Max Wertheimer's challenging legacy

Summary

Max Wertheimer's past contributions to psychology were recognized, 45 years after his death, by the posthumous award to him in 1988 of the Wilhelm Wundt medal of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie. The award acknowledged the elegant model of experimental work represented by his original studies of the perception of apparent motion, the development and promulgation of the influential Gestalt theory, and the application of Gestalt thought to significant issues of epistemology, ethics, and social and political science. But Max Wertheimer's contribution is not only of historical interest; it still constitutes a contemporary challenge. First, his seminal book, Productive Thinking, has recently been reissued with a new preface that documents the challenge of its characterization of insight or understanding for the current field of cognitive science. Second, his works, originally in English, on truth, ethics, freedom and democracy are now being published in German as clearly still highly relevant to the current scence. Third, several previously unpublished fragments, dictated by Max Wertheimer, address the nature of genuine explanation; they argue that simply reducing the unfamiliar to the familiar is not enough, but that genuine explanation occurs only if a situation previously not understood becomes clarified, changing from a “murky” to a “transparent” state. Some concrete examples described in these fragments provide a challenge to traditional conceptions of the nature of explanation which is still far from satisfactorily answered today.