No new science is possible without neologisms, new words or new interpretations of old words to describe and explain reality in new ways.
How could Aristotle have developed the logic of syllogisms or Newton the theory of dynamics without new vocabularies and definitions?
They were neologists, and everybody wanting to contribute new knowledge must be.
For new knowledge there is no way around the creation of new terms and concepts.
To reject neologisms, often despicably, is to reject scientific development.
No sign of scientific conservatism is so telling as the rejection of all but the established concepts of a school of thought.
Neologisms are, however, relative to the terminological paradigm actually dominating a field of knowledge.
It may be a radical renewal to introduce terms from a tradition believed to be outmoded.
Gestalt theory took off with Christian von Ehrenfels's definition of the concept of "Gestalt qualities".
It was impossible to give a direct, completely adequate translation of the term "Gestalt" to any single corresponding word in other languages.
Words like "form", "configuration", "pattern", "structure" give some right associations as to how translate "Gestalt", but there has been a tendency to focus on the outer form, the visual configuration, abstracting from the content, the vital energy of a Gestalt.
To help reorienting Gestalt thinking back to its roots, I shall use "root" as a metaphor:
Gestalt knowledge is root knowledge.
The root metaphor helps avoiding the fallacy of equating Gestalt thinking with a formalistic perspective.
Let me give you an example.
In all philosophy and science as well as in daily life we use words connoting structure, pattern, system, harmony and so on.
"Order" will be used as a synonym for all these terms, and for the word "image" used below we will also accept "conception" as a synonym.
Now, according to Edmund Husserl we can have two kinds of images of observable objects, directly experienced through perception or indirectly constructed through symbols.
Husserl restricts his argument to symbolic images that make possible unequivocal recognition of the objects in question, so that the symbolic images can vicariate for the perceptual images.
Let me add a third kind of images, complex images, based upon both experience and imaginative construction, and also add a concept of complex images of higher order.
This theory of images reaches from the simplest threshold perceptions to complex images of the world as a whole.
Obviously any theory of perceptual order must be validated with reference to the factors of perceptual organization studied by the Gestalt psychologists.
Evidently, also any theory of symbolic and also of complex order must be correspondingly validated.
Furthermore, as my studies of logic have shown, the very concept of logical form or structure is rooted in the factors of perceptual organization.
Therefore, the roots of the conception of order, harmony, system, pattern, structure, up to cosmos, must be sought in the Gestalt organization factors, in the ground ruled by the Gestalt laws.
This is but one example of how all knowledge - philosophical, scientific, technological, practical - is rooted in the domain of the Gestalt laws.
(To be continued...)
