ABSTRACT
How do we see forms? This question has been asked by philosophers and scientists, each from their field's own perspective, for 2,500 years at the very least. And yet there are still so many intricacies and so many complexities that this brief five-word query is as perplexing now as it must have been when some Greek philosopher may have first formalized the issue. Nevertheless, in spite of its persistence, there have been many changes over the centuries in the way we approach the problem of form perception. Where previously the dominant approach to this problem involved philosophical speculation concerning some arcane epistemology, what had been a minor theme-the experimental analysis of visual perception-now dominates the search for answers to the question of how we see. However, as different as the methods of philosophy may seem to be from those of experimental psychology, one should not be misled into believing that their respective goals are also very different. They are not. Both philosophy and modem scientific psychology seek to answer virtually the same fundamental questions concerning the nature of knowledge acquisition through the visual modality. It is in terms of method, not substance, that they differ.
