The Gestalt Model

Gestalt-switch diagrams have perhaps most often been used as paradigmatic examples of entities which can be perceived in completely different ways without their changing, and without there being a change in the perceiver’s physical relation to them. N. R. Hanson, pursuing Wittgenstein’s remarks concerning seeing and ‘seeing as,’ has employed gestalt-switch figures in this sort of way in considering cases relevant to the philosophy of science. In the chapter of his book Patterns of Discovery entitled ‘Observations,’ for example, he has followed this line of thought, suggesting that where “Tycho and Simplicius see a mobile sun, Kepler and Galileo see a static sun.”