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Unconscious inference (German: unbewusster Schluss), also referred to as unconscious conclusion,〔''Unconscious conclusion'' is the term used by James P. C. Southall in his 1925 English translation of Helmholtz's ''Handbuch der physiologischen Optik'' (''Treatise on Physiological Optics''). Today, the concept is more widely referred to as ''unconscious inference'', notably by Edwin G. Boring in his widely received 'History of Experimental Psychology', and Daniel T. Gilbert. Cf. Boring 1950, pp. 309-311.〕 is a term of perceptual psychology coined in 1867 by the German physicist and polymath Hermann von Helmholtz to describe an involuntary, pre-rational and reflex-like mechanism which is part of the formation of visual impressions. While precursory notions have been identified in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke, and Francis North〔Cf. Kassler 2004, pp. 125-126.〕 (especially in connection with auditory perception) as well as in Francis Bacon's ''Novum Organum'',〔"()y far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important" (Bacon 1620, bk. 1, aphorism L, transl.).〕 Helmholtz's theory was long ignored or even dismissed by philosophy and psychology.〔Cf. Boring 1942, p. 289; Gilbert 1989, p. 191.〕 It has since received new attention from modern research, and the work of recent scholars, notably that of James Uleman, has approached Helmholtz's view. In the third and final volume of his ''Handbuch der physiologischen Optik''〔Helmholtz 1867.〕 (1856–67, translated as ''Treatise on Physiological Optics'' in 1920-25), Helmholtz discussed the psychological effects of visual perception. His first example is that of the illusion of the sun rotating around the earth: ==Optical illusions== We are unable to do away with such optical illusions by convincing ourselves rationally that our eyes have played tricks on us: obstinately and unswervingly, the mechanism follows its own rule and thus wields an imperious mastery over the human mind. While optical illusions are the most obvious instances of unconscious inference, people's perceptions of each other are similarly influenced by such unintended, unconscious conclusions. Helmholtz's second example refers to theatrical performance, arguing that the strong emotional effect of a play results mainly from the viewers' inability to doubt the visual impressions generated by unconscious inference: The mere sight of another person is sufficient to produce an emotional attitude without any reasonable basis whatsoever, yet highly resilient against all rational criticism. Obviously, the impression is based on the spontaneous, spurious attribution of traits - a process we can hardly avoid, for the human eye, so to speak, is ''incapable of doubt'' and thus cannot ward off the impression. The formation of visual impressions, Helmholtz realized, is achieved primarily by unconscious judgments, the results of which "can never once be elevated to the plane of conscious judgments" and thus "lack the purifying and scrutinizing work of conscious thinking".〔Helmholtz 1925, p. 27.〕 In spite of this, the results of unconscious judgments are so impervious to conscious control, so resistant to contradiction that they are "impossible to get rid of"〔Helmholtz 1925, p. 28.〕 and "the effect of them cannot be overcome".〔Helmholtz 1925, p. 5.〕 So whatever impressions this unconscious inference process leads to, they strike "our consciousness as a foreign and overpowering force of nature".〔Helmholtz 1925, p. 28.〕 The reason, Helmholtz suggested, lies in the way visual sensory impressions are processed neurologically.〔Edgar, Scott (forthcoming). “The Physiology of the Sense Organs and Early Neo-Kantian Conceptions of Objectivity: Helmholtz, Lange, Liebmann,” in Flavia Padovani, Alan Richardson & Jonathan Y. Tsou (eds.), Objectivity in Science: Approaches to Historical Epistemology. Boston Studies in Philosophy and History of Science. Springer.〕 The higher cortical centres responsible for conscious deliberation are not involved in the formation of visual impressions. However, as the process is spontaneous and automatic, we are unable to account for just how we arrived at our judgments. Through our eyes, we necessarily ''perceive things as real'', for the results of the unconscious conclusions are interpretations which "are urged on our consciousness, so to speak, as if an external power had constrained us, over which our will has no control".〔Helmholtz 1925, p. 26.〕 In recognizing these attitude-formation mechanisms underlying the human processing of nonverbal cues, Helmholtz anticipated developments in science by more than a century. As Daniel Gilbert has pointed out, "Helmholtz presaged many current thinkers not only by postulating the existence of such (inferential ) operations, but also by describing their general features".〔Gilbert 1989, p. 189.〕 At the same time, he added, it is "probably fair to say that Helmholtz's ideas about the social inference process have exerted no impact whatsoever on social psychology".〔Gilbert 1989, p. 191.〕 Indeed, psychologists have largely felt that Helmholtz had fallen prey to an error in reasoning. As Edwin G. Boring summed up the debate, "Since an inference is ostensibly a conscious process and can therefore be neither unconscious nor immediate, () view was rejected as self-contradictory".〔Boring 1942, p. 289.〕〔Helmholtz himself had justified the use of the term: "The psychic activities that lead us to infer that there in front of us at a certain place there is a certain object of a certain character, are generally not conscious activities, but unconscious ones. In their result they are equivalent to a conclusion (). But what seems to differentiate them from a conclusion, in the ordinary sense of that word, is that a conclusion is an act of conscious thought. () Still it may be permissible to speak of the psychic acts of ordinary perception as unconscious conclusions, thereby making a distinction of some sort between them and the common so-called conscious conclusions. And while it is true that there has been, and probably always will be, a measure of doubt as to the similarity of the psychic activity in the two cases, there can be no doubt as to the similarity between the results of such unconscious conclusions and those of conscious conclusions" (Helmholtz 1925, p. 4).〕 However, several recent authors have since approached Helmholtz's conception under a variety of headings, such as "snap judgments",〔Schneider, Hastorf, & Ellsworth 1979.〕 "nonconscious social information processing",〔Lewicki 1986.〕 "spontaneous trait inference",〔Newman & Uleman 1989.〕 "people as flexible interpreters",〔Newman, Moskowitz, & Uleman 1996.〕 and "unintended thought".〔Uleman & Bargh 1989.〕 Siegfried Frey has pointed out the revolutionary quality of Helmholtz's proposition that it is from the perceiver, not the actor, whence springs the meaning-attribution process performed when we interpret a nonverbal stimulus: 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「unconscious inference」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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