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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?

Philosophers have troubled over such questions, for engaging them is to wrestle with the fundamentals of our ontologies and epistemologies. Until recent times, however, philosophers have had to deal with such questions without the help of any systematic psychological or relevant physiological knowledge. The philosopher was left largely to his own good sense, thought, and intuition. 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. 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.

Two preliminary asides should be made, however. 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. I can only assert here what I will show in a later volume: the discussion of the field context of conflict, violence, and war will depend in part on perceptual level concepts, such as expectations, dispositions, percept, trigger event, and sensory vehicles. 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...