Tertiary qualities,from Galileo to Gestalt psychology

Abstract

Tertiary qualities have been studied primarily by Gestalt psychologists. My aim in this article is to revisit the theoretical assumptions regarding tertiary qualities. I start from the Galilean distinction of the qualities of experience, the Lockean subdivision of qualities, the subjectivist definition in aesthetics and the theoretical contribution of Gestalt theory, to show the theoretical value of ‘tertiary qualities’ in the current context of experimental psychological research. I conclude that tertiary qualities are a crucial keyword for an experimental psychology based on the primacy of perception. Such a perspective is in favour of a neo-Gestalt Experimental Phenomenology.

Keywords

Experimental Phenomenology expressive qualities Galileo Galilei Gestalt psychology tertiary qualities

There is a long tradition of experimental research on tertiary qualities thanks to Gestalt psychology, Experimental Phenomenology by Albert Michotte and his school in Louvain, and the most recent paradigms of the cognitive sciences. These theories, based on constraining assumptions, have attempted to explain many phenomena that can be described as tertiary qualities. The aim of the present article is to revisit these assumptions, starting from the Galilean subdivision of the qualities of experience, to show the theoretical value of ‘tertiary qualities’ in the current context of experimental psychological research and to show also its potential as a distinctive concept of the discipline.

The Galilean distinction

Democritus made the first distinction of the qualities of experience and maintained that shape, size, inertia, density and hardness are properties of things, while colour, tone, smell, taste proceed from things to senses, thus originating subjective perceptions. This distinction, which has a metaphysical character, was well known to Galileo, who methodologically reconsiders it in Il Saggiatore [The Assayer] to lay the foundations for modern physics:

Now I say that whenever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number, or few, or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odour, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary accompaniments. Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence, if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. But since we have imposed upon them special names, distinct from those of the other and real qualities mentioned previously, we wish to believe that they really exist as actually different from those.…When touched upon the soles of the feet, for example, or under the knee or armpit, it feels in addition to the common sensation of touch a sensation on which we have imposed a special name, ‘tickling’. This sensation belongs to us and not to the hand. Anyone would make a serious error if he said that the hand, in addition to the properties of moving and touching, possessed another faculty of ‘tickling’ as if tickling were a phenomenon that resided in the hand that tickled. (Galileo, 1957[1623]: 274–5)

Here Galileo separates the qualities of ‘external bodies’, determined by their relationship with the observer, from those that remain unchanged regardless of the observer’s contribution. This distinction founded modern physics as it allowed scientists to exclude the sensory component and thus also to begin measuring the physical world in an objective way, that is, independently from the observer.

As Husserl (1959) insisted, such a seemingly harmless distinction has profound implications:

But now we must note something of the highest importance that occurred even as early as Galileo: the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable – our everyday life-world. (Husserl, 1970[1959]: 48–9)

Husserl has argued that the Pisan scientist achieves the mathematization of nature by assuming spatiality as a model for quantification. Thus Galileo does not refer to pre-categorical extension, but to extension as a quantifiable quality. He does not achieve mensurability of the phenomenal quality, but provides mensurability of the quality of experience by imposing the model of quantifiability of extension, thus determining quality discrimination. While for Galileo this operation was to have a methodological value for the mensurability of nature, in the scientific tradition it excluded the qualities that cannot be scientifically studied (Sinico, 2012b). The primitive form of methodological reductionism has thus become ontological dualism (Burtt, 1932).

Both Geymonat (1957) and Bozzi (1990, 1995) have proposed alternatives to the standard interpretation of the Galilean text (Drake, 1977, 1978). Geymonat maintains that the passage quoted from Il Saggiatore must be interpreted within its context: Galileo is not writing a philosophical note, but rather one against Grassi-Sarsi’s principle of authority. The Galilean antidote to the principle of authority is mathematics, understood as a methodological and technical instrument, as logic, and not metaphysical, as ontology. Bozzi, on the same line, emphasizes that in the original text Galileo refers to logic ‘ben sento tirarmi dalla necessità’ (‘from necessity’) or to thinking ‘subito che concepisco’ (‘conceiving’) and not to perceptual experience. Moreover, Bozzi quotes two of Galileo’s passages in which the immediate perceptual experience has a clear epistemological value (other quotations can be found in Sinico, 2012a) from Sizzi’s Dianoia, Astronomica, Optica, Physica: ‘That vision is not deceived in modest distances perhaps experience alone could have taught us, when, getting nearer the objects, we learn that they are indeed what they appeared’; or in which qualitative observation is privileged, as in the first day of the Discorso intorno a due nuove scienze (1638), where Salviati accounts for the nature of the musical interval of a fifth using tertiary qualities (‘gentle kiss’ and ‘bite’) as the explicit explanandum.

But the fifth is characterized by its displaced beats and by the interposition of two solitary beats of the upper string and one solitary beat of the lower string between each pair of simultaneous pulses; these three solitary pulses are separated by intervals of time equal to half the interval which separates each pair of simultaneous beats from the solitary beats of the upper string. Thus the effect of the fifth is to produce a tickling of the eardrum such that its softness is modified with sprightliness, giving at the same moment the impression of a gentle kiss and of a bite. (Galileo, 1954[1638]: 1638)

Therefore, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, as they were subsequently called by Robert Boyle (1666), would be for Galileo only a methodological instrument for measuring Nature and not to attribute any ontological significance.

The Lockean subdivision

In spite of this, subdivision of the quality saw further development with Hobbes and Descartes, but it was John Locke (2008[1690]) who perfected it. Under the influence of Boyle’s chemistry, Locke believed that primary qualities are no longer related to experience, but become, instead, essential attributes of matter. The possibility of causing certain sensations through primary qualities resides then in the object, while secondary qualities are only ‘modes of primary qualities’. That means that primary qualities can immediately produce ideas to which they correspond, while secondary qualities can produce variations in the subject without qualitative correspondence in bodies. With Locke the Galilean subdivision becomes irretrievably physicalist.

The subsequent philosophical reflection debated again the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, starting with George Berkeley:

… primary qualities cannot be abstracted from secondary, as in the concrete the two are inseparable (extension is coloured extension, colour a colour patch of a certain shape and size, motion is the movement of a coloured body, and so on). If colour, sound, taste are in the mind, so also are extension, figure and motion. If our ideas of secondary qualities cannot resemble the status of matter, even the ideas of primary qualities cannot be like matter. (Berkeley, 1975[1713]: 206)

With Hume the breakdown of the distinction becomes even more complete. In perceived objects, primary and secondary qualities are inseparable except as intellectual abstraction. The reflection continues with Bradley (1893) and, as already seen, with Husserl (1913, 1970[1959]), until the distinction between I and II qualities is completely lost, although at that stage it had already contributed to the founding of modern physics.

It is less well known that Locke (2008[1690]), besides distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities, also introduced tertiary qualities:

To these might be added a third sort, which are allowed to be barely powers; though they are as much real qualities in the subject as those which I, to comply with the common way of speaking, call qualities, but for distinction, secondary qualities. For the power in fire to produce a new colour, or consistency, in wax or clay, – by its primary qualities, is as much a quality in fire, as the power it has to produce in me a new idea or sensation of warmth or burning, which I felt not before, – by the same primary qualities, viz. the bulk, texture, and motion of its insensible parts. (Locke, 2008[1690]: 98)

With tertiary qualities, then, Locke means the way some substances react to other substances. For instance, if wax comes into contact with fire it melts and this causal relationship shows up a certain property of wax. Such a definition of tertiary qualities, however, was not admitted in subsequent psychological theories.

The term ‘tertiary qualities’ gathered consensus with a new meaning referred to the traditional subdivision: primary qualities are objective, that is independent of the observer; secondary qualities are partly subjective because they are caused by objects, but depend on the observer; and, to conclude the logical options, tertiary qualities would be completely subjective because the cause too would lie with the observer. Thus, as they cannot be inter-subjective, they would be excluded from scientific investigation.

Tertiary qualities in aesthetics

This new meaning of the term ‘tertiary qualities’, just because of its emphasis upon subjectivity, has been valued within aesthetics. Samuel Alexander (1933: 183) maintains that the first to use it was Bernard Bosanquet (1892), an objective idealist. Bosanquet supported the objectivity of aesthetic qualities for every subject, but also variability between subjects. The term ‘tertiary qualities’ is also used to refer to values by Alexander, who maintains that beauty is a tertiary quality in the sense of relationship between an attitude of mind and the character of the object. In any case, tertiary qualities always originate within the individual subject who perceives, and thus are not inter-subjective.

A third meaning of ‘tertiary qualities’ comes from George Santayana, who, according to John Dewey (1949), refers to qualities like ‘saddening’, ‘embarrassing’, ‘cheerful’, ‘desolating’, which can colour any object, even if they are mixed with subjectivity.

According to Santayana in the primitive experience ‘extension is passionate, desire moves bodies, thought broods in space and is constituted by a visible metamorphosis of its subject matter … Only a long and still unfinished education has taught men to separate emotions from things and ideas from their objects.’ (Dewey, 1949: 141)

With a phenomenological attitude, the primitive man, without the interference of education which privileges knowledge over observation, finds immediate emotions in things. Likewise, expansion, when a limitless vastness is observed, is full of passion as an intrinsic quality. According to Santayana, such qualities, existing in the perceived world, must have a name:

The moving image is therefore impregnated not only with secondary qualities – colour, heat, etc. – but with qualities which we may call tertiary, such as pain, fear, joy, malice, feebleness, expectancy. (Santayana, 1980[1905]: 143)

Santayana’s reference to secondary qualities explicitly recalls the empiricist subdivision. We cannot therefore agree with Dewey who interprets Santayana’s definition of ‘tertiary qualities’ only in an aesthetic sense, as a generalized impression, which cannot be used in science.

Santayana’s definition refers to specific perceptual aspects:

Sometimes these tertiary qualities are attributed to the object in their fulness and just as they are felt. Thus the sun is not only bright and warm in the same way as he is round, but by the same right he is also happy, arrogant, ever-young, and all-seeing; for a suggestion of these tertiary qualities runs through us when we look at him, just as immediately as do his warmth and light. (Santayana, 1980[1905]: 143)

When observing the sun, we can attribute to it not only primary qualities (round) and secondary qualities (yellow), but also tertiary qualities (happy, arrogant, eternally young, all-seeing). These qualities are both specific and capable of being isolated: being happy is independent of being arrogant, being arrogant is independent of being all-seeing, etc. The sun, as a whole unit, is a superordinate set (today one would say a Gestalt) of qualities. However, single tertiary qualities, when analysed, can be isolated just because they are specific. Thus an object, e.g. the sun, can be described in diverse ways, referring to primary, secondary, or tertiary qualities, the last being the clearest, as reported by Santayana:

The sun is a better expression of all his ulterior effects when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all-seeing spirit than when he is stupidly felt to be merely hot. (Santayana, 1980[1905]: 143)

Santayana underlines also the variable perception of tertiary qualities:

The fact that these imaginative suggestions are not constant does not impede the instant perception that they are actual, and for crude experience whatever a thing possesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matter how soon that quality may be lost again. (Santayana, 1980[1905]: 143)

Such variability may depend on the plurivocality of the observed object: an object can be observed with diverse dispositions, each time noticing diverse aspects. Dispositions might concern the same subject, which can change observational modalities, but also diverse subjects in taking a more or less phenomenological attitude. However, according to Santayana, such variability does not mean that a description does not capture real data:

The mythologist or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the man of truest and most adequate vision. His persuasion that he knows the heart and soul of things is no fancy reached by artificial inference or analogy but is a direct report of his own experience and honest contemplation. (Santayana, 1980[1905]: 144)

The theoretical contribution of Gestalt psychology

Experimental psychology has found a shared theoretical reference in the Gestalt meaning of the term ‘tertiary qualities’. This fourth meaning is removed from the previous ones because it claims a phenomenological inter-subjective character, which allows not only analysis and description, as in the Husserlian reflection, but also experimental investigation.

Wolfgang Köhler (1938) explicitly assumes that Husserl’s phenomenology had turned upside down the classic conception of the physical study of the qualities of experience. On the other hand, Köhler (1947[1929]), a shrewd physicist, claims that even the most abstract categories of physics have no meaning without reference to immediate experience. Furthermore, Galileo himself had already excluded the immediate experiential data, which are not useful to physical science, from measurement; but he had legitimized an epistemologically autonomous level of the immediate experiential data, with its own laws iuxta propria principia (Sinico, 2012b).

In immediate experience, in the phenomenological field, there are ‘tertiary qualities’ which do not fall within the category of the mensurative schema because they can be grasped even before the application of a category. The Gestalt psychologists use the term ‘tertiary’, recalling the traditional classification, only to accentuate the necessarily non-mensurative character of tertiary qualities compared with primary and secondary qualities. Indeed, in the Gestalt meaning, the tertiary character is independent of the traditional classification. Also weight, size, colour, taste, etc., traditionally primary and secondary qualities, can be perceived, according to the phenomenological approach, in their pre-categorical nature, without applying the mensurative schema, and thus share the tertiary character. This does not stop Gestalt psychologists from making other distinctions between qualities (Metzger, 1941).

Within tertiary qualities fall also the Gestalqualitäten, introduced by von Ehrenfels (1890) and typically exemplified by melody, which, even when transposed in key, so that each of the component tones has a different frequency, does not change. Another subclass of tertiary qualities is formed by the so-called ‘expressive qualities’ (called also ‘physiognomic qualities’ in reference to human character). The two terms ‘tertiary qualities’ and ‘expressive qualities’ are not at all synonymous. Expressive qualities are qualities of single properties or whole objects that express (in the etymological meaning of the word, derived from the Latin ex-primere, ‘to show out’) a specific (intersensory, emotional, moral, etc.) character. For example: red is hot; willow is sad; the sun is arrogant; etc. Differently, other kinds of tertiary qualities do not express anything. For example, a square has both an expressive character and a shape as its specific phenomenal quality.

The inter-subjective character of tertiary qualities is clarified by Koffka (1940), who distinguishes between two meanings of ‘subjectivity’ (Parovel, 2012). The first is phenomenological because it concerns the immediate and direct experience, independently of any physicalistic reduction, and it can be either internal or external to the body. The second meaning is functional: all perceptual qualities, also those that do not strictly depend on the sensory systems (like tertiary qualities), are subjective because they need the activity of an organism: the central nervous system. The objective counterpart is represented by the physically defined objects, the stimuli, whose luminous rays hit the retina and thus activate the organism. As maintained by Koffka:

The brown colour of my desk, the red plumage of this robin, the fair colour of Greta Garbo’s hair belong to my desk, to the robin, to Greta Garbo, but not to me. Thus they are objective in the first, although subjective in the second sense. We need hardly point out that what is true of the colours is equally true of the coloured objects: inasmuch as I know of my table, of the robin, of Greta Garbo, these are all subjective in the sense that they depend on the functioning of my nervous system. (Koffka, 1940: 191–2)

Thus, within a phenomenological perspective, tertiary qualities can also be independent of the subject. Such independence is an indispensable condition for experimental research. And the experimental study of tertiary qualities is what first of all distinguishes the philosophical phenomenological approach from the Gestalt psychologists’ scientific phenomenological approach.

The experimental study of tertiary qualities is quintessential in Wertheimer, in his essay on perceptual organization (1923). The experimental character is given by the use of a demonstration in which an independent phenomenal variable is manipulated as a function of a dependent phenomenal variable, without any quantification (Sinico, 2008). In the preliminary phase of the research, in fact, the aim is purely qualitative, even if, for the purpose of the experimental realization, the variables can be operationalized and described in physical terms (ibid.). Following this approach, called Experimental Phenomenology, there is a large amount of research on the perceptual organization that identifies dependence between phenomenal variables, also with quantitative results (Kanizsa, 1979; Bozzi, 1989; Ehrenstein, Spillmann and Sarris, 2003).

Köhler’s experimental demonstration (1947[1929]) is one of the first in the study of the Gestaltists’ expressive qualities. He asked his experimental subjects to associate two meaningless words, ‘takete’ and ‘maluma’, with two figures they had never seen before, one angular and one rounded. The subjects’ association is based on similarity of expressive traits. Several other experimental qualitative and quantitative research works followed (Katz, 1935[1930]; Werner, 1940; Heider and Simmel, 1944; Arnheim, 1949, 1964; Minguzzi, 1961; Holland and Wertheimer, 1964; Bozzi and D’Arcais, 1967; Kassin, 1982; Bozzi, 1990; Lindauer, 1990; Parovel, 1999; Jankovic and Markovic, 2001). However, they were mainly within phenomenal-experimental paradigms, like, for instance, the one that derives from Michotte (Michotte, 1946, 1953; Yela, 1952, 1954; Kanizsa and Metelli, 1956; Levelt, 1962; Kanizsa and Vicario, 1967; Thinès, Costall and Butterworth, 2014[1981]; Rimé et al., 1985).

Conclusions

In a different way, the paradigms oriented towards a functionalist model of explanation (Sinico, 2010) have studied these very same phenomena of the Gestalt literature with the purpose of inferring structures or balanced functioning conditions of the cognitive or neural models (see, for example, Cutting and Kozlowski, 1977; Premack and Premack, 1997; Sholl and Tremoulet, 2000; Tremoulet and Feldman, 2000; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001; Blakemore et al., 2003; Pavlova, Sokolov and Sokolov, 2005; Nielsena and Rendall, 2011). However, such paradigms, which have dominated experimental psychology for the last 50 years, were not able to deal properly with tertiary qualities when they assumed physicalism, postulating that physical data were the cause of sensory stimulation. The physicalistic description of experiential data does not allow us to account for the pre-categorical character of tertiary qualities. For this reason, research on tertiary qualities has not yielded a lot of systematic and valid results.

Only the phenomenological paradigms, among them Gestaltists, Michottians and some Gibsonians (McLeod, 1964, 1974; Thinès, Costall and Butterworth, 2014[1981]; Heft, 2001; Clarke and Costall, 2008), have instead been able to develop a theory that could give full support to the experimental investigation of tertiary qualities.

Although Gestaltists and Michottians are not oriented towards a functionalist model of explanation but principally towards nomic knowledge (Sinico, 2010), the goal of a functionalist model of explanation of systems does not necessarily contradict them. The ‘goal’ of the system within a functionalist model of explanation, reconsidered as data from which the inferential process of the cognitive or neural functioning is triggered, can indeed be phenomenologically defined as the content of direct and immediate experience (ibid.). This schema makes a research approach aiming at a functionalist model of explanation compatible with the phenomenological approach, with the pre-categorical data and thus with tertiary qualities. In addition, albeit without excluding the experimental usefulness of physical operationalization and of the necessary but subsequent process of quantification (Sarris, 2010), the phenomenological definition allows us to avoid the obstacle that the physical description hides the intrinsic nature of tertiary data. Within a more general perspective, tertiary qualities become a crucial keyword for an experimental psychology based on the primacy of perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

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