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Gestalt qualities (''Gestaltqualitäten'' in German) were introduced by the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932). The remarkable essay "On Gestalt Qualities," published in 1890 by Ehrenfels has given a name to one of the most characteristic schools of scientific thought in our time and thereby established its existence formally. It is responsible for the word "Gestalt" having acquired citizenship in the English language; and even the term "Ehrenfels qualities" is encountered here and there in American psychological literature as a term designating Gestalt properties. The qualities were based on tests done by flashing lights for certain amounts of time. This discovery later led to the famous Gestalt effect discovered by Max Wertheimer. A formed Gestalt always is entire, complete structures with clearly defined contours. Quality “trans – positivity” manifested in the fast that the image of the whole remains even if all parts change in its material. But Ehrenfels did more than baptize the new movement. With great discernment he immediately alluded to many of the questions that the Gestalt problem raises in the minds of thoughtful theorists even today.〔Henle〕 ==Founding of Gestalt theory== Beginning with a few remarks about the history of Gestalt psychology—because not all chapters of this history are generally known. In the eighties of the past century, psychologists in Europe were greatly disturbed by von Ehrenfels' claim that thousands of percepts have characteristics which cannot be derived from the characteristics of their ultimate components, the so-called sensations. Chords and melodies in hearing, the shape characteristics of visual objects, the roughness or the smoothness of tactual impressions, and so forth were used as examples. All these "Gestalt qualities" have one thing in common. When the physical stimuli in question are considerably changed, while their relations are kept constant, the Gestalt qualities remain about the same. But, At the time, it was generally assumed that the sensations involved are individually determined by their individual stimuli and must therefore change when these are greatly changed. Both positive and negative esthetic characteristics of the world around us, not only of ornaments, paintings, sculptures, tunes, and so forth, but also of trees, landscapes, houses, cars—and other persons—belong to this class. That relations between the sexes largely depend on specimens of the same class need hardly be emphasized. It is, therefore, not safe to deal with problems of psychology as though there were no such qualities. And yet, beginning with Ehrenfels himself, psychologists have not been able to explain their nature.〔Kohler〕 In the analysis of Gestalts, the whole is primary. The parts are understood within the systematic whole. A paradigmatic example of "Gestalt qualities" is a melody, which sounds the same in any key. In 1890, Christian von Ehrenfels attributed these qualities to melodies as "a positive quality of presentation," not something projected upon sense data. Ehrenfels extended these qualities to "Gestalt qualities of a higher order," (such as marriage, service, theft, and war) concepts that retain their identity even though the examples that instantiate them change. For philosophers and psychologists of the 1890s, it was not clear whether these qualities of structure were philosophical or psychological. The Gestalt theorists would attempt to integrate both in an experimental science. Jonathan Crary describes Ehrenfels' assertions within the modern problem of form as the attempt to formulate "laws" that would give to perception a semblance of the same unconditional guarantees that vision had had within the classical regime of visuality.〔Ehrenfels〕 The starting point of the theory of Gestalt qualities was the attempt to answer the question: what is a melody? The evident answer is the sum of the individual tones which make up the melody. The fact that the same melody may be made up of different groups of tones opposes this theory. Ernst Mach, who was struck by this fact, drew from it the conclusion that the essence of melody must reside in a sum of special sensation which accompany the tones as aural sensations. Mach did not know how to specify these special sensations. The pivotal step in founding the theory of Gestalt qualities was the declaration that if memory images of successive tones are present as a simultaneous consciousness-complex, then a presentation of new category can arise in consciousness. This would in turn be a unitary presentation, which is uncharacteristically associated with the presentations of the related complex of tones.〔Boeree〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gestalt qualities」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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