ABSTRACT
In describing his research on the experimental phenomenology of perception, Michotte stressed the extent to which he depended on chance observations. He would often find that a display set up for one purpose would give rise to a totally unexpected effect which he would then explore with great enthusiasm. These surprise discoveries, however, did not determine his basic agenda, but rather suggested ways in which he could experimentally address the questions that had long concerned him. Thus, the progress of his research was far from haphazard. First, the main themes of his phenomenological studies were hardly disconnected; as he himself noted, they are among the most central questions of philosophy. In addition, each of his studies involved the same basic method, the determination of differences. He would establish especially favorable conditions for producing an effect, and then vary the display in various ways to determine those changes that preserve the effect, those that destroy it, and those that give rise to a new category of the effect. Thus in his research on mechanical causality, he sought to determine the basis on which the perceiver visually differentiates causality from mere succession, animate movement, and so on. This was not, however, a matter of simply specifying the relevant stimulus conditions, but rather of characterizing how, for example, causality appears to the perceiver.
