How Otto Selz Became a Forerunner of the Cognitive Revolution

Abstract

Who was Otto Selz, and what was his principal contribution to psychology? In the first section of this chapter we shall present a brief overview of his career, that untimely was disrupted by his exile and tragic end as a victim of the holocaust. The second section will be devoted to a synopsis of his work, and to the intriguing question why his ideas found only a moderate response in his own time. The meager reception of his work will appear to be due both to an unfavorable scientific climate and to personal factors. During his life-time, as is shown in section three, his influence (apart from one study in musical creativity) was practically confined to the educational domain. It was only after his death that the seed he had sowed began to germinate, not only in the field of psychology, but in an unnoticed way also in philosophy. The fourth section deals with the latter: Selz's hidden influence on Karl Popper's critical rationalism. The fifth section recounts the rediscovery of his work by the 'cognitivists', and its mediation by Adriaan de Groot's study of Thought and Choice in Chess. In the final section the fate of Selz is used to discuss the vicissitudes of influence and fame. It will be shown that 'greatness' in science (as in other domains of culture) is only partly a matter of the personal genius of an individual, but principally a matter of the reception of his or her work, and the degree to which it becomes instrumental in the development of a new paradigm--in some cases only after several decades. In this transmission personal contacts play a much larger role than is often assumed. Apart from this, the function of 'great men' in providing scientists with a respectable pedigree should not be underestimated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)