Paolo Bozzi’s Experimental Phenomenology

Ivana Bianchi, Richard Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351232296
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

This anthology translates eighteen papers by Italian philosopher and experimental psychologist Paolo Bozzi (1930-2003), bringing his distinctive and influential ideas to an English-speaking audience for the first time. The papers cover a range of methodological and experimental questions concerning the phenomenology of perception and their theoretical implications, with each one followed by commentary from leading international experts. In his laboratory work, Bozzi investigated visual and auditory perception, such as our responses to pendular motion and bodies in freefall, afterimages, transparency effects, and grouping effects in dot lattices and among sounds (musical notes). Reflecting on the results of his enquiries against the background of traditional approaches to experimentation in these fields, Bozzi took a unique realist stance that challenges accepted approaches to perception, arguing that experimental phenomenology is neither a science of the perceptual process nor a science of the appearances; it is a science of how things are. The writings collected here offer an important resource for psychologists of perception and philosophers, as well as for researchers in cognitive science.

Part I

1
Experimental Phenomenology

Translated by Ivana Bianchi

The following pages represent a written version of the Keynote Address that I presented in opening the Padua conference on Experimental Phenomenology¹. Speaking on that occasion, and more to the point, after I had finished speaking, I could not shake off the impression that the public – made up as it was of academic colleagues specialising in research more or less close to mine, and almost all of them indeed old friends of mine – were listening to what I was saying as if it were yet another of my nuggets of scientific autobiography, conjuring up old times and personalities of the past, a granddad’s tale of scientific practice in bygone days, for sure interesting in patches and perhaps even relevant to today in their own way. This misapprehension was to a great extent my fault because I had not taken fully into account the amount of time that I had available to me; but, to a lesser extent, it was also due to my listeners’ attitude, which habitually takes for granted that what I have to say and what I write is no longer up to date, and which contextualises my every idea in a historic limbo that is rather alien to the terminology, the theorems, the conceptual practices and the scientific stereotypes of today.

To try to get round this sort of misapprehension, in place of merely repeating the Address, I shall try to offer an anatomy of it, summarising certain phases of it that seem to me to be important, and offering some brief and radical theoretical comments on these short summaries. In this way I hope to boil the talk down to a sequence of propositions, if need be paradoxical or hard to swallow, that make up the main points of an ideal scheme that is wholly coherent, even if nobody cares. To help this procedure to work, I should begin by pointing out two introductory things about my subject matter. One is a fiction, the other is a warning.

The fiction

Not long ago, Professor Mazzocco reminded me that, in the early Sixties, I used to introduce my psychology courses in general psychology (always taking problems of perception as the key questions) by commenting in detail on a passage of Descartes where the philosopher speaks about the epistemological and metaphysical fiction of an evil demon. This demon is capable of generating in us all sorts of sensory impressions at whim, leading those of us involved in this kind of virtual reality to false beliefs concerning the world, thus providing the empirical basis for methodical doubt to be extended in every direction beginning with the senses.

Mazzocco remembered how, from this introduction, I drew a moral for the benefit of my students, who were all students in philosophy, since at that time the Faculty of Psychology did not exist. This moral, which Descartes himself had incidentally illustrated in a passage of the Objections and Replies, was: let the evil demon deceive us as he will, but regarding the virtual world which he has ingeniously constructed we can build an unimaginably large number of true propositions about what are improperly called the “appearances” as well as a great deal of coherent theory, given that the demon’s virtual project is admirably consistent. In order to discover the regularities within these diabolical deceptions, we must observe and carry out experiments, systematically varying the mischievous devices created with evil intent. At this point I would then begin with experimental demonstrations, as my classroom was relatively well equipped. This, then, was Descartes’ fiction.

But no. It is only the starting point. How could we doubt the entire unobservable realm that science describes as the external support, the basic condition of perceptual experience but that is beyond the boundaries of that experience? I say, how could we doubt, we who are nourished by Scientific American, university textbooks, interdisciplinary studies straddling physics, biology, physiology and AI, and by representations of the world offered by P. Angela and Son² and by the colleague who provides us with a philosophy suitable for connecting everything and anything? Come on! The fiction of Descartes is too far-fetched. I feel I must propose a slightly updated version.

Since I believe in what science says – albeit with some reservations and if only to save myself the trouble of doubting and to be able to trust what I am told by my doctors, some of them good ophthalmologists – I propose a meta-pretence based on the classic pretence.

Let’s pretend to doubt. We can pretend to have doubts even about things that we blindly believe, things that are absolutely certain and regarding which an exercise in scepticism would soon lead to madness. We can pretend to doubt quite easily the conceptual artefacts we use daily in our profession, such as lateral inhibition or 2½-D sketch. And sometimes we really do doubt. Thus, we can pretend to doubt about stimuli (whatever that word means), and also about the response of certain measuring devices applied to the object of our observation. So I can, for example, pretend to doubt that Müller-Lyer parallel lines are of equal length even though I’m comparing them with the aid of a pair of compasses, repeatedly applying them to one and then to the other and noticing that, to do so, I do not have to vary the angle of aperture – and this is one possible definition of the phrase “equal length”. Similarly I can pretend to doubt that the grey of the two samples that I cut from the same cloth and then placed one on white paper the other on a blackboard, is the same. But what do I mean when I say that when I observe them I doubt that I see them as different (or that I see a difference in length in Müller-Lyer lines)? In the very middle of observing, I say to myself “now I’ll pretend to doubt what I see; here I go, I’m doubting, I really do not know anymore”. If one really tries to do this, not merely to imagine it, and one forces oneself to doubt what one is observing, one quickly learns that this act does not make any sense. It is the verb “to doubt” which empties itself and vaporises, while nothing happens to the scene in front of one’s eyes. When we pretend to have doubts about our retina and what is happening to it, or about the wave and corpuscular theories of light, or about the fact that, whatever they are made of, electromagnetic waves reach our eyes, or about 2½-D sketch, or about anything that Descartes regarded as doubtful, the expression of these doubts boils down to a sophistical group of propositions that are false with the regard to scientific objects, such as: “I doubt that this surface reflects light rays onto my eyes”, “I doubt that this exists”, “I doubt that I have neural processes in the visual areas of my brain”, and so on. But when I say I have doubts about what I’m observing, I am talking pure nonsense. Pretending to doubt is a game with the experience of nonsense.

This is the deep nature of the explanandum that is perception. You cannot pretend to doubt, just as you cannot believe that you believe.

The warning

If someone, at this point, thinks that such a conception of perception may be for sure philosophical, but that it falls outside the logical space of the natural sciences, to which experimental psychology is related by historical tradition and by its nature, that person needs to be reminded that this is not true. Experimental phenomenology is a branch of natural sciences and a part of a naturalistic conception of a theory of knowledge. I believe that it is the bedrock of a naturalistic conception of knowledge.

It is quite wrong to think that a naturalistic conception of perception must be the result of an assemblage of fragments of notions deriving from the natural sciences, if by that we mean an encyclopaedia of facts and concepts arising in biology, physiology, physics, chemistry, artificial intelligence, information theory and the like. For it is not by putting together, however ingeniously, pieces of knowledge acquired elsewhere that we can give substance to a theory of observable experience (visual, acoustic, tactile, proprioceptive and so on), which is to say to a theory or a way of thinking that brings coherence and, most of all, leads to the discovery of new facts about perception.

Rather, a natural science of perception – Experimental Phenomenology – can be achieved by adopting the investigative procedures that have been valuable in natural sciences, by multiplying observations and perfecting them in experimental environments, by reducing them to situations that can be observed in controlled conditions and then tracking the logical routes that bring them back from the lab to everyday observable reality and to the ecological dimension. It is a little embarrassing for me to suggest comparisons that are too obvious to my esteemed colleagues and co-researchers, but one already has the right system of coordinates to see Experimental Phenomenology as a naturalistic approach to the study of perception if one has understood how ethology arose and developed, and how it has revolutionised biology. It took shape from very many observations, directly scrutinising animal behaviour and inventing tricks to modify it, clearing animal psychology laboratories of those stereotyped farcical settings such as mazes, and replacing them with more ecological environmental conditions, including interwoven relationships, even those where the experimenter is a decisive element in the research. The work done by Rubin and Wertheimer, by Michotte and by Johansson and by Kanizsa and by others you are familiar with, is not different in terms of method, procedures, reasoning and arguments from the ethological way of working that we learned from Tinbergen and Lorenz, with the exception that instead of animals and their niches, there were colours and spaces, shadows and transparencies, the motion of objects and their figural conditions, a naïve physics, the sounds of things, their bulk and their weight. And this is naturalism, in terms of the methods, aims and results, that is, in terms of the discoveries it led to – in terms of the fact that, after a certain point, we realised that there were new observable facts in the world, which had previously gone unnoticed.

Of course later on, but only later on, what the other natural sciences have to say comes in useful, but only on specific occasions when the internal logic of an investigation demands or merely suggests it. The journey is always from here to there, from Experimental Phenomenology to different fields of knowledge, never vice versa.

1. The event under observation

In the past, I have likened learning to work on perception with Kanizsa to doing an apprenticeship with a Renaissance painter, as Vasari so well described it. Talk about theories was kept to a minimum; you immediately got to grips with facts, in the first instance those that were being studied there in Trieste. And when we spoke of the results of Michotte, Metzger or Fraisse, we first had to set up their experiments right next to ours, then we had to observe them for a long time, and only after that could we speak about them. The apprentice was invited to take the initiative, to make trials, to change the facts under the observers’ eyes, to draw conclusions from these changes, taking care to check that what was in play had not already been found and observed by others – hence the need for a well-stocked library, especially with journals. Anyone who began posing new problems was invited to show the facts to be investigated, reducing descriptive and speculative aspects to the minimum in order to make room immediately for observation. These observations were repeated over and over again (the eye must never tire of observing), with the observers taking turns and trying to alter this or that aspect of the electrifying event. I remember well how silent and absorbed we were before someone burst out with comments to provoke new attempts and new inventions: Tampieri’s rotating pyramid, Petter’s transparencies, Bosinelli and Canestrari’s trajectories, Minguzzi’s animations, and Vicario’s acoustic tunnels.

But this is just reminiscence.

The perceptual event, the focus of Experimental Phenomenology, only exists at the moment of observation, and this observation takes place in a time period which is the event’s “real duration” (a good expression of Bergson’s to stress that the reality of the event’s occurring in a lapse of time), and which Stern likewise very appropriately called the “time of presence”. A future perception is something that we can imagine, but it does not yet exist: it is the image of a potential future perception. Similarly, a past perception does not exist either: there is, so to speak, the memory of some past perception which again is an image if we evoke it and not simply talk about it. But, whatever people may say, there is no past perception in the sense that a memory of a perception that we had a moment ago absolutely cannot be a perceptual experience that is, as I shall say, “under way”³. “Past perceptual experience” is bad grammar on a linguistic level and it is also a contradiction on a logical level. If I want to study the “tunnel effect” in vision, I need to look at it until I am sated because its properties – whether they be salient or irrelevant I cannot yet tell – are there and can be verified (and lead to true scientific propositions), only so long as the experience of something passing behind a screen is under way. And in order to understand if one aspect of what is being observed is relevant or not, the changes I make must also be under observation because that is where things are decided.

During the course of an observation whole myths fall apart. There is the philosophical myth – also alas widely believed in the sciences – that the immediate experience of perceptual reality is continually changing so that it is elusive, ineffable and fugitive, and hence cannot be an object of science and still less an object to be systematically controlled. It is unique. It all flows like a river. All this can be argued while talking or with the (paradoxical) aid of diagrams on a blackboard. But if you are taught to observe persistently and insistently (and observation is where reality is studied and experimentally assessed) this immediately leads to the discovery that Heraclitus’ maxim is false and rhetorical, a fumus imaginationis. Observable events under way have a remarkable stability at the time that they are being observed. They have well defined contours, unambiguous localisations and their transformations are themselves observable and verifiable. Suffice to say that every possible scientific measuring and observation device is applied right there. This stability of events under observation is the necessary condition for there to be precise points where measuring tools (from compasses to lasers) can be accurately applied. In Experimental Phenomenology, the act of observation is in no way disturbed by the thought of an infinitely smooth flow of internal changes in either perceived objects or their surroundings.

Furthermore, the immediate experience of perceptual reality is repeatable: indeed, it is probably the only place in the world where absolute repeatability is guaranteed. The equipment you use to achieve a good tunnel effect, considered as a physical piece of apparatus down to its smallest detail – even those of minuscule magnitude which are only detectable using very precise instrumentation – probably behaves in a slightly different way at each new presentation; that is each cycle is not precisely the same as the previous one. But all this happens below the absolute thresholds, which are the boundaries of Experimental Phenomenology. You of course are working well above these thresholds. The unrepeatability that can be ascribed to the physical states that ideally we use as “stimuli” cannot apply to the observable counterparts of these stimuli. Repeatability is thus guaranteed and unquestionable. If you do not see a difference there is no difference. A musical trill is literally a repetition of two alternating notes: the fact that its notes are in theory associated with different instants of time does not in any way affect its perceptual nature. Or take a pendulum: each swing is such that even the most finicky observer fails to notice any perceptible difference. Its oscillations, therefore, are absolute repetitions since any differences that might be detected with instruments on the level of kinetic microstructure are largely below any imaginable threshold, and thus simply do not exist. Repeatability is not only possible in Experimental Phenomenology, it is even quite common.

Another myth is that of “subjecti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Source texts and chapter acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Afterthoughts
• Index