The Challenge: What Peters was Trying to Capture

Why Peters Chose “Gestalt”

The (unconventionally long) forms that Peters identified were unresolved masses, not gestalts.

Peters explicitly choses “gestalt” simply to mean “the opposite of analytic,” intending to represent her observation that certain phrases were used without having been analyzed into their component parts.

But she was insufficiently knowledgeable about gestalts to take into account the fact that because there had been no analysis that had resulted in an awareness of parts, there could not be a gestalt.

And that rounds out our Peters precedent program portion.

Gestalt ≠ Unresolved Mass

A gestalt is not like looking into your fridge and just going, “uh… blob” (á là Peters).

A gestalt is looking into your fridge and understanding that all of the items, when taken together, constitute some sort of unified entity along the lines of “perishables” or “(fridge) food” (or something like that).

You can only do that after you have already analyzed the noisy sensory stream into its component signals:^⇲

• You have to know that part of the mass is pickles, and that another part is butter (and worcestershire sauce, leftover rice, kale, and so on).
• You have to be able to do that (i.e., perceptual segmentation and organization) for enough of what is in there that you can understand what they all have in common… which means that you need to have analyzed things like pickles and butter into their component features (like sour, solid, green, crunchy, and so on^⇲).
• You have to know that there isn’t enough of anything else in there to significantly invalidate those patterns (e.g., some people also store non-foodish items in their fridge, such as batteries, an open box of baking soda, eggplant, and the like).

~GLPs don’t do that well enough with their received auditory stream, nor likely with other incoming sensations either.^⇲

So, from this point on, start thinking about what we should do to informedly and meaningfully support people who face challenges with the segmentation of their experience of their environment (whether it is the time-stream of the sensory information, or otherwise). We will discuss this more, of course, but you might enjoy percolating ahead of time.

More than Words

While a phrase is composed of words, it is not like a gestalt unless the meaning of that phrase adds up to something other (generally more of a unified whole or gestalt) than the individual meanings of those component words.

In Peter’s work, there is no way for ~GLPs to cognize a phrase as a gestalt like this, because they have no set of bounded components from which to unify a whole;^⇲ instead, they work in the other direction over time, using sensory and perceptual cues to segment (unconventionally large) “chunks” out of the information time-stream.

To extend the earlier example, Peters would have ~GLPs start with an understanding that the fridge contains “food,” and then work their way into finer resolutions within that gestalt, coming up with such concepts as “vegetables” and “meat,” and then subtypes of vegetables, and so on.

There’s something to that, but it should be eminently clear by now that it is not a gestalt.^⇲

Which means that these people – when specifically labeled as GLPs – are identified as doing something that they don’t do, that is to say: these misidentified gestalt language processors do not process language as a gestalt.

They process it instead as insufficiently resolved masses. Note that I am not coining a term here. There’s more yet to learn.

But What if…

Either that, or Peters is saying that such people are using what she understands to be a gestalt when she uses it (as a conventional communicator); in other words, she would be saying that ~GLPs don’t actually process gestalts for the purposes of language, but rather they do something else that merely has the appearance of the gestalts that other people use.

But what’s the sense in that kind of a naming convention?

There’s a reason that we avoid doing that very thing with other disorders.

For example, when a sociopath memorizes the rules needed to pass as charming (and similar), we carefully identify this aberrant behavior as “sociopathy,” and not as the “other-centered social processing” that it merely imitates; in other words, we don’t help sociopaths to hide their (potentially harmful) lack of empathy by referring to them as “other-centered social processors.” Such a practice would promote a risk of harm to them and others.

Neither do we refer to someone who is driven by obsessive behavior as an “emotionally-composed detail-oriented processor.”

Nor is a “phobia” an instance of a “projected event risk assessment.”

I am covering this possibility because I have come across it elsewhere (as a type of straw clutching when people try to defend the gestalt thing); however, if you read Peters’ work, it is clear that this was not her intent, nor has it been the intent of the work that came to be built upon it (like in Prizant).^⇲