Intuition & Perception
The necessity of a Pluralist view of life
William James, who laid the foundations for modern psychology with the publication of The Principles of Psychology (1890), described himself as a ‘pluralist’, by which he meant that the best way to approach any subject was to study it from more than one point of view. He wrote:
‘There is no such thing as an ‘absolute’ point of view from which the world can be seen as it ‘really’ is. All our points of view are partial and limited, and our ‘truths’ are always relative to those points of view.’
Pluralism is quite different from the dogmatic approach that is dominant in Western culture. Dogmatism is defined as ‘a set of beliefs or principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.’ Dogmatism can be seen most clearly in religion, and in the assertion of an orthodox outlook against which all other outlooks are deemed unorthodox, heretical or possibly even dangerous.
A pluralistic approach is not simply about being tolerant to other viewpoints, but is founded on an understanding of the phenomenon of perception. Perception is little understood, largely owing to the dominance of dogma in Western culture. The assumption of dogma is that, if we can find fault with another viewpoint, then our own viewpoint must be correct. This assumption informs not just religion, but it can also be found in science, where it takes the form of ‘scientism’, which can be just as intolerant of unorthodox or heretical views as any religion. Thomas Kuhn made this very point in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962):
‘Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.’
Owing to the way dogmatic attitudes have become so embedded in Western culture, the nature of perception - and in particular its importance - is not immediately obvious. One method of studying it is through the use of illustrations and examples. The problem with this approach is that we might assume such examples are exceptions.
When the first preserved remains of a duck-billed Platypus was sent back to England from Australia, the scientists who inspected it checked its neck for stitches. They had never seen an animal with a duck’s bill, a mammal’s body, and webbed feet before and so they assumed it was a hoax. In a further example, the Japanese woodcut artists of the Edo period did not depict shadows in their prints because they didn’t regard shadows as real. Contrast this with the extensive use of shadows by, for example, Rembrandt. We assume we see the world ‘as it is’ and cannot imagine that we interpret what we see - quite unconsciously - through the way we perceive it.
Perception - particularly limited perception - is not an aberration, but is the natural outcome of the way the mind organises information. We do not just ‘see’ the world, but we make sense of it even if not all the relevant information is available to us. This happens without any deliberate effort on our part, and the fact that it occurs automatically points to the mind as a self-organising system. For anyone who wants a more detailed explanation of the self-organising nature of the mind, Edward de Bono’s The Mechanism of Mind (1969) is particularly useful.
The concept of self-organisation arose from the work of Norbert Wiener, who in the middle of the last century developed the science of Cybernetics, which he defined as ‘the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.’ He developed one of the first self-organising systems, the automatic anti-aircraft gun, which incorporated radar, a simple computing device, and tracer bullets. The radar picked up on the position of the enemy aircraft, the tracer bullets were fired into its projected path, and the information was then fed back into the computer to alter any future aim of the gun. Once set up, the system became self-organising.
We might ask what does this have to do with perception? We do not just see a collection of items - a group of people, a mass of sounds, a series of events, or a type of behaviour - but connect the lesser elements into a coherent whole or pattern. What is more, the mind does this without any deliberate intention on our part.
We can observe the same systems effect, for example, in the behaviour of a murmuration of starlings, a school of herrings, a swarm of bees, or a colony of ants. In each case the behaviour of the lesser elements is determined by the group as a whole.
We see the world, people, events, and so on from a particular point of view because the mind organises what we see into a coherent outlook. The problem is, the mind does this even if not all the available information is present. That is why two people will see the same event from two completely different points of view.
The same self-organising nature of the mind was picked up by the early pioneers in Gestalt. Gestalt had its origins in the thinking of Christian von Ehrenfels, who pointed out that in a musical melody, even if the key changes and a completely different set of notes are used, we still recognise the same melody. Gestalt was further developed by Max Wertheimer, who noted that in a simple graphic such as rows of dots on a page, if some rows are closer than others, we see a pattern over and above the individual dots. Wertheimer was interested in the way the mind organises the lesser elements into a coherent whole. In a lecture included in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology (1938), he stated:
‘The fundamental ‘formula’ of Gestalt theory might be expressed in this way: There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.’
Once we accept this as the inevitable outcome of the mind acting on information, we can accommodate for it by applying the pluralist approach to knowledge favoured by William James. Rather than allowing ourselves to be trapped by a singular and limited way of understanding the world, we can overcome it by deliberately entertaining different perspectives. For some, this will amount to ‘dangerous relativism’. It is interesting to note that this was the accusation levelled against Thomas Kuhn on publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His response was unapologetic:
‘One consequence of the position just outlined has particularly bothered a number of my critics. They find my viewpoint relativistic, particularly as it is developed in the last section of this book. My remarks about translation highlight the reasons for the charge. The proponents of different theories are like the members of different language-culture communities. Recognizing the parallelism suggests that in some sense both groups may be right.’
Pluralism is not a new idea. It forms a central part of one of the oldest religions in the world, Jainism, where it is known as ‘anekantavada’, or ‘many-sidedness’. This is depicted by the Jainist parable of the blind men and the elephant, where three blind men are sitting by the side of the road when they hear an elephant. One says ‘I have heard an elephant before but I don’t know what they are.’ The others agree, and so they decide to each take hold of the elephant and compare notes. One takes hold of its ear, another takes hold of its leg, and a third takes hold of its tail (the elephant being a metaphor for a greater reality), and of course they argue about what an elephant is.
We might assume that the inductive method would correct any misconceptions we have about reality, but we will only test an idea if we suspect it is flawed. This rarely happens, not least because the mind makes sense of limited information owing to its self-organising nature. Rather than undermining truth, pluralism prevents us from mistaking limited perception for truth itself.
It is interesting to note that, prior to actively questioning our current outlook, we may have the gut-feeling that something is not quite right in our understanding of a situation. If we attend to this feeling, we may find ourselves in receipt of insight, when the limitations of our current outlook are suddenly transcended, and in an instant we may see all that we saw before but from a new and more inclusive perspective. The phenomenon of insight is possibly the most compelling evidence there is that the mind acts in a self-organising manner.
(Graphic: Jain temple carving)