2 Perception is a core concept and, as I will show, has a central function in our intentional field. Students of violence and war only recently have tackled the problem of perception, 1 but in doing so have adopted the narrowest and most sterile stimulus-response conception of Thomas Hobbes and the successor psychological behaviorism of Watson. For example, an understanding of such central political concepts as 'status quo' and 'status quo testing' requires comprehending perception and how sociopolitical meanings (such as military threat or political intent) are carried by events (such as preparing bomb shelters or promoting a specific general to the politbureau). Will depend in part on perceptual level concepts, such as expectations, dispositions, percept, trigger event, and sensory vehicles.

I can only assert here what I will show in a later volume: the discussion of the field context of conflict, violence, and war First, the reader who is looking for some psychological orientation toward violence and war from this book, The Dynamic Psychological Field, may be impatient with and curious about this extensive psychophilosophical digression into perception. Two preliminary asides should be made, however. Rather than review the fascinating philosophical views of perception and their relationship to thought and reality, I will move directly to a rough sketch of the perceptual field and only allude to some of the more pertinent philosophical ideas in the process. Now physiological and especially neurological knowledge, psychological laboratory research, and empirical analyses by Gestalt, field, and personality theorists, and psychoanalytic experience have given us a solid base for our understanding of perception. The philosopher was left largely to his own good sense, thought, and intuition. Until recent times, however, philosophers have had to deal with such questions without the help of any systematic psychological or relevant physiological knowledge. Philosophers have troubled over such questions, for engaging them is to wrestle with the fundamentals of our ontologies and epistemologies. What is it that we perceive? What is the relationship among things-in-themselves, our sensation of them, and our understanding? Is understanding nothing more than the ideas generated by our sensations, as Locke believed? Or are there distinct Cartesian realms of thought and sense? And is there an external reality apart from our sensations? And the visual appearance is filled out with feeling of what the object would be like to touch, and so on. In learning to draw, it is necessary to acquire the art of representing things according to the sensation, not according to the perception.

When we see an object, say a penny, we seem to be aware of its 'real' shape: we have the impression of something circular, not of something elliptical. When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience. THE DYNAMIC PSYCHOLOGICAL FIELD Chapter 7 Perception And Reality * The Conflict Helix: Principles and Practices. 13:Behavior, Personality, Situation, and Expectationsġ4: The Behavioral Equation: Behavior, Situation, and Expectationsġ5: Situation, Expectations, and TriggersĢ0: Energy and Attitudes in the Psychological FieldĢ1: Motivation and the Superordinate GoalĢ3: The Dynamic Field and Social Behaviorģ1: Alternative Perspectives on Freedom of the Willģ2: A Humanism Between Materialism and Idealism

Perception definition philosophy