the foundation of the logical superiority of mathematics.

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repeat68 Einsteins selection of Machs arguments here, as they illustrate a psychological view of what I will call nave Newtonian physics69. William James description of mistaking knowledge of and knowledge about and the differentiation of true and apparent have their psychological origins here. We must suppose that the change in the point of view from which the system of the world is regarded which was initiated by Copernicus, left deep traces in the thought of Galileo and Newton. But while Galileo, in his theory of the tides, quite naively chose the sphere of the fixed stars as the basis of a new system of co-ordinates, we see doubts expressed by Newton as to whether a given fixed star is at rest only apparently or really (Principia, 1687, p. 11). This appeared to him to cause the difficulty of distinguishing between true (absolute) and apparent (relative) motion. Thereby, he was also impelled to set up the conception of absolute space. Mach (1883; 1976, p. 223) then cites Newton: But how we are to collect the true [absolute] motions from their causes, effects, and apparent [relative; dependent on the observer] differences, and vice versa; how from the motions, either true or apparent, we may come to the knowledge of their causes and effects shall be explained more at large in the following Tract. Mach adds that these words give the intuitive impression that Newton was glad to be able to pass over to less precarious questions that could be tested by experience. Mach continues in order to criticize this point of view of Newton (1883; 1976, p. 224) When we say a body K alters its direction and velocity solely through the influence of another body K, we have asserted a conception that is impossible to come at unless other bodies A, B, C are present with reference to which the motion of the body K has been estimated. In reality, therefore, we are simply cognisant of a relation of the body K to A, B, C. If now we suddenly neglect A, B, C and attempt to speak of the deportment of the body K in absolute space, we implicate ourselves in a twofold error. In the first place, we cannot know how K would act in the absence of A, B, C; and in the second place, every means would be wanting of forming a judgement of the behaviour of K and of putting to the test what we had predicated which latter therefore would be bereft of all scientific significance. [] The motion of a body K can only be estimated by reference to other bodies A, B, C. But since we always have at our disposal a sufficient number of bodies, that are as respects each other relatively fixed, or only slowly change their positions, we are, in such reference, restricted to no one definite body and can alternately leave out of account now this one and now that one. In this way the conviction arose that these bodies are indifferent generally. Mach then shows that of course the relation between K and A, B, C might only be collateral (i.e. a correlation) dependent on a medium (filling space) on which K and A, B, C jointly depend. But this medium has not been found by experiment, nor does Newton entertain the idea. Mach here details the scientific psychological process that Newton followed. Interestingly, this process was not a logical necessity. Mach shows that Newton could have thought otherwise. Scientific descriptions are thereby not arbitrary, but they are not determined either. They depend on (often intuitive) assumptions. Intuition in science

The first part on Newton is actually taken from a later edition of the Mechanics than the one used by Einstein. It contains an additional interesting hint from Mach on intuitive notions in science (e.g. Newtons Principia). 69 The term has been used extensively by several prominent psychologists, for instance by Dennett (1991). One should note here that for Mach, error is an integral part of the knowledge process (which by and large is not additive, but gestaltist). Therefore nave is always relative to another view, which is also necessarily inherently erroneous. The naivit is therefore not meant pejoratively. Mach (1883; 1976) in a defence against Husserls version of logically based phenomenalism emphasizes that he sees vulgar thought clearly superior to scholarly metaphysical speculation.

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How exactly do such intuitive assumptions come about? A very detailed account on the intuitive effect of Machs ideas was given by Fritz Mautner70: Mach himself has reminded me [around 1895] that as a young student in Prague, [] Mach let me read his lecture on the Conservation of Work and I received an impetus, which must have continued for decades without my knowledge. Because when I read this lecture nearly thirty years later, without remembering its first reading, I was astonished about its critical linguistics anticipations and I was instantly of the decided opinion that I had already once assimilated these forceful verbalizations. Machs positivistic philosophy of science which does not hate the metaphysical words, like Auguste Comte, but psychologically describes, so explains them had continued to have an effect in my subconsciousness. (Mautner, cited in Thiele 1978, p. 158) In the example of Mautner (as Einstein had noted, there are many more similar examples, especially concerning Machs epistemological influence) one can see that further to Poincars and Hadamards examples, unconscious influences in science can last over long time, especially regarding ideas, which are acquired during youth. This process often concerns the initial formation of very general gestalt patterns, which we can describe in the sense of Mach as world views. Examples of such initiatory experiences include Mach himself, Eino Kaila, or his latest successor Kaarle Kurki-Suonio (see Siemsen & Siemsen 2009, Siemsen 2010d). Because of the long time-frame involved over the lifespan of a researcher, these longterm processes are rarely reported. As the examples show, intuition in science is used in several contexts. It initially describes the intuitive process in developing scientific thought. But, intuition is also used as an analytic tool for the psychology of science on the meta-level in the sense of a psychological description of the genesis of ideas and as a methodological critique of the excessive authority of long-used concepts. Because of these two uses, it will therefore be interesting to have a closer look into what kind of ideas tend to have this intuitive effect. In the case of Mach, the conceptual gestalts of fundamental concepts are changed. This in turn requires the change of all subsequent concepts. So the outcome is a fundamental deconstruction and reconstruction of a whole set of scientific ideas. This process can require several generations of researchers. Only from the end of the process results a new shiny theory. From the genetic point of view, the process of initial scientific concept formation the status nascendi71 is the most important and decisive part of the whole process, even though the most impressive developments tend to happen later. Seemingly small metaphysical conventions in the beginning, such as Newtons absolute and independent space and time, can have large effects on the interpretation of a theory. As the intuitive processes are unconscious by definition, information for a psychological analysis on the status nascendi is becoming increasingly difficult with time. Existing concepts are intuitively engrained (in the sense of James) by frequent repetition over the life of a scientist. This process is then further intuitivized by his students, who often do not share the initiatory status nascendi process as an experience, but copy the results tacitly, like an apprentice observing the master. This is increasingly hiding the intuitive process of the status nascendi for internal as well as external analysis of concepts. The genetic analysis thus often resembles a process of re-engineering (backwards engineering) where the process has to be reinvented from the result.72 As this
Mautner is regarded as one of the initiators of linguistic critique (actually critical linguistics, but this terminology has today acquired a different meaning), which became very influential in philosophy. Mautner has been a basis for the ideas of Wittgenstein (see Visser 2002) and through him on the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. 71 The status nascendi is called tentative stage by Chamberlin (1890) in which the affections enter with their binding influence. 72 People who think that this is impossible should remember that all of biological research into evolution is based on such a genetic process. Often one has to assume the most probable path and keep searching for more clues
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opens several possible paths and time-layers, several points of view have to be used simultaneously and their results combined into a consistent whole. This methodology also requires a deliberate training of ones intuition for keeping the habits of thoughts open to several alternatives. As we saw in the example of Titchener, one can seemingly train the habit (intuitive method) of ones own thoughts in this methodological direction. The genesis of consciousness In the letter to Hadamard mentioned above, Einstein had seen Hadamards concept of consciousness as a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. Our thoughts adapt to an (culturally provided) ideal, which is only achieved in retrospect. Thus, contrary to Aristotles initial assumption (in De Anima) that judgements are logical, logic denotes the dependency of judgements from each other and makes this dependency explicit. Judgements themselves instead are made intuitively. Their relationships are then constructed in retrospect to become conscious. Therefore, in the famous Libet experiment, people show an activation of the muscles before they consciously decide to press a button (see for instance Carter 2002). Judgement is only seemingly the most conscious of thought activities. It is the activity happening just after it, which becomes conscious. There is interconnectivity of conscious and unconscious, even in judgement. A metaphor often used to describe consciousness (for instance by Hobbes, Galton, the Wrzburg school of psychology) is the idea of King and Court. In it, the self is the omniscient monarch who judges over the ideas, which his (unconscious) advisors let pass as important. Thus the pre-judgement is done by a number of (unconscious) public servants of the royal court. Although the idea of an omniscient monarch became a bit unfashionable in democratic societies, it still persists in current psychological literature in the Platonist/Marxist variant of the omniscient central planner (for instance Donald 2001). Nevertheless, one should be careful with this metaphor. Empirically, the planners with the best theoretical intentions were often the worst as politicians. On the contrary, most successful managers or governors are not conscious of why they do what they do.73 They just do the right thing (which can then prove to be wrong in retrospect). If, on the contrary, theoreticians are successful as politicians, it is often difficult to analyze why. For instance the mathematician Spiru Haret74 is known as a very good minister of education in Romania, but he never really reflected in writing on the question why and from where he developed his ideas. Hayek (1964) has elaborated that, if knowledge is relative and mostly unconscious, the idea of an omniscient personally detached decision maker is not consistent with the facts, neither in law, nor in economics, nor in psychology. The idea is also fundamentally not consistent with a concept of knowledge based on evolutionary theory. Even if one takes for consciousness the metaphor of a stage, where the actors appear closer or further away (as for instance Taine does), the metaphor requires a script and a director. Thereby again, consciousness is indirectly assumed as a (self-contradictory) prerequisite to explain consciousness. From this perspective, symbols are also not a prerequisite, but a result of our concept of consciousness. Hadamard (1945, p. 89) mentions an example, which the economist Sidgwick reported to the International Congress of Experimental Psychology in 1892. In his reasoning on economic questions, the images were often curiously arbitrary and sometimes
into the direction as well as looking for clues excluding other possible paths of development. The seemingly most direct paths from the perspective in retrospect are often not the most direct from a genetic perspective. Mach (1886; 1919, p. 85) for instance observes that our own experience can mislead us in a genetic analysis: It is natural for the learner to proceed from the simpler to the more complex. Nature does not necessarily have to go the same way. 73 Much of management literature then tries to provide an interpretation. 74 He wrote his thesis in Paris on a question from the mathematics of Poincar.

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almost undecipherably symbolic. For example, it took him a long time to discover that an odd, symbolic image which accompanied the word value was a faint, partial image of a man putting something on a scale. Thus the symbol of the concept of value was constructed from the sensations of using (or observing somebody to use) a scale. If we go back into childhood, our concept of consciousness might not exist in the form we are used to think about it. Our current concept is the result of a genetic adaptation process. We only cannot remember how sensations were before this process. The experience does not fit the conceptual frames of adults (in Western culture). For instance the deafblind Hellen Keller wrote to William James about her experiences before her consciousness was awakened by instruction.75 Mach (1905) states that Every human discovers within himself, when waking up to his complete consciousness, already a completed image of the world, to which accomplishment he did not at all willingly contribute to and which he accepts on the contrary as a gift from nature and of the civilization and as something immediately intelligible. This image was built up under the pressure of the practical life; extremely valuable, in this regard, it is inerasable and never ceases to act upon us, no matter which are the philosophical views that we will later adopt. Consciousness is thus the result of ones initial world view, not the origin of it.76 Maybe it is not so much judgement, as the continuity of sensations and the process of attention on which of them to focus on, which gives the impression of a phenomenon of consciousness. Hadamard (1945, p. 65) quotes a description from Rodin: Till the end of his task, it is necessary for [the sculptor] to maintain energetically, in the full light of his consciousness, his global idea, so as to reconduct unceasingly to it and closely connect with it the smallest details of his work. And this cannot be done without a severe strain of thought. As one can see from this description, the gestalt process is hidden, while the role of attention in the gestalt process is prominent. But also attention can be guided unconsciously. However we turn the concept of consciousness, unconscious intuition always plays a strong role in it. Adaptive judgement What is judgement then, if not conscious logical thought? For analyzing this, we shall again deliberately shift our perspective in order to see, if the results gained from cases of scientific thought are also consistent with the general and especially genetically early development of thought. For Mach (1896, p. 156), science is only a specific form of continuation of what goes on in daily life: The adaptation of thoughts to facts [and the thoughts to each other] is the aim of all scientific research. In this, science only deliberately and consciously pursues what in daily life goes on unnoticed and of its own accord. Both, scientific thought and the thought of daily life are already constructed by consciousness. As soon as we become capable of self-observation, we find our thoughts, in large measure, already adjusted to the facts. [But] almost every new fact necessitates a new adaptation, which finds its expression in the operation known as judgement. Mach (1896, p. 156/157) gives an example he observed with his three year old child. This process of judgement is easily followed in children. A child, on its first visit from the town to the country, strays, for instance, into a large meadow, looks about, and says wonderingly: We are in a ball. The world is a blue ball. [In this case actually a physiological fact is stated, which of course was realized only belatedly. The old scientific astronomy begins with such nave statements, which it deems to be physical.] Here we have two judgements. What is the process accompanying their formation? In the first instance, the

The passage is indirectly quoted by James (Perry 1935, p. 455) in his return letter. Our limited memory of our early childhood might be a result of many experiences (clusters of sensual elements) not fitting to the conceptual gestalts formed later.
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existing sensual conception77 of us (the accompanying group) is complemented by the also already existing concept of a sphere to a joint image.78 Likewise, in the second judgement, the image of the world (i.e. all objects in the environment) is supplemented with the concept of an enveloping blue ball (the image of which must also have been present, since otherwise the name for it would have been wanting). A judgement is thus always the supplementing of a sensual conception to the more complete representation of a sensual fact. [] When the process is over and the image became familiar, making its appearance in consciousness as a ready concept, then we have no longer to do with a judgement but merely with a simple element of memory. Natural science and mathematics mainly owe their growth to the forming of such intuitive knowledge (as Locke calls them).79 Intuitive knowledge [] impresses itself upon the memory and makes its appearance in the form of complementing recollections which spontaneously complements every sensual fact. But the facts are not all alike. The common parts of the different cases of sensual concepts are strengthened, and this results in the principle of the broadest possible generalization or continuity in memory. At the same time, memory also has to sufficiently differentiate between different concepts. A considerable portion of mental adaptation takes place unconsciously and involuntarily, under the natural guidance of the sensual facts. If this adaptation has been sufficiently comprehensive to comply with the vast majority of the occurring facts, and subsequently we come upon a fact which runs violently counter to our customary course of thoughts, without us being able to discover at once the determinative factor likely to lead to a new differentiation, then a problem arises. The new, unusual, and marvellous acts as a stimulus, which irresistibly attracts the attention. Practical considerations, or even bare intellectual discomfort, may enable the will to remove the inconsistency, to the new adaptation of thoughts. Thus arises the deliberate adaptation of thoughts, scientific research. (Mach 1896, p. 159/160) Thereby, Mach shows the continuity between the intuitive adaptation of thoughts in children and the consciously deliberate version in science. In science, this implies that only some part of the adaptation is deliberate, i.e. the part on which our attention is focussed. It does not mean that all the process of thought adaptation involved thus becomes automatically conscious. On the contrary, a larger part remains unconscious and it is a continuous part of the process to try to make more parts accessible to conscious reflection and scrutiny. Otherwise, we ourselves as well as other people might not be able to notice and criticize these parts. The horror vacui kept people from accepting Aristarchos instead of Ptolemaios. Is there a horror psyche (the fear of losing oneself), when we need to leave our old beloved concept of consciousness? In a certain way it seems to be so, paradoxically because of our intuition and the counterintuitivity of this notion.

5. Metapsychics

I have adapted the translation in several instances. The original used by Mach here is sinnliche Vorstellung, which for instance could also be translated as sensual perception or sensual image. The translation depends on the different empirical meaning of the concepts used. My usage of concept here is specific and unusual, but empirically relatively precise in contrast to a more metaphysical use. The linguistic (translation) problems involved in concepts close to consciousness will be discussed in more detail later. 78 Mach as the originator of the idea of gestalt psychology (via von Ehrenfels, Wertheimer and Khler, see Ash 1995) describes here the formation of a new gestalt from different parts: two existing concepts and an analogous judgement based on the observation of a new fact. The new fact is thereby integrated with the previous facts into a new thought economical gestalt image. 79 Locke: Certainty depends so wholly on this intuition, that, in the next degree of knowledge which I call demonstrative, this intuition is necessary in all the connexions of the intermediate ideas, without which we cannot attain knowledge and certainty. (Essay, Chap II, 1. I.)

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In principle, the Copernican and the Darwinian revolution have changed the erkenntnistheoretical nature of knowledge, although neither Copernicus nor Darwin have been aware of all such consequences of their initial ideas. The Copernican world view finally showed (in its Machian, i.e. post Newtonian interpretation) that empirically, one cannot define an absolute reference system, also not by defining any such system as gods thoughts. The final jurisdiction over any scientific world view is empirical, not metaphysical.80 Similarly, Darwins detailed synthesis of biological and geological facts exposed teleology as an anthropomorphic principle. Again, it was Mach who first brought the implications of the two together. He showed in a synthesis the psychological and erkenntnis-theoretical shift necessary for a less anthropomorphic and consistent world view, which would integrate physics, physiology, psychology and epistemology. He finally also integrated mathematics into this synthesis. From this final synthesis results the recognition of teleologies in fundamental concepts of mathematics. The intuitionists used this for their fundamental critique: for instance the tacit teleology of the principle of the excluded middle is not consistent with the facts of evolution. The simplifying assumption of the excluded middle might be helpful in more efficiently constructing mathematics within limits (for instance for the concept of infinity). But the concept of the excluded middle can certainly not be used for the foundation of psychology, especially concerning its genetic aspects in which the psychical is a result of Darwins non-teleological evolution. As the following chapter will show, exactly this is still the case and needs to be erkenntnis-theoretically addressed in psychology. It leads to a fundamentally different understanding of the concept of intuition. From the previous analysis we have seen that the most important epistemological distinction for Mach (1896, p. 156) is the one between sensual (empirical) conceptions and auxiliary (i.e. metaphysical) conceptions: All auxiliary conceptions, laws and formulae are but the quantitative regulation of my sensual conception. This differentiation is not absolute, but relative. The more adapted the concepts become (through the process described above), the more difficult the differentiation between the empirical and the metaphysical part of a concept becomes. This in turn is the starting question for a genetic conceptual analysis. If we make the same distinction between sensual conceptions and auxiliary psychological conceptions, the latter of course cannot be described as metaphysical, but must be described as metapsychical. This conceptual differentiation is doubly important, because it also more specifically denotes the psychology of metaphysical construction. Depending on the epistemology used, the psychical sensual conceptions and the auxiliary psychological conceptions use physical and metaphysical concepts to a varying degree. Equally, physics (and mathematics) in turn uses sensual conceptions with their psychological meaning and makes use of metapsychical auxiliary descriptions (both mostly called indiscriminately intuitions). These meanings are often confused with current terminology. But as many examples from this chapter showed, a larger number of facts are thereby systematically overlooked. The whole phenomenon of intuition in science cannot be properly framed. As a result, many scientists assume that this phenomenon even if they think it exists cannot be scientifically described as it affects our description itself. They therefore conclude that one should not saw off the branch one is sitting on. But this ignorabimus (we cannot know) is not necessary. For such an inquiry one needs of course to find a freer position. The position shown by James and elaborated by Mach fulfils this criterion. From this position, many of the seemingly self-referential paradoxes suddenly appear as pseudoproblems. In this sense, the following ideas are partly metapsychical. But they can claim to be less metapsychical and less metaphysical than most other ideas used in current psychology used as a theoretical explanation. Additionally, they are consciously metapsychical. They should only be considered as a possible reconstruction of psychology based on the previous
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This does not exclude, that there are other areas of jurisdiction.

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analysis. They aim at making the conceptual distinction between the adaptation of the thoughts to the facts and the thoughts to each other easier. This I tried to do, based on a historical genetic analysis and a rigorous application of the economy of thought. From my current point of view, only three basic concepts are necessary for this reconstruction: sensation, gestalt and memory (meme). The other concepts are sub-processes (sub-gestalts) of these. This specific reconceptualization has the advantage, that one can much better distinguish between the empirical and the metapsychical (related to the psychological, in the sense of metaphysical as related to the physical) contents of psychological concepts. This conceptualization also provides for the main aspects of a genetic analysis. All these concepts already have a history in psychology, although they have never been synthesized in this form together. Nevertheless, the reconstruction should be regarded as only tentative and as such speculative. Other reconstructions are certainly possible when they are based on alternative conventions. Similar to this approach they should be based on a rigorous analysis: whichever are the basic concepts and which intuitive assumptions they are based upon. Intuitive assumptions equally need to be kept continuously genetically analyzable and not fixed a priori. Sensations Mach in his Analysis developed a more general concept of sensations. But it is not easy to change our intuitions of the concept of sensations in such a way that Machs suggestion seems intuitively acceptable. As his intellectual successors in psychology Semon and von Ehrenfels note, one has to adapt the intuitive concept of sensations to Machs concept by imagining the widest application of the concept. For Mach, sensations become a relation between the physical and the psychical. It is always seen as the whole relation, although temporary local analyses are possible. The only thing we know, the given is, that there is a relation, although we do not know it a priori in its totality. In inquiry about colour we might intuitively begin at the body and not at the light source, in inquiry about the sound of a church bell we might start with the bell and not the bobbin and the bell ringer. When we become aware of our intuition that the body would have no colour without the light source, we become aware of the supposedly single sensation as actually an intricate cluster of many sensations. We become aware of its dependency on the physical and the understanding of the physical (i.e. metaphysical). Also the relation is not always the same. The same physical facts can lead to different perceptual81 results. Different physical facts can lead to the same perceptions. For Mach, sensations can be analyzed into sensual elements, which are defined recursively (as gestalts building on each other). The most elemental is explicitly defined as such from current analytical perspective, not excluding that later the elements might become more detailed or change their conceptual meanings completely. As a result of the recursive definition, the same concept of sensations does not only concern the most elemental, but also complex constructed sensations. When one assumes therefore that the unconscious plays an important part in all thought processes on a general level, including the seemingly most conscious, rational or logical, can one also assume that unconscious thought is part of all levels of thought? Is there really a gap between high and low levels of thought or might this assumption be itself an illusion? What is the role of sensations in this? Do they belong (as many psychologists assumed) to the low level psychological processes, while abstract scientific thought is a high level process? Do these concepts still make sense after the observations from the prior investigations? These questions
For conceptual purposes, perceptions is here used in the sense in which many people use the concept of sensations: the psychical part of the psychophysical relation which we experience in conscious introspection. The question of the relation of the concepts doing and perceiving shall not be further elaborated here, as it would require a more detailed analysis. It will be enough to say that for Mach, both are part of sensations.
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historically lead back to an intensively discussed question in psychology on the role of images in thought processes. The first psychological theory we know of is probably the one from Aristotle, mostly written down in his De Anima (On the Soul). It had and still has a profound influence on all theoretical thinking in psychology in Western culture. In it, Aristotle describes that before him Indeed the ancients go so far as to identify thinking and perceiving; e.g. Empedocles says 'For 'tis in respect of what is present that man's wit is increased', and again 'Whence it befalls them from time to time to think diverse thoughts', and Homer's phrase 'For suchlike is man's mind' means the same. They all look upon thinking as a bodily process like perceiving. They hold that like is known as well as perceived by like82, as I explained at the beginning of our discussion. Yet they ought at the same time to have accounted for error also; for it is more intimately connected with animal existence and the soul continues longer in the state of error than in that of truth. They cannot escape the dilemma: either (1) whatever seems is true (and there are some who accept this) or (2) error is contact with the unlike; for that is the opposite of the knowing of like by like. (Aristotle, book III, part 3)83 From this perceived inconsistency, Aristotle (De Anima book III) starts to differentiate between perceiving, practical thinking, sensitive and deliberative imagining as well as judging. He sees them as a hierarchy of thought processes, beginning with the simplest animals (which can perceive and move) to the highest form of logical judgement, which he observes only in humans. But he retains the idea of similarities between these concepts. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is. In spite of this, Aristotle continues to drive an epistemological wedge84 between thinking and perceiving (De Anima, book III, part 3): Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgement. For imagination is different from either perceiving or discursive thinking, though it is not found without sensation, or
As the concepts used here are not in common use anymore, but on the other hand I do not wish to adapt the translation, I will try to provide an interpretation: Aristotles point is that his predecessors did not fundamentally distinguish between thinking and perceiving and therefore there is no possibility of error between knowing and perceiving. Like here is generalized from two meanings. On the one hand it is the humans themselves which are alike, including the observer who is also a human (in the sense of William James question How Two Minds Can Know One Thing from 1905c) in the sense of for instance (for Aristotle) an intelligent mind not belonging alike to all animals, and indeed not even to all human beings. On the other hand a person can perceive and know two things as alike (in the sense of William James question The Knowing of Things Together from 1895) in the sense of having at least one similar property. The non-intelligent mind for Aristotle errs more often and is not-like his own mind because of this difference, although he still assumes the perception to be similar. In the beginning of the discussion, Aristotle is referring to the question of monism and dualism: All, on the other hand, who looked to the fact that what has soul in it knows or perceives what is, identify soul with the principle or principles of Nature, according as they admit several such principles or one only. [] That is why [] all those who define the soul by its power of knowing make it either an element or constructed out of the elements. The language they all use is similar; like, they say, is known by like; as the soul knows everything, they construct it out of all the principles. 83 As we saw before, is it not possible to make a consistent conceptual cut between sensory perception and interpretation, unless one manages to distinguish between a visual and a tactile world view, which is scientifically not very consistent. The stick held into the water is neither bent nor straight for our sensations. The bent-ness or straight-ness depends on the reference system. Both are in this sense metaphysical, i.e. one adds experiential interpretations in the thoughts and the inconsistency of these nave interpretations are the source of the error. Or a very small child, there is no inconsistency. Rousseaus Emile is already grown (Rousseau initially described this example of the stick in the water and the resulting epistemological question). In this sense, there is no absolute truth to be found in these different views, only consistency of the thoughts with the facts and consistency of the thoughts to each other. Then there is also no teleology in the sense of Darwin. 84 Mach in principle removes this wedge and instead introduces it as a differentiation between two types of thought: the adaptation of the thoughts to the facts (empiry) and the adaptation of thoughts to each other (metaphysics).
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judgement without it. That this activity is not the same kind of thinking as judgement is obvious. For imagining lies within our own power whenever we wish (e.g. we can call up a picture, as in the practice of mnemonics by the use of mental images), but in forming opinions we are not free: we cannot escape the alternative of falsehood or truth. Here, Aristotle has tacitly introduced a concept from logic/mathematics into psychology: the principle of the excluded middle. As the intuitionists in mathematics have shown, this principle is a convention, i.e. it is not empirical, but a simplification, which makes calculation in mathematics easier. It is the introduction of a logical convention as a basis of a metapsychical concept. Aristotle has thereby inadvertently put logic (a specific form of it) before psychology in all psychological descriptions from him and his successors, which start from this assumption. As we saw from Machs conceptual frame, this assumption is not a logical necessity resulting from the observed facts. It is an intuitive axiom of the excluded middle resulting probably from Aristotles interest in logic more than from his empirical observations. Aristotles other concepts, especially the concept of image, are then constructed from the assumption of the excluded middle. To imagine is therefore (on this view) identical with the thinking of exactly the same as what one in the strictest sense perceives. But what we imagine is sometimes false though our contemporaneous judgement about it is true; e.g. we imagine the sun to be a foot in diameter though we are convinced that it is larger than the inhabited part of the earth, and the following dilemma presents itself. Either (a) while the fact has not changed and the observer has neither forgotten nor lost belief in the true opinion which he had, that opinion has disappeared, or (b) if he retains it then his opinion is at once true and false. A true opinion, however, becomes false only when the fact alters without being noticed. (p. 38/39) When we apply this concept to Machs example of the boy and the world as a blue sphere, its genetic limitations become clear. This leads us back to the question of teleology regarding what are illusions, what is metaphysics and to the question of the relation between knowledge and error. It is not by chance that Machs most philosophical book was titled Knowledge and Error. Aristotles interpretation is not an empirical necessity, but a convention. From the non-teleological perspective after Darwin applied by Mach to human and scientific thought, it even has to be considered an inconsistent convention. Aristotle mistakes the perspectives of the logikos and the psychologikos (instead of the mathematikos and the physikos). The facts of evolution are not consistent with the tacit teleology of the principle of the excluded middle. As we saw from Machs description of judgements, for children they follow intuition rather than logic. Thus they might be logically false and genetically (empirically) correct. Poincar and Hadamard have shown that this is not only so for children, but also for adult top-level mathematical thought. One can see the same conceptual problem in Aristotles concept of image. Sensitive imagination, as we have said, is found in all animals, deliberative imagination only in those that are calculative: for whether this or that shall be enacted is already a task requiring calculation; and there must be a single standard to measure by, for that is pursued which is greater. It follows that what acts in this way must be able to make a unity out of several images. This is the reason why imagination is held not to involve opinion, in that it does not involve opinion based on inference, though opinion involves imagination. (p. 47) For Aristotle, the image is a basic psychical entity. But what if it is already constructed and dependent on his empirical experience as philosopher? Would he have thought the same, if he would have had the empirical experience of a physicist, such as Einstein? These questions came back into focus again at the time of the development of modern scientific psychology.85 In the beginning of the 20th century, several researchers86
For instance it is also at the basis of Machs criticism of Helmholtzs concept of unconscious inference (see Mach 1886; 1914 for instance p. 201). For Mach the concept is not consistent, because it assumes a logical process (inference) instead of a psychical (adaptive) process. According to Mach, thoughts are adapted to each
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made experimental discoveries seemingly independent of each other. Their findings were not consistent with the dominant paradigm at the time, which was supposed to be associationism, i.e. that all thought processes could be described as associations. As an example, I will here quote the most famous of this development (see Beth & Piaget 1966), namely Marbes (1901, p. 17) question of judgements: The experiments were therefore adequate to answer the question about the psychological conditions under which perceptual images (Wahrnehmungsvorstellungen) would become judgements. In these experiments, the introspective observers could not discern basically any perception, memory or line of thought precluding the judgement. From this, Marbe (1901, p. 43) concluded that there are no psychological preconditions of judgement. Seen from our previous perspective, one could ask about the intuitive assumptions leading to the judgement, which are not consciously noticed and therefore not considered by Marbe. The Aristotelian true-false dichotomy (the principle of the excluded middle) already presupposes a specific type of logic as well as language. Neither of the two are an empirical necessity. On the contrary, both presuppositions start the enquiry already at a relatively high level of concept formation in relation to sensual perception. What are considered judgements to be observed are a priori biased towards (Western) logic. Seen from the genesis process, Mach tries in his concept of sensation to gain a freer position in psychology. First of all, it frees itself from Aristotles logicistic assumption and thereby becomes consistent with the empirical facts of evolution. As a world view, it is insofar freer that relatively independent of new physical and psychical findings the concept can remain the same. It is also relatively independent of metaphysical and metapsychical changes. The main problem is an intuitive one: In order to accept it, we have to learn to live with an incomplete world view (Mach 1893a; 1960). Building on Machs concept, Richard Semon in his synthesis is able to completely dissolve the psychological intuition of the Aristotelian distinction in De Anima (On the Soul, book III) between perceiving, practical thinking, sensitive and deliberative imagining as well as judging. Aristotles differentiation is oriented along the lines of conscious introspection and the observation of animals. By re-evaluating the concept of consciousness from a primary concept of psychology into a secondary concept of introspective description, the Aristotelian frame can finally lose the excessive authority it had over psychological thought. Meme As we have already seen, Machs concept of sensations is more general than the usual use of the concept. Semon built on this enlarged concept with his concept of the mneme87, distinguishing between actual sensations and memory. The origin of the concept can be traced back to Ewald Hering,88 a psychologist who worked close with Mach at Charles University in Prague. Hering published an influential article about Memory as a General Function of Organized Matter in 1870. In it he proposes that memory should be seen as a general
other and not inferred from each other. What instead is often meant by inference is an adaptation by analogy (see Mach 1905 or Siemsen 2010c). Inference thus mixes the concept of sensations with the concept of images, which is clearly inconsistent in the Machian sense of sensations. 86 These were the Wrzburg school of psychology around Marbe in Germany, Binet in France and Woodworth in the USA (see Woodworth 1915, Beth & Piaget 1966). In a detailed genetic analysis, one could show here that the Aristotelian conceptual problem pervades the development of classical and modern psychology. Many of the assumed crises of psychology are related to it. For the purposes of this article, I will only show it for the origins of the Wrzburg school (Marbe). An example from modern psychology will be provided later. 87 As for English readers the spelling as meme will be more familiar, I will retain this writing in the hope that it will not create confusion between the different epistemologies. 88 This concerns the theoretical concept. Mnemetic phenomena for plants have already been described by Sir Francis Darwin, as later Semon points out.

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function of evolution. Hering also mentions Gestalten: Who can hope to unravel the manifold and intricately intertwined tissues of the inner life by simply following the threads of consciousness? You may as well gather your information about the rich organic life of the oceanic world from those few forms [Gestalten], which now and then emerge at the surface of the sea merely to disappear again into the depths of the ocean. Thus the cause which produces the unity of all single phenomena of consciousness must be looked for in unconscious life. (Hering 1870; 1969, p. 10) Hering continues on developing his concept of unconscious memory: Our perceptive faculty would forever remain in its lowest stage, if we should consciously construct every single perception from the given single materials of sensation. Our voluntary motions would never surpass the awkwardness of a child, if in every case we should re-incite with conscious will the different single impulses and reproduce over again all our single conceptions; or, to state it briefly, if the nervous motor system were not endowed with memory, viz., an unconscious memory. [] But for the binding power of memory, consciousness would be dissolved into as many fragments as there are moments. Most activities of the nervous system remain unconscious. (Hering 1870; 1897, p. 10/11) Thus, most of current sensational processes do not become part of consciousness, but can become part of memory. Memory can therefore be double-unconscious. This concerns concrete bodily processes as well as learnt abstract ideas. True, ideas are not inborn in an infant, but the ability of ready and precise crystallisation of ideas from a complex mixture of sensations, is due, not [mainly] to the labour of the child, but to the labour of innumerable ancestors. (Hering 1870; 1897, p. 25) Nevertheless, the problem of inheritance remains largely unresolved by Hering. In an article on Transformation and Adaptation in Scientific Thought (1888), Mach describes knowledge as an expression of nature and ideas thus having the properties of living organisms. And although ideas, as such, can not be treated in every respect as separate and distinct living beings, and although every forced comparison is to be avoided, [] the common trend of evolution and transformation is necessarily manifested in ideas also. Semon (1923, p. 59) develops the meme concept further, based on Machs concept of sensation.89 [] Mach himself does not recognize any such sharp contrast between bodies and sensations, for in another place he says: I see no contrast between the physical and the psychical, but only identity. In the sensory sphere of my consciousness every object is at one physical and psychical. [Quoted from Machs Analysis, 4th German edition] What we call a body is given to us first and immediately as a group of sensations, as a relatively, but not absolutely, permanent complex of colours, sounds, pressures, etc. This complex of sensations, not in the case indeed of the new-born babe in whom there is no concept of a body, but in that of every relatively more developed human being, is composed of original and mnemic sensations (under certain circumstances of the latter alone). Our concept of a body is therefore the result of a very intricate but simultaneously executed synthesis of sensations. Semons meme concept is based on a concept of sensations, which goes from the excitation (the skin) to the perception and even covers the after-effects of the immediate perception (such as after-images). We can also see from the quote, that Semon tentatively accepts the genetic world view of Mach as seen from a young childs perspective. Only this view tackles the problem of including genetically constructed psychical entities, such as the self or consciousness into ones a priori assumptions. Unfortunately, Semon speaks only of syntheses, but not how this process actually develops. He does not himself systematically research a genetic view which was attempted later by gestalt psychology.

89

Actually, Mach is by far the most quoted author in Semons Mnemic Psychology.

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What Semon misses in Machs concept of sensations is that it already includes more than what Semon calls the excitation, which is the physical. Machs sensation of light does not start at the skin.90 It is the whole relation from the light source, via the transmission medium (air) through the ocular lens, to the retina, via the optical nerves to the brain. It covers all the changes, transformations, reductions and interpretations in-between. It goes from the source of the sound to hearing the ringing of a bell (see Mach 1906a). The border of the self does not coincide with the border of the skin. The border of the skin does not coincide with the border between the physical and the psychical. Any epistemological cut introduced here necessarily leads to inconsistencies in the empirical meanings of the concepts involved. As Helmholtz already found out, the sound does not traverse the skin in the outer ear, but the sound waves are nevertheless changed by it. This, as well as the distinctions between excitation and conscious perception, is not consistent with the empirical facts. The Bergsonian differentiation between passive perceiving and active doing still prevalent in Herings concept of memory does not exist for Mach. Perception cannot be consistently distinguished into active and passive. There are only clusters of sensory elements happening at the same time.91 Semon was not aware of the gestalt concept. He died in 1918, before the main synthetic works on gestalt psychology were written by Wertheimer and Khler. His own solution of the gestalt problem with his concepts of engram, acoluthic phase, ecphory and homophony seems complicated and his terminology archaic for the taste of a broader audience. Nevertheless, his synthesis as well as the gestalt concept are constructed from the same epistemological origin, namely Machs concept of sensations. Thus, sensation and gestalt are consistent basic concepts. Both of them have mnemic and actual aspects in current thought. All other concepts describe sub-gestalts of these processes. One could assume that Semons concept of mneme has little to do with James critique on other world views and has not been very successful in its influence today, especially on psychology. But this impression would be mistaken as indeed there are (intuitive) influences of this idea to be found in psychology today and they are considered as challenging. In order to elaborate this, it will require a brief genetic historical analysis. Bertrand Russell confesses in his Analysis of Mind that he changed his philosophical world view primarily because of James question and its philosophical implications. But additionally, Russell includes Semons concept of mneme. James and Semon are the most quoted authors of Russells book.92 Russell (1921; 1922, p. 25) partly follows James successors (namely R. B. Perry and Edwin B. Holt) in postulating neutral entities as the stuff out of which both mind and matter are constructed. [] But I should say that images belong only to the mental world, while those occurrences (if any) which do not form part of any experience belong only to the physical world. There are, it seems to me, prima facie different kinds of causal laws, one belonging to physics and the other to

For Mach, the body sensations of the own body are not in principle different to the sensations concerning other bodies. The main difference is that they happen more frequently and thus after a while become the normal point of reference when one grows older. The border of the skin is only approximate of this and often does not coincide with the border of the self (called by Mach the border U, which cuts right through consciousness; see Mach 1905). The border of the self in turn is culture-dependent. None of these concepts offers a safe, i.e. not anthropomorphic, basis for constructing a world view. Semon rejects the concept of body as something outside of sensation, but intuitively excludes the own human body from this conceptual change. Semon (1923, p.58) in the beginning proposes taking the word sensation in its widest sense. Thus there is a wider sense of sensation than Semon is aware of. 91 Semon was a student of Haeckel. The questions of inheritance are therefore close to his initial inquiries. 92 Before Russell (1921; 1922, p. 22) goes further into the revolutionary doctrine which [William James] advocated, he considers sensation as the central concept for his shift in world view and Ernst Mach as the originator of the idea, whose Analysis of Sensations [is] a book of fundamental importance in the present connection.

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psychology.93 Does Russell, by reducing Machs concept of sensation even further than Semon, already cuts or at least numbs one of the legs Mach contended we are standing on, so that we cannot sense the world through it anymore. Why does Russell reduce Machs concept of sensation? Probably because as an advocate of the principle of the excluded middle (in his Principia), he intuitively keeps Aristotles assumption of a priori logical thoughts. But this of course is only an intuition and not based on genetic analysis. Nevertheless, Russells reduction is important for the following historical genesis of the concept of meme. For Russell (1921; 1922, p. 78), Semons mnemic phenomena94 are an important conceptual element missing in James account. The essence of experience is the modification of behaviour produced by what is experienced. We might, in fact, define one chain of experience, or one biography, as a series of occurrences linked by mnemic causation. I think it is this characteristic, more than any other, that distinguishes sciences dealing with living organisms from physics. The best writer on mnemic phenomena known to me is Richard Semon. And further (Russell 1921; 1922, p. 84) Semons applications of his fundamental ideas in various directions are interesting and ingenious. For Russell, Semons mneme account for the influence of past experiences on behaviour. The mnemic phenomena open the way to the genetic account. James did not adequately include this direction, maybe as part of the difficulties he had answering genetic questions (cf. quote in footnote 9). Russell is struggling with the same difficulties, as he gives a rather behaviourist account of mnemic phenomena. He begins his observations similar to Semon (excitations) from the stimulus,95 but takes into account only the modification of behaviour. Both approaches (Semons and Russels) thus significantly reduce the possibilities for genetic analysis and understanding. The excitation approach neglects much of the possible physical observation (i.e. everything that happens before it passes the skin. The criterion of behavioural modification excludes the observation of many intuitive learning processes. These as we have seen tend to be long-term and indirect, i.e. outside of most scientific observation periods. Consequently, most of the examples Russell uses for the concept of mneme are concerning remembering simple facts (adding them to memory). This corresponds best to his simplicity assumption of causal connections. Transformative (gestalt) memory events are not a priori excluded, but also not in detail considered. In Machs sense, Russell might still use both feet to feel the earth, but standing only on the toes. Dawkins meme concept is very close to Russells interpretation of Semons idea. Also Dawkins does not include the idea of transformative (gestalt) memory events. He focuses on the genesis properties of the concept, but by-and-large leaves out its sensational origins. He thereby abstracts from its genesis and does not apply the concept to itself. As an example, Dawkins (1978, p. 210) takes the understanding of Darwins theory by different people. Yet, in spite of all this, there is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory. If this were not so, then almost any statement about two people agreeing with each other would be meaningless. An idea-meme might be defined as an entity which is capable of being transmitted from one brain to another. The meme of Darwins theory is therefore that essential basis of the idea
Russell overlooks the dual dependency of causality. The causal concept is primarily used for investigations in physics, but it is a metaphysical concept according to Mach (1911). In the sense Russell is using it here, it becomes a highly metapsychical concept. Concerning the assumption of causality, Russell ignored his own warning (1921; 1922, p. 16): [T]here is no enemy to thinking so deadly as a false simplicity. Mach had intensively warned against this solution of a third entity, as psychophysics thus loses its empirical meanings and becomes a purely metaphysical concept. 94 It is interesting to note that Russell changes Semons terminology from sensations to phenomena. On the one hand this change adds implications concerning the philosophy of science. On the other hand, it neglects the part of metapsychical from the dual dependency. 95 This conceptual shift is also slightly different as one puts the emphasis of observation on what happens to the outer side versus what happens at the inner side of the skin.
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which is held in common by all brains who understand the theory. The differences in the ways that people represent the theory are then, by definition, not part of the meme. The difficult part is of course the question of the meaning of understanding the theory and what happens if the empirical meanings of the fundamental concepts shift. Dawkins unfortunately does not give any account on the origin of this idea, but it is rather unlikely that he did not have any either direct or indirect contact with Russells influential book during his study time at Oxford. Because of his cultural closeness to Russell and his similarity in interpretation one can with a high likelihood assume that there has been some influence. This influence was enough to let the concept of the mneme suddenly reemerge again by Dawkins more than 70 years after Semons initial description. Seen from this perspective, Dawkins idea of replicators, i.e. self-replicating elements as the basis of all evolution, leading to the selfish gene might be a result of Herings idea of memory as a general function of evolution. Dawkins developed his idea of memes after the idea of genes as the centrepiece of evolution. Genetically, it was probably the idea of mneme, which led Dawkins to his idea of replicator genes. The idea of selfishness thus becomes an anthropomorphic reintroduction of Descartes intuitive self. It thereby is a metapsychical concept and not an empirical (physical) one as Dawkins tacitly claims. As this development only serves as one example of the principles elaborated in this chapter, it shall be sufficient here to state the genetic likelihood of such a connection without showing it in all details. I will at this point also neither continue venturing into the details of Dawkins intellectual influence on currently eminent psychologists (Daniel Dennett shall serve as the most prominent example) nor into showing that the conceptual adaptations which were analyzed are still active with his intellectual successors.96 This account of the genesis of ideas from Mach via Hering, Semon and Russell to Dawkins provides a current example of the intuitive concept in science and how concepts can become more intuitive with time, while their foundational concepts might become more and more hidden through this intuitive process.97 This is a problem in science, as it reduces the possibility of fundamental reconstructions as well as the perpetuation of adaptive errors over time. This phenomenon has always happened, but the number of such adaptive errors has increased through the turmoil of the World Wars. Unfortunately, the phenomenon causes its greatest problem in the area of learning science for students. In this area, the effects of the World Wars appears with a time-lag of about 2-3 generations (the literature used in education is mostly tertiary literature). The empirical evidence of this phenomenon will be briefly described at the end of this chapter. Gestalt In his Analysis, Mach (1914, footnote p. 90) describes the origin of his idea of gestalt, which led to his last shift in world view.98 Some forty years ago [], in a society of physicists and physiologists, I proposed for discussion the question, why geometrically similar figures were also optically similar. I remember quite well the attitude taken with regard to this question, which was accounted not only superfluous, but even ludicrous.
These details may be a subject for later research. I will again stress, that the account I gave I consider only one of several possible views. Especially the link between Russell and Dawkins is based only on probability of the meme diffusion of prominent thinkers within the scientific culture (between Oxford and Cambridge). Nevertheless, the probability of fundamental ideas in science being reinvented (with similar foundational properties and in this case a similar and unusual name) is much more unlikely than their transmission through intuitive processes. The relation becomes even more likely, if the idea in question is not in the air, i.e. a mostly deductive result of previous new findings known to the scientific community. The meme/mneme concept does not seem to have been in the air at the time of Dawkins book as a logical necessity of the gene concept. 98 There were at least two more shifts in his world view (see Mach 1885; 1914, p. 30).
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Nevertheless, I am now as strongly convinced as I was then that this question involves the whole problem of visual gestalts. That a problem cannot be solved which is not recognized as such is clear. In this non-recognition, however, is manifested, in my opinion, that one-sided mathematico-physical direction of thought [].99 These ideas of Mach had intuitive influences on physics and mathematics, but also on the development of psychology, for instance on the concept of gestalt and gestalt psychology.100 The article On Gestalt Qualities from 1890 by von Ehrenfels was regarded by Wertheimer and Khler as the foundational article of gestalt psychology (see Wertheimer 1924, Khler 1920 and Ash 1995). In the beginning of this article, von Ehrenfels states that his ideas initiated from an intuition he had after reading Machs Analysis. My starting point arose from several remarks and hints from E. Machs Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations (Jena 1886) practically by itself, which I owe a considerable strengthening of my opinions about the here described circumstances to, even though they seem to have originated in completely different circumstances. Mach sets up the, for some people certainly paradoxically sounding, hypothesis that we can immediately sense [empfinden] spatial patterns [Gestalten] and even sound-patterns or melodies. And indeed at least the second of these theses not only seemingly, but also from its contents should be undisputedly absurd101, if it would not be immediately intelligible, that sensation here is used in a different than the usual sense. [] But if Mach, by using the term spatial and tonal gestalts, also wanted to stress its simplicity, it becomes clear that he [] viewed these gestalts not as mere combination of elements, but as something new (relative to the elements on which they base) and up to a certain degree independent. [] I hope to be able to show in the following that Mach [in his reflections] has shown us the way of resolving the problem mentioned. (von Ehrenfels 1890, pp. 249-251) The problem von Ehrenfels mentions is what William James called The knowing of things together (1895). If one takes a regular concept of sensation, it is a question of descriptive psychology. For Mach, it becomes a question of genetic psychology. What is simple might therefore appear to be simple in its current sensational gestalt, but is actually a result of a complex genetic process. Gestalts are not linear (additive), they are transformational.102 In order to genetically describe the gestalt concept, I will in the following deviate slightly from my method of quoting the status nascendi and use an example from one of the earliest articles of Wertheimer, because it concerns precisely the topic of the examples I mostly used in this chapter: the psychology of mathematics.103 It is in the psychological sense a fiction that everywhere any arbitrary partition can be considered equal, just discretionary; [] Operations are not in general initially given as arbitrary, but those operations suggest themselves, which are in the nature of entities, predetermined through their type or which lead to results, which have the character of wholes in the area concerned. (Wertheimer 1912; 1925, p. 132) Contrary to Khlers physicalistic interpretation later (see Ash 1995), Wertheimer (1912; 1925, p. 112) stresses that this nature and
This quotation also bears reference to the prior discussed question of methodological specialization in science and the (unintended) intuitive training of ones thoughts. 100 His other influences on for instance the development of genetic psychology (Siemsen 2010b) and Boring (1950), shall not be of concern here. 101 The German word used here is widersinning, which literally translates as counter-sensual. 102 Many gestalts, for instance, are not best recognized in reality, but in caricatures, i.e. when certain properties are overemphasized, while others are neglected. Greek statues in the classic times are thus not just idealized bodies. They are idealized beyond the point a body could look like. Egyptian obelisks are not built straight, but slightly curved. Equally, natural laws cannot be observed in reality. They approximately describe many facts under idealized circumstances which can never be achieved for each single fact. 103 Unfortunately, this article has never been translated into English, although it is from a genetic perspective one of the best articles from gestalt psychology. Wertheimers most influential book Productive Thinking is based on this article, i.e. the article provides the theory, the application of which Wertheimer demonstrates in the book. A reflection of the genesis of Wertheimers own thought is unfortunately equally missing in the book.
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predetermination is not externally given and logical, but a genetic result of Machs sensational relation: This is connected with the special way of thought, which does not grasp concepts according to discretionary logical operations, but according to their biological relevance. This genetic concept has direct implications for the understanding of learning, for instance in the teaching of mathematics. So also the difficulty of teaching children the concept of generally transferrable numbers does not lie in their inability to think, but in the strength of the representation of these natural factors in thought. (Wertheimer 1912; 1925, p. 134) The good mathematics teacher puts his main emphasis on the understanding (the general view) of the task and requires that the student for himself (approximately) forms a concept of what (roughly) will be the outcome contrary to the mechanical mathematizing, where for instance a mistake in the setting of a decimal point can lead to claiming completely senseless results. Genetically it is probable that not primarily the counting, but natural groups and clusters develop within the real biological relationship coming into consideration; not concepts such as 1 and the continuous Plus One are probably what is primary, but the analogconceptual more individual entities. Also probably not in the sense of a majority of similar, but initially as structures wholes. (Wertheimer 1912; 1925, p. 143) The tendency of having the unity, the character as a whole does not, contrary to the substractive capturing of properties by our logic, let characteristic traits appear as logically addable parts, but in their being as a whole as constituents of a gestalt quality. Abstraction therefore is not necessarily a higher development, but it is a specialization of thoughts. This specialization might be thought economical in some contexts, but hindering in others. What is higher and lower in a cultural sense cannot be judged anthropomorphically from the point of view of a specific culture.104 Such categories often make no sense in anthropology, as the whole conceptual frames (world views) are different. All concepts might be based on completely different sets of empirical meanings.105 Also logic and our current Western concept of number came out of practical requirements and needs. They can thus neither be considered universal nor culturally independent. Because of the expansion of modern science, they have just been developed by more people over longer time than any other similar conceptual systems from other cultures. The concept of gestalt also resolves the unproductive hen-egg type of questions regarding the initial primacy of nature or nurture. From a gestalt perspective it makes no sense to try to draw a triangle in one dimension and ask which of its sides has a larger share in its area. If one takes the concept of memory as a general function of evolution (see Hering 1870; 1969), the problem disappears as a pseudoquestion.106 An example: Implications for the concept of construction One result of this genetic gestalt concept is a change of the empirical meaning of the concept of construction in epistemology. The metaphor of construction in epistemology and the
Similar ideas have been developed by Franz Boas and have been very influential in US anthropological thinking until today (see Boas 1911; 1938 and Stocking 1968). On the closeness of the development of these ideas to Mach and their later influence on the initial ideas of Jerome Bruner, see Siemsen (2010b). 105 The difference in observed facts can be so intuitively fundamental that even with long training, one cannot observe them in principle. For instance Boas observed that he consistently heard phoneme in Inuit language one time as one sound, another time as a different sound. His interpretation was that psychophysically, the factual sound gestalt was in-between, but impossible for him to hear in the way the natives would hear it. 106 Dawkins concept of meme shows only superficial similarities to this. A more fitting account can be found in Semons concept of mneme (1911). Nevertheless, all these concepts are gestalts, i.e. they are constructed by our perception and the scientific process and do not exist outside of this process. No planet at any time moves exactly according to the laws of Newton. The laws are only an idealized approximation of planetary movement. Einstein used Minkowskis mathematics because it could best describe his ideas about relativity. It is not that Minkowski had found Gods thoughts with a mathematical description. As Mach (1886; 1919, p. 256) wrote, there is always the danger in specialized science to mistake the tools of a special science for the whole world.
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resulting constructivism have their origin in the question of the method of mathematical proofs. According to this approach, all mathematics is constructed from as few initial elements (assumptions/axioms) as possible. This view was applied in mathematics for instance by Kronecker and Brouwer and voiced as an analogy by Poincar: a house is constructed from stones (on the relation between Poincars analogy and Piaget, see Piaget 1984). From the theory of proofs, it became an epistemological assumption that all knowledge also in other sciences needs to be constructed in order to be internally consistent. This idea was logically developed by Rudolf Carnap in his Aufbau (The logical structure of the world) and then promoted by him, the members of the Vienna Circle, as well as Logical Positivists in general around the world. The central critique on this approach came from Eino Kaila, a gestalt psychologist and philosopher of science from Finland.107 According to Kaila, Poincars analogy of construction has one fundamental problem: it requires stones and a knowledgeable architect to begin with.108 Here the analogy ends, as stones are obviously not constructed from basic elements, for instance from pieces of sand. Stones are gestalt wholes. Equally, the architect assumes to be conscious of the result of other peoples thought processes, even though these depend mostly on the (in general not known) genetically pre-existent knowledge. Any basic elements need another epistemology to be presupposable.109 Kailas argument is founded on the results from his research in experimental psychology. It concerns the basic elements of the relation between the logical and the psychological. Kailas criticism led Carnap to re-evaluate the foundations of his Aufbau towards physicalism. But this new approach still neglected Kailas main arguments, which are psychological, or rather metapsychical.110 It follows from the extensional quasi-analytic method that any internal manifold of the basic elements must be left out of consideration. However, Carnap believes that his assumption that the cross-sections of the stream of experience are utterly simple qualia agrees with the views of modern psychology, in particular gestalt theory. He seems to assume that the rejection of the doctrine that experiences are composed of mental elements of some kind or another is equivalent to the statement that apart from all conceptual elaborations they are unstructured total impressions (without original internal manifold of their own). [...] Quite generally, it has become clear at all points of the theory of perception that former psychology enormously overestimated the part played by learning, experience and custom in the formation of the perceptual world. Now these results of psychology surely are of significance for the construction theory inasmuch as this theory wants to be a rational reconstruction of the actual process of cognition. [...] And after all the construction theory itself is surely based on concepts which cannot have arisen according to the quasi-analytic schema e.g., the concept of the past, without which this method would not be applicable. This implies that the quasianalytic formation of concepts is only one among many others. What is more, this kind
Kaila was strongly influenced by Mach as were many members of the Vienna Circle (for details, see Siemsen & Siemsen 2009 and Siemsen 2010d). 108 It is important to note here that the Finnish words for building/constructing rakentaa, building rakennus and structure rakenne do not exactly correspond to the English meaning implied in constructing. It does not require an architect of construction. It can also be structured without. Rakentaa can signify developmental processes in nature, i.e. the structure and growth of plants. The empirical meaning of rakentaa is therefore closer to a genetic (adaptive) understanding of the scientific knowledge process. 109 As we saw in Wittgensteins Tractatus, metapsychical genesis must already have started before logic can be presupposed. 110 Kaila continued his critique, but because of the World Wars, it did not have an impact on Logical Empiricism anymore. Kailas work though did have a long-term effect on Finnish Science education, which is documented in the empirical results of the OECD PISA-study (see Siemsen & Siemsen 2009).
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of concept formation is such as is possible only on a relatively high level of the actual cognitive process. Countless distinctions leaping forth from one single experience [] must precede before one can abstract, e.g., the pitch of a tone. The reason why construction theory favours this particular kind of concept formation is, of course, that it can be formally represented in terms of classes and relations, the only constructional forms available to logistics. For this reason the theory absolutizes this method and introduces it epistemologically too soon, whereby the theory gets entangled in inner contradictions and does violence to the 'auto-mental objects' of experienced time and perceptual space. (Kaila 1930) What does this story tell about constructivism? Constructivism is based on an unfitting metapsychical metaphor. This metaphor may be consistent from a metaphysical point of view, but not from a metapsychical one. Constructivism is not inherently genetic, but logicistic. For a consistent approach, one would have to include the genetic concept of gestalt (i.e. the one from Kaila, not the physicalistic one from Khler). The Metapsychical I hope that now the meaning of the concept of metapsychic became clearer. The term distinguishes the process of the adaptation of thoughts to each other from the empirical process of adapting the thoughts to the facts. As both processes are double-dependent, this distinction is never absolute. Nevertheless, an enquiry into it is a necessity in order to find the conventional parts of our intuitive assumptions and question them systematically. For an easier understanding of the concept, one can use the metaphor of origami. When the paper is folded, it assumes a different gestalt. In this gestalt, neither the shape of the initial sheet of paper, nor of what was written or depicted on the paper is apparent anymore. To the uninitiated (child), the folding appears as a given, a mystery. Only when we unfold the paper, and show it to the student, the connection with his or her prior experience becomes apparent to the student. When we slowly fold the paper again and then let the student repeatedly do the same, the mystery dissolves. The student can then after a while even develop his or her own adaptations of the gestalt. The origami gestalt has acquired its empirical meaning. Instead, the folded gestalt initially shown may be recognized as what it is meant to depict (an animal, a boat, etc.), but it cannot be fundamentally adapted. As such it is highly metapsychical. The image of it may lead to the assumption that it is not based on sensations, but senseless images. The strong influence of logicism and its functionalist, operationalist, constructivist, etc. derivatives has probably unintentionally increased these phenomena of intuitive hiding in science. As Hans Hahn111 summarized in another metaphor: If the mathematicians have, since the days of Euclid, already learnt to put themselves up with the fact that there is no royal road to their science, so on the other side the access to it must not lead over the longest and steepest high mountain paths, so that most people would have to fail underway, but the few who manage to pass, being exhausted to death, finding themselves not at the goal, but at the beginning, where true mathematics would be supposed to start. Additionally, metapsychics is a methodological tool for the meta-analysis of science. Even though, metaphysics is dependent on physics for its construction, it has implications for all of science. All sensation depends on the physical. Equally, the metapsychical has implications for all of science. All sensation depends on the psychical as well. It is these implications, which can be systematically analyzed with the conceptual frame developed above.

Hahn provides an insiders perspective in several ways. He was a student of Mach, a prominent member of logical positivism, an intuitionist mathematician and an inspiring mathematics teacher to Kurt Gdel, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper and Karl Menger.

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5. General intuition The above view of course might not fit our intuitions about the concept of intuition. But precisely because we research the phenomena which might be related to intuition, we should know that one cannot be guided by intuition only. Intuition depends on developing a habit of thought (alternatively one can of course use the physiological description that the synapses between neurons are strengthened so that the neurons become more likely to fire together). This habituation does not distinguish between empirical habituation (when thoughts are adapted to the facts derived from sensual elements) and rational habituation (the adaptation of thoughts to each other). As we saw in the quotation from James before, most of the time (99% according to him) we do not have an empirical feedback, but intuitively regard the lack of a negative feedback as confirmation. Especially in science when one researches by thinking about a concept very intensively, the rational part of habituation can become a strong part of the process of thought. Optimizing the process in terms of internal consistency which in its extreme scientific form is seen as rational or logical deduction does not have any relation to its empirical consistency (the consistency with the phenomena and the facts). Elaborate internally consistent (ratio/logical) systems, such as the Ptolemaic epicycles, can be completely speculative and considered erroneous from the perspective of (often later developed) scientific theories which describe more facts or look at different circumstances of these facts. But, speculative systems can become practical tools for the economy of thought, like Minkowskis theorems for Einsteins relativity theory. A problem arises mostly when one does not handle them with appropriate empirical care, but regards toy models as describing reality. One may mistake some similarities in appearance between a mechanical model with knowing the functions of a living being or a human brain. But up to now, no mechanist construction has ever produced a living being. It is not a thought experiment and certainly not a fact, but a (metaphysical) fiction. As Jerome Bruner (1962) stated: we have to be very careful in not mistaking the portrait even a very elaborate one for the sitter. Therefore, the concepts and models derived mainly from adapting the thoughts to each other should be named metaphysical as opposed to empirical. This must be regardless of the thoughts being intuitive or conscious. The main problem with intuitive speculation is that many people in the sense of James do not notice that it is speculation. This intuitive metaphysical speculation should thus be counteracted by training empirical carefulness.

6. Conclusions How to research intuition with intuition shaping research or the erkenntnis-theoretical role of psychology The psychological analysis of scientific (including psychological and philosophical) concepts is a necessity of scientific consistency. [It] is not enough to replace the instinctively acquired opinions of everyday life, which have crept into philosophy under different guises, by a purely scientific perspective. One has to lay bare their psychological roots; otherwise they will continue to tiller. (Mach 1906a, pp. 598-599) But, psychology plays a double-role in this analysis of thought. On the one hand it provides the tools for the analysis of psychic phenomena, such as intuition. On the other hand it presupposes concepts, which depend on the meaning of the concept of knowledge. As knowledge in turn is part of psychic phenomena as well as a precondition of observing them, only a careful implementation of psychology and Erkenntnistheorie can help in unwinding these intricate relationships. In his erkenntnis-

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theoretical inquiry into conceptual thinking in mathematics, Wittenberg112 (1957, p. 197) observed, This does not become evident in the usual psychological investigations, because these do not initially work with the goal of a total reduction of thought to the psychical. Instead, they will use for example the reality or perception or something similar as relational concepts defined in regard to their contents and then investigate, how, for instance in the psychogenesis, the concepts come about with which << we orient ourselves in reality >>. That means that the investigation of certain concepts accept a certain part of meaningful language as reasonable, respective defined in regard to their contents beforehand. A total goal would imply to include also these concepts themselves into the field of psychological research. This cannot be done by psychology alone, but only in conjunction with an erkenntnis-theoretical philosophy of science. On the same terms then the physical and physiological views are involved as no empirically oriented Erkenntnis is possible without. Again, the Erkenntnistheorie is needed to distinguish between the empirical and the metaphysical or metapsychical aspects of concept formation. It might console the psychologist that as a result of the psychological analysis, also the fundamental meaning of Erkenntnistheorie changes. The concept of the metapsychical is one example of this. The insufficiently understood complexity of this process is probably the root of many assumptions of crisis in psychology (for instance by Klpe, Bhler, Stumpf, Lurija, etc.) as well as the often observed distance with which several other sciences view psychology and its results (for instance philosophy, physics or economics). As Wittenberg argues, the epistemological problems do not show as long as one remains within a locally defined world or system. The problem is that no world or reality restricts itself to any previously defined human thought system. This is the real challenge of the empirical primacy before any metaphysical or metapsychical. There are many local empiricists, but few that even attempted this view on a total (monistic) level. Changing the concept of consciousness from the basis on which psychology is constructed, or which as James claimed takes for its domain precisely the filed of the facts of consciousness, to an epiphenomenon of thought is a rather far-reaching claim. The claim is not new, as it was already stated by James, and it has been restated for instance by the heterophenomenologists, such as Dennett. But these cases still lack consistency from an epistemological point of view. The argument for a total (really monistic) empirical view113 is clear: The choice for the local empiricists when to be empirical and when not, remains arbitrarily based for instance on conventions and little understood intuitions. This is a fundamental inconsistency for dualists as well as for other monists. The only problem is that this view can by definition never be finished. In the terms of Gdel, it is consistent, but incomplete. Or as Mach (1883; 1893a; 1902, p. 464) has put it: The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is precisely this toleration of an incomplete conception of the world and the preference for it rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate conception.114 Empirical effects on science education Although the focus of this chapter lies certainly on the questions of science and especially psychology, one of the main empirical impacts of the questions elaborated can be found in

Wittenberg studied mathematics in Zurich under George Polya, Wolfgang Pauli and Hermann Weyl. He was probably also influenced in his ideas by Rolf Nevanlinna (see Siemsen 2010). His doctoral advisors were Hilberts former assistant Paul Bernays and Ferdinand Gonseth. Gonseth had a close affiliation to Piagets thoughts. Wittenberg was a central person in developing the ideas of the OECD PISA study on the comparison of science education and in voicing the resistance of mathematicians to the New Maths reforms in the USA and Canada. He unfortunately died very early. 113 Here one can understand, what James probably meant with his term radical empiricism. 114 Mach adds to this: Our religious opinions are always our own private affair, as long as we do not obtrude them upon others and do not apply them to things which come under the jurisdiction of a different tribunal.

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science education.115 Also in science education, the epistemological inconsistencies mentioned are aggravated by the effects of the two World Wars. But here the effects show much stronger. On the one hand, genetic questions have an immediate effect on all children, who do not acquire a sufficient background in Western logical culture from their parents (leading often to high attrition rates for scientific subjects as a result). On the other hand, many science educators orient themselves on current science thinkers. This implies that any epistemological inconsistency tends to be not only replicated, but metastasized in tertiary literature. If one assumes as a hypothesis that the main damage was done during WWII on the main scientists, their direct students would retire one generation after, while the science educators taught by them would retire another generation after and the teachers these had trained a further generation later. Thus, following this line of argument, the effects of the cultural rubble left by the World Wars should empirically show in education roughly now, with a widening gap between low and high achieving students as well as a general decrease in science-related achievement. Both trends seem to be confirmed by most large-scale educational studies, such as the OECD PISA study (for instance OECD 2007).116 There should also be an empirical effect observable depending on the proportion of James and Machs epistemology implemented into the central ideas of science teaching. At least for Finland, i.e. the country consistently occupying the first rank among OECD PISAstudy countries, this can be shown.117 Their internationally most renowned Finnish mathematician Rolf Nevanlinna developed a specific synthesis of mathematics between intuitionism and formalism based on the epistemology of Ernst Mach. His colleague and friend Eino Kaila used this in turn for a unique synthesis with gestalt psychology and Erkenntnistheorie. Two generations after, a successor of Kaila, Kaarle Kurki-Suonio (2010) implemented the ideas in science education in an in-service teacher training course (see Lavonen et al. 2004). Through this course (and regular teacher training courses at Helsinki and other Finnish universities) about 20% of Finnish science teachers have been taught in an epistemology very similar to Machs approach. As a result, the PISA-study average on student achievement in Finland is much higher, while the variance of low-achievers is much lower than in the rest of the OECD. Also the dependency of student grades on the parents academic background is very low in Finland. This was achieved by changing the teachers world view on science as well as education jointly and consistently (see Siemsen 2010d and Kurki-Suonio 2010). How the problem of erkenntnis-theoretical consistency is central to the question of science education has been found again and again in many educational debates. Unfortunately, the related teleological question as discussed in this chapter is often missed. As an example, one of the current participants of the so-called Math Wars, Schoenfeld118

For the purposes of this article, only a very brief overview can be provided. Details can be found in Siemsen & Siemsen (2009) and Siemsen (2010b and 2010d). 116 The PISA study also has a strong phenomenological background, which makes it a better proxy for the following purposes than more logicistically based studies, such as TIMSS (see Siemsen & Siemsen 2009). 117 See Siemsen & Siemsen (2009) and Siemsen (2010d). The empirical results in PISA for several other countries, such as Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark or the Czech Republic also fit this picture. The Asian countries as well as Canada are cases that still need to be researched. The situation in the USA seems to be historically mixed: while there have been several attempts at implementing such educational reforms, like James Conants General Education program, these seem to have mostly failed in their broad implementation in the long run (i.e. for the whole country and not only for single university cities), probably because of a lack of epistemological consistency in the sense discussed in this chapter. The continuing debate on the Math Wars seems to be a case in point, where the initial erkenntnis-theoretical questions have been watered down to the point where sensible empirical questions cannot be asked anymore within the given set of metapsychological metastases. 118 Schoenfeld should serve only as an example, because he is one of the few authors who at least tries to take a less radical perspective, although he clearly belongs to the reformist camp. Other descriptions of the Wars

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(2004, p. 264/272) observes the already described empirical situation: The attrition rate from mathematics, from 9th grade on, was roughly 50% per year; worse still, the attrition rate for Latinos and African Americans was significantly larger. On the analysis of the origins of this problem and the question of the remedy he mentions: When superficial aspects of reform are implemented without the underlying substance, students may not learn much at all. [For the teacher] this means knowing the mathematics well, having a sense of when to let students explore and when to tell them what they need to know, and knowing how to nudge them in productive directions. Thus, the main questions of good education (and this can similarly be found for the other side of the Wars) remain vague and presupposed in the existing intuitions of the teachers. They are seemingly not explicitly provided in the (reform or nonreform) ideas of teaching. But what might give a teacher this magical teaching sense? Schoenfeld, for instance, regards cognitivism as the main basis for the reform ideas. Piaget is taken by many cognitivists such as Jerome Bruner as one of the founding fathers of their discipline. Piaget (1966 in his book with Beth, p. 141) states: We cannot oppose the search for connecting links between the mental mechanisms and logico-mathematical structures, since this is precisely our task. Here we are squarely back at the topic of this chapter. But does this implicit Aristotelian assumption really comply with empirical evidence? Many educators have continuously thought so. But some of their greatest began to have empirical doubts at the end of their lives. Piaget, in spite of Bruners earlier critique on the culture-dependency of his empirical results (Bruner et al. 1966), started to have doubts only in 1971/72 at his retirement, especially about the 11-15 year olds and their development in his conceptual terms: However, recent research has shown that subjects from other types of schools or different social environments sometimes give results differing more or less from the norms indicated; for the same experiments it is as though these subjects had stayed on the concrete operatory level of thinking. (Piaget 1972; 2008, p. 43) Similarly, other great educators began to have late doubts about some of their initial assumptions. For instance Henry Edward Armstrong, the great British science education promoter and pioneer of the experimental approach (which was later implemented by the Nuffield approach), staggeringly noted at the end of his life that he had done a fundamental mistake for more than 30 years: He had been teaching mainly for the high-achieving students. The majority [of the students] proved incapable it is not in us to be logical. (Armstrong 1934) But at the point where Armstrong had resigned, more than 20 years earlier Alfred Binet one of the greatest French psychologists and educationalists had followed-up. He concluded his book on pedagogy, which became his scientific testament, with a humble metaphor as a guide for further inquiry: The old science of education is like an old-fashioned carriage: it squeaks but it can still serve a turn [] [Modern educational science] looks like a precision-made machine, but the parts do not hold together and it has one defect: it does not work. (Binet 1975, p. 232) Following the line of Binets thoughts, one could wonder if what he describes is actually the origin of such educational phenomena as the Math Wars: the new approach destroys enough of the old approach without being able to replace it with enough conscious consistency (i.e. theoretically replicable by the average teacher). In the end, each well-meaning reform or synthesis leads to a de facto (though unintended) deterioration of the overall intuitive knowledge of the teachers. The problem would then be that the old as well as the new approach are inherently inconsistent. Furthermore, all attempts of synthesis are thereby built on inconsistencies, which both approaches share to begin with. The result after several rounds of reform and counter-reform is erkenntnistheoretical gibberish.119
from the traditionalist camp or of the older debate around the New Maths show similar properties in the sense observed here. 119 Both sides in the Math Wars for instance still introduce fundamental concepts logically, without basing them on the sensual experience of the students. In this case it is irrelevant, if the concept is introduced by a

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Unfortunately, these empirical insights came often at the very end of the careers of these educationalists, when their successors did not notice their change of mind anymore. Seemingly each of them did not build on these insights of their predecessors.120 Just like Jamess radical empiricism idea, which has been but almost forgotten. But seen from the perspective of this late world view of James, much of what came afterwards seems to become erkenntnis-theoretically increasingly fuzzy rather than clarified. The newer thinkers do not necessarily provide a more consistent view.121 Nevertheless, their hindsight insight seems to remain mainly the same. Instead of repeating it, one should therefore start to treat it as a joint Erkenntnis to learn from such great educationalists and psychologists as Piaget, Armstrong, Binet, James and Mach122. All of them up to a degree had noticed that the erkenntnistheoretical analysis of the genesis of scientific thought cannot be based on logical premises, at least after Darwin had shown the principal way out of this Aristotelian circularity. Do we have to make the same mistake all over again and again? It is time to go back in time and to see these insights in a new erkenntnis-theoretical light.

References Archimedes (1972). Werke. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Aristotle (1994; 2000). On the Soul. Internet Classics Archive http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/soul.html, accessed 20/09/2009. Armstrong, H. E. (1934). The First Frankland Memorial Oration. The Lancastrian Frankland Society. Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry, 53/21. Ash, M. G. (1995). Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890-1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

definition of the teacher or by group work or in an experiment of the students. In the latter cases, the concept is also implicitly introduced by the teacher by framing the problem, i.e. before the actual group work or experiment begins. The students would otherwise never arrive at the concept. As John Bradley, strongly influenced by Mach, working in the same school as the late Armstrong and a great critic of the Nuffield experimental approach, recognized in his retirement speech (1975, p. 9): Why have teachers [], including myself, failed so miserably? [] We have answered the question: Where does theory begin?: wrongly. [] So with good intentions, we have said to Robert: What matters is the atom, or the molecule or the equation. Poor Robert has been stranded; he resembles a child aged six given logarithms to multiply three by two or like David he is too small and weak to carry the armour of Mendeleeff and Cannizzaro [both eminent chemists, the concepts of whom Bradley had earlier suggested to teach to students]. I am convinced that almost all of us have answered the question wrongly. Where has been our mistake? We have forgotten that all thought is theory, and that classification is thought and therefore also theory. 120 Luckily, though, they managed to document it. 121 With the exception maybe of Kaila, who made this change away from Aristotelian logicism much earlier in his life. 122 Mach had published an article in 1890 about this topic on the About the Logical and Psychological Moment in Science Education in a teachers journal, which unfortunately, like similar articles, has never been translated to English. [] This view seems to be shared little in the circles of teachers, and even those, who agree with them theoretically, in practice abdicate from them again and again, which manifests itself in the overestimation of the logical and a disregard of the psychological moment in education. [] Criticism cannot begin where empirical meanings [konkrete Vorstellungen] are still lacking. [] If a teacher, who already knows all the subject matter, states a sentence adapted to his meanings and to his own satisfaction, this indicates if it happens unconsciously, an error of the person on whose satisfaction the effort should be focused upon. If it happens consciously, it is a didactical insincerity. For Mach, this relation of the logical and the psychological moment in science education also explains the fact that many of the most prominent French mathematicians of the 18th century had initially been technicians. The technician has to take care of many details; his abstractions appear later and therefore often stronger than at studying pure theory. (Mach 1890, pp. 1/4)

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The relevant articles have also been published in English, but, because of inconsistencies in the translation, not been used as sources: a) 1931; 1940, History and Biological Evolution I. In: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7. b) 1941, Problems of Empiricism. In: Neurath, O. et al. (eds.), Foundations of the Unity of Science. Towards an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Part II.

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