In the Eye's Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy - Rilegato

Turner, R. Steven

9780691033976: In the Eye's Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691033978 ISBN 13: 9780691033976

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1994

One of the most persistent controversies of modern science has dealt with human visual perception. It erupted in Germany during the 1860s as a dispute between physiologists Hermann von Helmholtz, Ewald Hering, and their schools. Well into the twentieth century these groups warred over the origins of our capacity to perceive space, over the retinal mechanisms that mediate color sensations, and over the role of mind, experience, and inference in vision. In this book, R. Steven Turner explores the impassioned exchanges of those rival schools, both to illuminate the clash of theory and to explore the larger role of controversy in the development of science. Controversy, he suggests, is constitutive of scientific change, and he uses the Helmholtz-Hering dispute to illustrate how polemics and tacit negotiation shape evolving theoretical stances.
Turner focuses on the arguments and issues of the dispute, issues that ranged from the interpretation of color blindness and optical illusions to the therapeutic practices of clinical ophthalmology. As well, he focuses on the personalities, institutions, disciplinary structures, and methodological commitments that shaped the dispute, including the schools' rhetorical strategies. The work explores the incommensurability of the protagonists' viewpoints and examines the reception of the theories and the changing fortunes of the schools. Finally, the author traces the controversy into the twentieth century, where the issues of the dispute continue to inform the study of vision today.

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Recensione:

"Turner has clearly done his homework and--unlike many people who write on the history of colour vision--has read the original texts. He understands the issues and the methods used in studying them, and does an excellent job of defining the jargon of the era, which is often comprehensible only in context."--Nature

Contenuti:

	List of Figures and Tables
	Preface and Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Introduction	3
Ch. 2	Physiological Optics from Wheatstone to Helmholtz	10
Ch. 3	Helmholtz on Spatial Perception	35
Ch. 4	Hering on Spatial Perception	54
Ch. 5	The Nativist-Empiricist Controversy Begins	68
Ch. 6	Helmholtz Light and Color	95
Ch. 7	Hering on Light and Color	115
Ch. 8	Core Sets and Partisans	139
Ch. 9	The Nativist-Empiricist Debate, 1870-1925	156
Ch. 10	Color Vision Controversies, 1875-90	176
Ch. 11	Color Vision Controversies, 1890-1915	196
Ch. 12	The Roots of Incommensurability	218
Ch. 13	Controversy and Disciplinary Structure	235
Ch. 14	In Search of Denouement: The Twentieth Century	261
	Appendix	281
	Notes	289
	References and Abbreviations	299
	Index	329