ABSTRACT
The great historian of psychology, Edwin Boring, who would later engage James J. Gibson in a debate over the phenomenology of perception, developed a theory of consciousness that integrated features of both structuralism and Gestalt psychology. Gestalt phenomenological descriptions presupposed field organization concepts, and Gibson’s early phenomenology used dimensional, functionalistic, and relational concepts. The complementary proposal of a psychophysics of perception is basic to the innovative character of Gibson’s approach in his early period. Leonard Troland’s philosophical starting point is a dualistic ontology similar to Descartes’. Knowledge of Egon Brunswik’s individualized modification of empiricist psychology is requisite in understanding Gibson’s thinking in his 1950 book, because Gibson’s historical understanding and criticism of depth cues and Bishop George Berkeley’s theory relied heavily upon Brunswik’s own particular explication. The retinal depth cues, described by Brunswik, were only probabilistically correlated in variation with variations in the distance of objects.
