ABSTRACT
Long before psychology became a recognized discipline, scholars de bated the question of how we learn to perceive the physical world around us. Philosophers have traditionally considered this issue as central to the domain of epistemology in which the important positions were established by Descartes, who assumed knowledge to be innate, by Locke, who claimed that all knowledge comes through the senses, and by Kant, who assumed a kind of middle ground in which information coming through the senses is always structured by categories which themselves are innate. These viewpoints have carried over into psychology, where they have had a profound, but often unnoticed, effect upon the kinds of questions asked, the types of evidence accepted, and the sorts of theoretical accounts gen erated. From the beginnings of experimental psychology with Wundt and James to the work of the Gestaltists and more current research of Hebb (1949), Piaget (1971), and the Gibsons (E. J. Gibson, 1969; J. J. Gibson, 1966; Gibson & Gibson, 1955), specialists in perception have generally been more aware of their epistemological underpinnings than psychologists in general.
