Harwood Fisher (Auth.) - Schema Re-Schematized - A Space For Prospective Thought - Palgrave Macmillan (2017)

Schema Re-schematized
Harwood Fisher
Schema
Re-schematized
A Space for Prospective Thought
Harwood Fisher
City College
City University of New York
New York, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-48275-0 ISBN 978-3-319-48276-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48276-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955172
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To Helene
PREFACE
The schema concept is central to the explanation and exploration of

complex issues in psychology. The concept has a deep and broad history
of intersecting with these issues. They include the derivation of thought
from perceptual patterns, the representation of cause and effect in action
patterns, the separation of logic and psychological dynamics, and the
concomitant isolation of schematic diagrams from phenomenological
events and loci. These topics influence the schema concept’s use and
sway in psychology, cognitive science, and disciplines influenced by cyber-
netics and information science.
In the prevailing reductive views, the schema’s powers are limited. That
is a great shame given the promise of the schema concept as Kant envi-
sioned it. It was to account for knowledge, but also it was to account for
thought. As things have developed, psychology seems only to have a
schema concept and strategy that accounts for knowledge. This is of
course as information. Within its present form and use, the schema can
only yield de facto diagrams representing specifics in linguistic structure
and information. That may lead to reproduction of such specifics and their
patterns, but it would not produce the basis for new patterns. This leaves
out the schema’s role as a fundamental clue to and paradigm for knowl-
edge—let alone new knowledge. Possibilities for the development of the
schema’s functions remain far removed from addressing the basic issues of
thought and knowledge that Kant raised. If psychology cannot get sig-
nificant leverage on the nature and role of thought, we have on our hands
the schema as a device—something like a Sorcerer’s Apprentice!
vii
viii PREFACE
This book’s main proposal: The present-day concept of the schema

would be significantly enriched, if Otto Selz’s concepts—‘anticipatory
schema,’ ‘coordinate relations,’ and ‘knowledge complex’—were more
inclusive and psychologically dynamic. If they supplanted the present
default views—Piaget’s, Bartlett’s, and Craik’s—the path would open to
a more complete follow-up on Kant’s challenges. These are via his unre-
solved view of the schema as knowledge, on one hand, and thought, on
the other.
This book is a proposal for a fundamentally different way of facing the
dilemmas of Kant’s view of the schema. As such it is an introduction to a
way of expanding the concept and role of the schema to include the
thinker as outside agent. Historical perspectives from different vantage
points are needed to reconstruct and apply Selz’s concepts. An approach
to historical reconstruction is to make analogies that crisscross different
temporal patterns. To fill the gaps that Selz left, this book looks back to
what influenced him from the past. But it also looks at the contemporary
thinking that made up the context in which his ideas were actively influ-
enced. To tie all these together, there is a focus on the present state of
affairs in psychology and related fields. It is a look back at Selz, his
contemporaries, and the theorists who followed Kant. It is also a look to
the future possibilities that can be realized.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deeply felt thanks go to Editor Philip Getz and to Assistant Editor

Amy Invernizzi for their expertise and patience and consistently compe-
tent help with my various queries. Springer Nature Production Editor,
Manoj Mishra, was scrupulous during the various phases that included
careful proofing and splendid tolerance. I particularly thank Palgrave
Macmillan for the foresight to provide for manuscripts that do not squeeze
into the truncated article size now widely adopted. Their approach accom-
modates the kind of monograph that can reach for combinations of
different disciplines and different modes of thinking.
I want to include my deepest gratitude for the support and forbearance
of my wife, Helene. My sons Marc and Saul, with their brilliance and
sparkling accomplishments, spur me on to develop my ideas and continue
my work. Lastly, there’s a role my grandchildren play. I do not think they
realize it. It so often appears that we disagree. Yet, they do listen and
respond to my arguments. When push comes to shove, they show with
obvious affection how well they understand my attempts to expand their
thinking.
ix
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Following the Kantian Dilemmas

and Grand Conception 1
2 Historical Crosscurrents and Conceptual Syntheses 19
3 Concluding Issues and Implications 69
Appendices 99
References 105
Index 117
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Following the Kantian

Dilemmas and Grand Conception
Abstract Major definitions of the schema include those of Bartlett, Craik,

and Piaget. They focus the schema as a key template for information, but
they eschew the Kantian idea of the schema as a key to the structuring of
knowledge. Major present-day concepts of the schema are dependent on
the ‘frame.’ The role of analogy put front and center by Kant is major in
the advance of the schema concept to deal with the unknown and to
project new ideas. Selz took on the problem of the schema’s place and
function relative to productive thinking.
Keywords Analogy Cognitive objects Reduction Frame Information

Language Representation Thought
PURPOSE AND COURSE

To introduce the range of psychological issues affected by the schema
concept, I first define the schema generically. Then, to present the differ-
ent levels and sources of its definition, I begin with the widely accepted
schema’s core focus and its de facto status. I identify the predominant
present-day concepts—the frame and the script—as reductive. In contrast,
I present Otto Selz’s definitions of schema and anticipatory schema. His
concepts do much to avoid the reductive resolution of Kant’s concepts of
the schema and its dilemmas. I identify Kant’s concepts as the generative
point for these disparate versions—the reductive default current views
© The Author(s) 2017 1

H. Fisher, Schema Re-schematized,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48276-7_1
2 SCHEMA RE-SCHEMATIZED
versus what promises to be more relevant to a fuller view of psychology.

I relate cogent points concerning the historical evolution, fundamental
issues, and challenges.
DEFINITIONS OF TERMS
The schema concept is central to the explanation and exploration of
complex issues in psychology. The concept has a history of intersecting
with these issues (Bell and Halligan, 2009; Arbib, 2003, pp. 993–998;
Brewer, 1999b; D’Andrade, 1995; Stein, 1992; Rumelhart, 1980). They
include the derivation of thought from perceptual patterns, the represen-
tation of cause and effect in action patterns, parallels and antecedents in
neurological patterns, the separation of logic and psychological dynamics,
and the concomitant isolation of schematic diagrams from phenomenolo-
gical events and loci. These are all topics that influence the schema con-
cept’s use and sway in cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and
disciplines influenced by cybernetics and information science. For its pre-
sent-day uses in these pursuits, as well as in psychology in general, the
schema’s focus is on information sequences about the relations of objects.
These sequences, as they appear in the form and formats of ‘frames’ and
‘scripts,’ have come to denote compact versions of the schema’s form and
function (Gureckis and Goldstone, 2010, pp. 725–727; Seel, 2012,
pp. 269–270; Rumelhart, 1980; Ramirez, 1997). In the course of this
book, ‘frames’ and ‘scripts’ are treated as derivatives of the schema con-
cept. To guide the discussion of the ‘schema’ concept’s derivations and
possibilities, I begin at a generic point with this overall present-day philo-
sophical definition: ‘a linguistic template or pattern together with a rule
for using it to specify a potentially infinite multitude of phrases, sentences,
or arguments, which are called instances of the schema’ (Corcoran, 2014).
If the schema is a template or pattern of instances, then what do the
instances represent and depict?
THE SCHEMA’S TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL SEQUENCE
Object/Action Outcomes, Sentences, and Logic

Of core interest is the schema as a pattern that determines how we depict a
fundamental relation between objects. That relation specifies an order of
the temporal and spatial sequence, object → action → outcome. It is a
1 INTRODUCTION: FOLLOWING THE KANTIAN DILEMMAS… 3
pattern that we can depict. The depiction may be symbolic, say in logical
terms. This may show up in a propositional sequence, which can accom-
modate deductive or inductive reasoning. The depiction may also be of a
grammatical pattern that shows up in sentences and their contingencies.
Lastly, the depiction may be diagrammatic—a matter central to this book,
and to be addressed after the possibilities Selz’s thinking opens are
presented.
Logical Possibilities in Extending the Schematic Pattern

First, symbolize this pattern as A → B → C. ‘Objects’ (in the ‘A’ slot) can
be constants or have contingencies of various sorts. An object, A—say,
growing flowers—has a contingency—they are watered (B). The ‘contin-
gency’ can also be expressed as the proposition, If A ⊇ B. So, when A ⊇ B
is the case, the outcome is ‘full growth’ (C). The A → B → C sequence can
thus reflect this sentential logic: ‘If the plant is watered; it grows.’ That
would read, ‘(A ⊇ B) ⊇ (C).’ The core depiction, object → action →
outcome, can also be expressed as a logical proposition: ‘If A ⊇ B; then C.’
That proposition would be in the same form as the familiar modus ponens
logical form, ‘All S is P.’ While this proposition’s logic is a deduction, the
‘object → action → outcome’ schema in its sentential (contingency-laden)
format would be applicable to inductive patterns. (You can see and check
on how the watering works out.) Such contingency patterns can be pre-
sented as ‘cause → effect’—or, at least, as cause–effect relations to be
observed and evaluated.
Modus ponens is a logical form of a valid argument, but it is also a rule of
inference.
Overton (2013) presents a way to depict the difference between logic,
on one hand, and, on the other, deductive reasoning about inductive
patterns that can present ‘cause → effect’ sequences. He (2013, p. 22)
offers the concept, ‘deductive systemic availability’ to serve as a rule for
deduction to conform to logic. The rule’s presence presumes there is no
instance to the contrary of an ‘If A; then B’ sequence. In Overton’s terms,
this is a permissibility rule. It is ‘in evidence only when this [sequence]
becomes the valid modus ponens rather than a promise, a causal, or
temporal sequence.’ So, the rule would apply to a logic of propositions.
In contrast, the inductive version of a causal sequence presumes there can
be the presence or occurrences of impermissible antecedent and conse-
quent clauses. Thus, in inductive ‘If A; then B’ patterns, there can be cases
of ‘If ~A; then B’ and ‘If A; then ~B.’ In the example, there may be
watering of flowers that occurs at the same time that a blight is present.
Alas, then, no full growth.
Productive Thinking and New Patterns

The presence or absence of impermissible antecedent and consequent
clauses is key. It is the critical cue for the validity of the logical sequences
and to the different ‘permissibility’ or contingency rules. It theoretically
acknowledges and makes possible pursuit of the relation of both kinds of
sequences (modus ponens logic and inductive cause effect sequences) to
knowledge (e.g., Cheng and Nisbett, 1993). Even with this latitude, the
reductive views prevail. They limit the schema’s powers. The range of
permissibility can potentially include a lot. But this depends on the pre-
sence of a wide-scoped view of permissibility. For example, antecedents
and consequents that are neither present nor known would have to be
included.
However, with the presently accepted reductive view, the schema can
only produce de facto diagrams representing specifics in linguistic struc-
ture and information. That diagramming may lead to reproduction of such
specifics and their patterns, but it would not produce the basis for new
patterns. Missing is a designation of unknowns and a way to relate them.
We shall see in the course of the book that Selz provides abstract symbols
for unknown methods and outcomes and analogical thinking as a way to
relate them to known specifics in a schema. The present accepted view of
the schema leaves out its role as a clue to and a paradigm for knowledge—
let alone new knowledge. While both the logic and the inductive patterns
can have either sentential or propositional formats, these possibilities for
the development of the schema’s functions remain far removed from
addressing the basic issues of thought and knowledge that Kant raised.
THE BREADTH OF KANT

To complete the introduction, I mark Kant’s concepts that presented basic
dilemmas. He conceptualizes an impassible gulf between thought and
information. The schema is a function of both sources, but there is no
traffic between them. With this, defining or delineating it presents a
dilemma. It is ‘here’ but it is ‘there.’ If it is both here and there, neither
version is knowable from the position of the other. He also presents this
dilemma as one of the accessibility of either source. There is not only an

inaccessibility of thought, but also an inadequacy to represent it merely by
language. Despite these dilemmas, the concepts he formed have domi-
nated the major schema theorists’ direction and agenda. I focus the legacy
of Kant’s dilemmas as the simultaneous presence of two perspectives on
the schema-as-knowledge: thought vs. information.
Otto Selz faced the Kantian dilemmas. In doing so, he took Kant’s
ideas about the schema to resolutions in a direction that diverges from that
of the major theorists. Selz’s ideas were attenuated by his abstract style of
writing and by the unfortunate events of the Nazi era as they came to cut
his contribution short. I give voice to Selz’s ideas by historical reconstruc-
tion of their relation to the ideas of his contemporaries that paralleled and
influenced his thinking. This gives resonance to the unexpressed implica-
ture of his ideas. I argue its potential for developing resolutions to Kant’s
dilemmas and making for a richer psychology of thought.
The introduction serves to show the source of the dilemmas that gave
rise to a default version of the schema. With Kant’s dilemmas and their
difficulty to shoehorn into a scientific definition of the schema, we have
the impetus and the context for the reductive definitions that now prevail,
yet constrain thought in psychology.
SELZ AS STANDARD BEARER: RE-AWAKENING

KANT’S QUESTIONS
Included in this introduction is the contrast with the reductive approach that
has become default. Selz’s project was not to reduce, but instead, to face the
challenge of Kant’s legacy. This became a challenge to open the door to
productive thinking that would be compatible with a schema concept.
Selz’s 1909 PhD thesis in philosophy was ‘Die psychologische
Erkenntnistheorie und das Transzendentalproblem’ (The psychological
epistemology and the transcendental problem). He did postdoctoral
work with Oswald Külpe in Bonn (1909–1912) and was known as the
‘perfecter’ of the Würzburg School, which undertook to study the process
of thought as ‘imageless’ (Hoffmann et al., 1996). Selz’s approach
advanced thought’s structural relations (ter Hark, 2009, pp. 179–180).
He viewed those structures as psychological, logical, and analogical,
and their coordinated sum as ‘knowledge structures.’ Mandler (2007,
p. 111) describes Selz as ‘the first psychologist who is both willing and
able to deal with the problem of productive thinking under the

same rubric as reproductive thought.’ This point has deep implications
for the resolution of thought vs. information dilemmas in Kant’s concept
of the schema. Selz’s ideas are anchored to the historical challenges
and reactions to them. The directions taken by his contemporaries
support his ideas; yet, Selz’s ideas do not emerge. They remain strong
and silent—juxtaposed to the reductive and de facto resolutions.
ANALOGY AS CENTRAL TO THINKING ABOUT THE SCHEMA

Kant’s and Selz’s ideas about analogy and its role in actualizing a dynamic
view of the schema are presented. Kant’s ideas are well known; he regards
analogy as indispensible to any thinking, knowing, and representation. In
Selz’s way of thinking about and with the schema, analogy plays a central
role. He is not explicit about the concept. However, he conceives and uses
it to expand schematic space and to reflect knowledge and thought. He
uses it in conjunction with the logic and classificatory structure of his
‘anticipatory schema’ concept and his conceptions of the schema and its
functions. Since his contributions move to resolve Kantian dilemmas, his
use of analogy will be an important issue to reconstruct in evaluating the
projected impact of his ideas.
It is well to keep in mind that the book’s main assumption is that Otto
Selz’s ideas significantly contribute to a resolution of the Kantian dilem-
mas. Clarifying their relation to Kant’s concepts shows their potential for
fundamental reconfiguration of the present-day thinking about the
schema. The proposal built upon this major assumption is that Selz’s
ideas have the potential to enrich a psychology of thought that affects
ideas in a wide variety of disciplines concerned with thinking and cognitive
phenomena. However, the dilemmas are so deep, that straight-line con-
clusions are not in sight; verdicts are hard to assert. Yet, a meaning for the
schema has to be assigned and a path for its use prescribed. So, we require,
as Lewis Carroll, wrote, ‘Sentence first; verdict afterwards.’ I start this
book by presuming that the verdict is in: Kant had the keys. The other side
of this verdict is that the reductionists are ‘guilty.’ Therefore the sentence,
by prescription, is that the schema concept requires that the complexities
and dilemmas must be faced. That sentence comes down to focusing what
Selz had to offer. Yet, there remains a major argument that still casts doubt
on the ‘verdict.’ That is the ‘too much of a good thing’ argument. This is
the problem that faces psychology, particularly because of its needs to be a
scientific enterprise with scientific assumptions and methodology. Given

the force of those needs, we are ashamed but obliged to say that Kant was
simply too perspicacious. He saw too much for his concept to yield other
than poetic and abstract attempts to find a way to put together a science
with the instabilities of dynamics and the impenetrable regressions of
thought to an outside determinant.
I am also obliged to acknowledge Selz’s attempts to resolve the Kantian
dilemmas in the schema concept. Not to do so, sacrifices psychology’s
expansion to cope with dilemmas—in the face of Selz’s attempts, which
admittedly need reconstruction. An archeological find requires an all-out
multi-dimensional effort to reconstruct and connect its meanings to project
to our present and future. Analogously, a theorist and his theory, cut down
before full realization, deserve the reconstruction that would offer potential
enrichment for a psychology of thought. [See Foucault’s archeological and
genealogical method of approaching history (1972) in Note 2 below, p. 25.]
I begin by rejecting the default view and sentencing it to a category of
‘reductionistic.’
In pointing out this reductionist status of the schema, I am obliged to
introduce a few of its captivating concepts. After all—de facto, it is
currently ubiquitously accepted. Still, the verdict is in: The sentence is to
seek a concept of the schema that would be more reflective of the rich
foundations and potential capacities Kant envisioned. So, it is necessary to
be aware upfront: Voices were there, trying for a resolution to dilemmas
and for a more rich interpretation of the Kantian legacy. Some came
before Kant; they conceived ideas of what could mediate thought that
was originative and productive. Some came again at a time after Kant; it
was an era with Selz and the thinkers of his time. So, I will describe these
views as they were in the shadow of the default views. Yet, these sidelined
brave approaches foreshadow my proposals that will emerge at the end of
the book. The proposals will be in line with the sentence. They will be for
development and change of the schema concept.
Thus, the sequence of my explanation is to present the Kantian
context, to describe Selz’s approach, and then to show how the formal
default views of Bartlett, Craik, and Piaget prevailed. Selz’s concepts,
reconstructed, are strengthened enough to surpass the default reduc-
tionist view. I argue for a multi-perspectival view of Selz’s resolutions
to Kant’s rich concept and offer a summary of the changes this would
portend for a psychology that accommodated to the enriched concept
of the schema.
There is violence to chronology here. One justification for it is to

consider that the history of these concepts and their vicissitudes is funda-
mentally a history of what happens in the thinking processes of those who
conceive, study, collect information about, and proffer the ideas.
Therefore, the method of presentation should be to get directly to the
thinking of those who steer the course of events—the events in this case
being those of the vicissitudes of concepts and their effect on the course of
psychology and a body of knowledge and thought. In this respect, the
history is one that should focus on the ‘problem-solvers’—especially in
light of the deep dilemmas Kant presented. Note Haydu’s (1998) view of
the problem of historically accounting for such changes across different
time periods:
Reconstructing the problem-solvers’ understandings and choices—how

they make use of the past—enables us to account for trajectories across
multiple periods. (p. 367)
That point seems right on target. Yet, there is an even more fundamental
reason to de-emphasize chronology and follow the course of ideas and the
idea maker’s processes. (To get to Selz’s process in particular is a ‘recon-
structing’ of his ‘understandings’!) For reconstruction we need a good
deal of analogy. The violence to chronology and the preference for a focus
on the thinker’s (or theorist’s) idea-making process is in service of the idea
that history is analogy—namely, a ratio of events and ideas constructed to
compare different times. But such comparison requires that descriptions
are a function of the present. (That’s where we are, as those doing the
reconstructing.) Hence, sometimes in making the comparisons, the pre-
sent is—and should be—placed first. This is disconcerting because time
and chronology is either out of joint or simply moving backwards. Two
reasons for this immediate focus on the present are (1) the rendition of the
past is in present terms and from a present ‘understanding and choice.’ (2)
the present simply has to be manifest in order to specify to just what the
past is being compared.
THE DE FACTO MAJOR VIEWS OF THE SCHEMA

Kant’s challenge occurs first; then there follow the various reductions
and their effects on the schema concept and its effects on psychology.
For the reasons given, I cite all this before more formally presenting the
de facto major views influencing psychology’s use of the schema. With

this sequence we have a look at Kant’s mindset and the way the major
thinkers reacted to his dilemmas. Their ‘understandings and choices’
help to set in place the latitude we can take when looking at the
schema—reduced. These major thinkers’ views will include Piaget’s,
Bartlett’s, and Craik’s present-day influential concepts and their influ-
ence on developments in cognitive science and related areas. I cite the
‘frame’ concept as a logical outcome of the major default views. It is
central to the developments in cognitive science and psychology. It is,
however, reductive and I place it in a position antipodal to a projected
development of Selz’s concepts.
THE PROSPECTIVE FOR ENRICHMENT

The book’s main premise is that Otto Selz’s ideas significantly contribute
to a resolution of the Kantian dilemmas. Clarifying their relation to
Kant’s concepts shows their potential for fundamental reconfiguration
of present-day thinking about the schema. I have put forth the book’s
main proposal: Selz’s ideas have the potential to enrich a psychology of
thought that affects ideas in a wide variety of disciplines concerned with
thinking and cognitive phenomena. I underscore here that this proposal
is only that of a potential. The present-day concept of the schema would
be significantly enriched, if the role of Otto Selz’s concept (the antici-
patory schema) and his way of thinking about it were recognized as its
takeoff point. That concept would ‘re-schematize the schema.’ It would
mean replacing major thinkers’ ideas that follow a logical course in their
reductive interpretation of the schema. That is a tall order; so, let’s see
first how far Selz could go. But not without noting and appreciating the
problems for which the major theorists had their much more reductive—
and, from an empiricist point of view, acceptable—approach.
Otto Selz’s Approach: How Far Could He Go?

A schema’s form can provide a format for an antecedent and consequent.
This format as terms in the form ‘If A; then B,’ can accommodate all sorts
of objects. It is a pattern that not only can represent a sequence present
syntactically within a sentence. It also can represent the inclusion relation
present logically in a proposition. Corcoran’s sweeping scope for the
schema’s patterning includes ‘phrases, sentences, or arguments.’ These
objects are reflected in the logical forms and rules for sentences, proposi-
tions, and their outcomes—inductive and deductive.
With Selz’s approach, logic interacts with psychology and the cognitive
objects of thought. Concepts are such cognitive objects. They in turn refer
to objects and their relations. The schema has the function not only of
assigning form to concepts, but also of depicting coordinate relations
between selected or target concepts (Selz, 1924; p. 37). These functions
involve the psychological task of forming, shaping, and relating cognitive
objects. In addition, they result in moving these objects and their relations
to positions in a logical classification. Thus, swans are an example of
referent objects, but not all swans are alike. ‘Swans’ can be a concept
generically referring to the different sorts of swans. Various organizations
of criteria—maybe biological substructures or actions, like flying capabil-
ities and limits—can make up a way of grouping these particulars so that
they are all identifiable with the same term—‘swans.’ The term selected
becomes a concept for the particular grouping—swans. The criteria for
grouping set bounds—rabbits do not fly. They are not included within the
swan concept.
The forming of the concept moves in the direction of a logical classi-
fication. In all, though, the concepts are cognitive objects. They in turn
refer to objects and their relations. That reference has psychological and
logical components. The psychological part of forming the concept involves
the process of selecting it and selecting its criterial particulars. (Flying, for
example.) The logical part involves the boundaries of inclusion. (Rabbits are
not swans.)
With Selz’s approach, the logic interacts with the thinker’s psychology
and the cognitive objects of thought. Concepts are cognitive objects. So,
thought is involved—and as well, other psychological processes. That is
because the thought—the selecting, producing, and organizing—in turn,
also refers to the psychological objects and their relations. Those refer-
ences involve ancillary objects, alternate forms of the selected objects, and
identification of ‘other’ objects. Thus, the psychological processes may
include not only concept formation. They may also include memory,
association, assignment of organizational locus, assignment of semiotic
status, and computational transaction, such as subtraction, addition, and
combination of features.
The concept ‘swan’ is a cognitive object. It can refer to particular
swans—which can be further organized in sub-groups—white swans;
black swans. So, this, as other concepts, has an organization somewhat
like a logical class that has an identifiable particular and also a comple-
ment of particulars within it. It is logical also, because it is in opposition
to that which lies outside the class parameters. (No rabbits included.)
The psychological part of forming the concept involves the process of
selecting it and selecting its criterial particulars. Thus, swans are objects
and not all alike. ‘Swans’ can be a concept generically referring to the
different sorts of swans. Various organizations of criteria—maybe biolo-
gical substructures or actions, like flying capabilities and limits—make up
a way of grouping these particulars so that they are all identifiable with
the same term—‘swans.’ The term becomes a concept for the particular
grouping—swans. So the objects within a concept—and also the concept
as an object—have identifiable criteria, and they have classificatory struc-
tures for these criteria.
The Knowledge Structure

Selz (1924, pp. 37, 47) goes a step further. The relations of concepts to
one another (or to alterations in their use or form) fit into a general
structure—a ‘knowledge structure.’
Now we go beyond the concept to its place in a wider circle of
organization. That wider circle, as Selz sees it, is a manifestation of the
schema. His point is that the schema has the proactive function of
assigning form to and depicting coordinate relations. These are rela-
tions between the selected or target concepts (Selz, 1924; p. 37). The
door opens to a wide range of possibilities. Analogies of all sorts can
be constructed to suggest that our target cognitive object (swans) can
be in such a ‘coordinate relation’ with another concept. In addition,
that other concept can be on the same level, or on a superordinate
one, or a parallel one, or a symbolic one. Or the comparison can be to
an ‘unknown.’
This book’s proposal is that there are significantly different impli-
cations we can follow if Selz’s version of the schema were more
central to present thinking in psychology and cognitive science. As I
just argued, Selz’s idea of the intention of the schema is signaled by
the ‘knowledge structure’ concept. In addition to its powers to direct
the unfolding of the schema, the knowledge structure folds in the
product, namely, the schema’s completed (produced) unit. That pro-
duct is an articulated whole, which constitutes knowledge relative to
a specific intention.
Kant’s Concept of Analogy: The Dynamic Basis for Selz’s Logic

of the Anticipatory Schema
With the knowledge structure as an overall objective for the schema and its
capabilities and functions, Selz puts forth his key concept in his version of
the schema—the ‘anticipatory schema.’ With it, the knowledge structure’s
perspectives can be formative and prospective. We may not know whether
a concept will be totally logical or will fold out to impermissible ante-
cedent and consequent clauses. You can have the concept of a structure
that is built with nonsense within it—as Lewis Carroll does with this:
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would

be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise,
what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?
A mutation in a swan may appear anomalous—but it can cause a reshuf-

fling of the species objects and their properties. A new concept and/or a
new configuration within it—including new antecedent/consequent pat-
terns—may emerge. Such a conceptual structure—with its logical/cause
effect determinants and properties—unfolds as it is achieved via the ‘antici-
patory schema.’ That ‘unfolding’ level of thought is more abstract than the
thinking done with concepts having already been schematized. So, we
might have concepts A, B, C, and X. (X is an unknown.) Assume that we
already know that A → B. And assume that we might not know what
produces C. If we assigned X as an unknown, we might be able to say—in
the form of an analogy, A → B:: X: C. This is a simplistic example, but the
comparisons of B to C and of A to X present the relations of the concepts
to be specifiable as a ratio—in Kant’s terms, a ‘proportion’ (Kant et al.,
1997/1770, p. 99).
The format by which to derive the ratio is that of analogy—a method suited
to compare the known relations of concepts to the unknown ones. (My
example of specifics involves concepts of swans. The concepts are in a ratio
of classes and subclasses. Two sets of these are to be compared. The first set’s
class is ‘swans.’ Its subclass, ‘swan varieties.’ The second set has an emergent
concept—‘swan successors.’ Its subclass is ‘mutated swans.’ The ratio for the
relation of these sets of classes and subclasses is a product of this analogy:
the class, SWANS: subclass, swan varieties:: the class, SWAN emergent:
the sub-class, mutated swans.)
Kant’s view of analogy as ‘a proportion of concepts’ allows for inferences

about ‘a relation between an object and its known properties to another
object and its unknown properties’ (Callanan, 2008, p. 753). Remarkably
the same is afforded by Selz’s view of the schema—in specific, by his antici-
patory schema idea. Selz’s idea of the schema brings a dynamic perspective to
the Kantian idea that the schema is a guiding format that governs causal and
logical sequences. This perspective may be indigenous to a psychological
state of affairs. Or it may be an indissoluble combination of thought and
information. As such it would call for an account of unknowns as dynamic
irresolution within a ‘knowledge structure’ dynamically requiring resolution.
To best capture Selz’s idea of the schema’s capacity to project a yet unknown
relation, consider that his view of the ‘unknown’ relations has echoes in
Bergson’s prior conception—the dynamic scheme.
Bergson (1902/1920, p. 210) describes a ‘continuous transformation
of abstract relations suggested by the objects perceived into concrete
images capable of recovering those objects.’ This dynamic scheme would
constitute a future version of the presently known relations (On
Bergson’s ideas, also see de Groot, 2008a, pp. 5, 6). Piaget and
Inhelder (1956, p. 133), noting the connection between Bergson
and Selz, describe Selz’s ‘anticipatory schema’ as a concept ‘that suggests
an answer before the details are ‘filled in’ by the action during the actual
process of arriving at it.’
To achieve the concept that is not yet there is to be done by compar-
ison. Selz’s criterion is ‘likeness.’ In the course of attempting to solve the
word association problem Selz describes for his subjects, the subject uses
‘likeness’ for comparing the connection of a suggested answer with the
outcome (see de Groot, 2008b, p. 58). At the ‘beginning of a trial,’ there
is an anticipation of the ‘whole’ (Selz, 1922, p. 145). The subject looks
for a solving method that would be suitable ‘in constituting a whole’—
which is the knowledge complex. Noting the logic in this is not easy.
The Logic of Correspondence and of Constituting a ‘Whole’

Many have interpreted Selz’s ways of formulating his anticipatory schema
concept. They include Wenzl (1928) and Duncker (1945). Duncker’s
clue is the ‘reason of partial correspondence’ (1945, p. 19). Off the bat,
that sounds like what happens when a comparison is made in an analogy.
Before pursuing that interpretation, I list Wenzl’s. Both view Selz’s
formulations in a way that suggests a thinker’s projection of a
relationship is via analogical thinking. Wenzl characterizes it, using the

symbol ‘r’ as a relation and Ri and R2 as objects thus:
Ri r R2 are ‘two related objects . . . e. g., ‘hunting’ and ‘fishing’ [that] stand
in a relationship r (coordination). Ri r X is the comparison in the form of an
‘anticipatory schema.’
Using these ratio symbols, this comparison can be spelled out in the more
familiar analogy format, thus:
Ri : X :: Ri : R2
In Duncker’s version of Selz’s ‘schematic anticipation,’ aRb is a schema,

and ?Rb is an anticipatory schema. Duncker (p. 19) writes,
Cast the problem as ?Rb
Then, he summarizes Selz’s reasoning,
1. aRb ‘exists in the thinker’s experience.’

2. ‘by reason of the partial correspondence with ?Rb, aRb and there-
fore a are aroused.’
This idea of ‘reason by partial correspondence’ is awfully close to casting

this as ‘reasoning with the logic of analogy.’ Duncker’s terms can be
spelled out in the familiar format for analogy ratio comparisons, like this:
? : b :: a : b
‘Partial correspondence’ is an intrigue that comes up again, now closer

to our time. Simon (1981) observed that the assigned or given task
would be the action sequence template (schema) for which the subject
‘form[s] a relational structure resembling an equation with its unknown’
(p. 155; italics, mine). The idea of resemblance sounds like the logic is
that of equivalence relations. Simon (p. 151) nicely points out that
[t]wo-termed relations are essentially more powerful than simple predi-

cates (X is a Y; apples are red). It is impossible to build a completely
general language from simple predicates, but it becomes feasible when
two-termed relations are allowed.
The two-termed relation, like Duncker’s ?Rb, is powerful in that the

possibilities of the relation by ratio can take many forms. Given that ‘?’
is unknown, it has many possibilities. However, the relator ‘R’ appears
open and ratio-like. So, the ‘?’ can be subject to identifying an equivalence
relation at different levels of classification or by way of different categories
of particularity.
Selz took on the problem of relating two concepts. Each of the two is a
set of two terms—one known and one unknown. For one of the concepts,
one of its two sets contains an unknown as one of its two terms. For the
second concept, both terms are known. An example may help:
One concept may be ‘depression’ and a second, ‘mania.’ For depres-
sion, we may have the term ‘severe’ and the term ‘mild.’ For mania, we
might have the term ‘rampant’ and ‘occasional.’ Imagine that we can
specify ‘rampant’ and ‘occasional’ by a count of instances, but we cannot
easily spot ‘mild’ depression. We thus have one set of terms with an
unknown—and it is one that can have serious consequences.
[You can cast all this symbolically as follows: Two concepts, (C1 and
C2) which when compared, relate a known (k) and an unknown (u). Each
concept is a set of two terms (t1 and t2). One term of one of the two sets
contains an unknown (tu) and the other term contains a known compo-
nent (tk.) Thus, C1 ⊇ (tk, tu) but C2 (tk, tk.)]
In my view, Selz’s underlying commitment was to ‘coordinate’ the two
sets of two terms (i.e., coordinate the concepts in the face of the presence
of the unknown). Selz’s predicate was that they were sets of terms in a
‘knowledge complex.’ They would have to be ‘coordinated’ to achieve (or
actualize) knowledge. My purpose is to show that Selz’s conceptualizing
of the schema moved to bring to fruition Kant’s commitment—not only
to analogy—but also to the schema’s nature and power as formative for
knowledge.
Selz’s Anticipatory Schema as an Analogy that Reaches

for the Knowledge Complex
Selz pursued the way a thinker selected words to relate to a target word.
His method [adapted from Watt’s (1905)] was that of ‘controlled asso-
ciation.’ However, Selz instructed subjects to strive for an ‘adequate and
meaningful solution’ (Frijda, 1981, pp. 76–77). The subjects were asked
to name a word that fell into a categorical relation with the word
presented. They might be required to name words that would be
‘parts,’ ‘wholes,’ and that would fall into a ‘super’ or ‘subordinate’

relation (Selz, 1922, p. 107; also described by; Hoffmann et al., 1996,
p. 24). In Selz’s association task, to find a ‘word’ the subject uses a
method of thought. It may be to think about other words, or it may be
to dip into memory to find a word that fit a similar association. I mark the
method sought as (?). It may lead to a given solution, (R). Thus, (? → R)
is conceptualized as a particular relation. It is particular in that (?)
signifies an unknown, yet specific method. Since (?) is identified as
specific—even though unknown—the particular relation (? → R) is
possible to designate as a specific method that would take its place in a
‘whole’ ‘knowledge complex.’ (We can look at (?) as an unknown, but a
specific one—or specific class of methods and origins that might com-
plete knowledge of R.) With this particularization, the thinker’s concept
focused (? → R) is compared to an actualized or ‘whole’ ‘knowledge
complex’—call it, KW.
From Completing a Schema for an Unknown to Achieving

Its Extension in a Knowledge Complex
I will try to show how this way of thinking proceeds from the thinker’s
work in finding a specific unknown for a given problem to completing a
conceptual ‘whole’ viz. a generic ‘schema’ representing all possible
coordinate relations for the general category of such problems. To do
this, I will use the above (? → R) to represent the ‘specific problem.
However, the point of this next discussion is that of extending Selz’s
idea of the phase change between the anticipatory schema and the
schema that represents the achievement of a knowledge complex. In
what follows, the thinker becomes my version of the psychologist
applying Selz’s concepts to her thinking.
To go forward with Selz’s concept of the schema is to see the schema
moving along dynamically to create as an object of thought a relationship
between a specific ‘completion’ of the sequence ‘problem → method
solution’ to all of the coordinate relations for the category of that sort of
problem. That way of completing builds a concept that is a cognitive
object with a ‘part-whole’ basis to the structuring of its relations.
This is theory building that can guide the contemporary psychologist—
as it would be informed by the Selz concepts. I’ll cite an intriguing
example here: It could be the psychologist pursuing the problem of
finding the best method of presenting an opposing view in a debate.
Years ago, William McGuire (1961a, b; Banas and Rains, 2010) intro-
duced ‘innoculation’ as a method that could have value. The idea is
that bringing up the opposing argument before the opponent does so
would take the steam out of it. As a form of ‘immunizing,’ this
method might work out in a given experiment or a given situation.
Thus, a psychologist could try for some sort of schematic that repre-
sents specifics. Hopefully, it would be somewhat more than the opera-
tional ones for given experiments. Moreover, the range of issues for
argument-opposing argument calls for a more generic concept—or
what Selz would call the ‘knowledge complex.’ In all, the process
does revolve around the expansion of and coordination of the relations
of specifics of method and solution. The point here is that this set of
relations, resting on the idea that particulars lead the way to theoretical
concepts has a basis in part to whole relations. The ‘part’ for psychol-
ogists can be a specific scenario that would attenuate a specific argu-
ment. The ‘whole’ would be a set of coordinated relations at a level of
specificity so inclusive that you would have a full-blown theoretical
framework as your schema.
‘Part to Whole’ Summarized in Selz’s Terms and Carried

Further by Analogy
The comparison of the specific representation of a problem to its fulfill-
ment in a knowledge complex yields a proportionate relation—that is,
part: whole. Thus, (? → R) is only a part of that ‘whole,’ KW. Such a part of
a knowledge complex may appear as a thought, speculation, or a method
put into operation. In all, that thought, speculation, or attempt at a
method appears as a particular relation, while the whole (KW) is a general
state of the relations in a ‘knowledge complex.’ However, as elements
within an analogy, both [the particular relation (? →R) and the (KW)] are
conceptual terms, and they are compared by way of a ratio. As I would
presently take the role of a thinker, I would consider the (? → R) to
represent the concept of a method sequence. I would seek to relate it as
a particular (? → R)] to the whole (the KW). Still, the (? → R): (KW) is
one possible particular in a ratio to the knowledge complex. So, I would
want to conceptualize a class of methods that lead to a range of solutions
consonant with the ‘whole’ of the knowledge complex, (KW). I would
then be able to express relations that reach for a completion of the
knowledge complex more fully within an analogy.
I can begin with what is known, that is, there is a class of methods (say,
M1 ‥ n) we do know that do lead to acceptable solutions within the target
knowledge concept. (There are degrees of freedom here in that M1 ‥ n is a
structure supporting specifics, but also presenting abstract ‘slots’ for par-
ticulars not specified.) So, where that class of methods (M1 ‥ n) does
produce—and potentially accommodates—acceptable solutions within
(KW), the following analogy can be made:
? : R :: ðM1 : : n : KWÞ:
Within this comparison, there is an equivalence relation of the analogy’s

corresponding terms. So, (?: R) ≅ KW. This relation indicates an equiva-
lence of a part to the whole of the knowledge complex. The equivalence is
by ratio. That is, the knowledge complex is in a proportionate relation to
that class of methods producing acceptable solutions or fulfillment of the
knowledge complex. The logic here is basic to that of an analogy. Within it
the comparisons of particulars with a more general concept or category yield
equivalence relations.
CHAPTER 2
Historical Crosscurrents
and Conceptual Syntheses
Abstract Otto Selz’s thinking, writing style, personal dispositions, and

fate at the hands of the Nazis attenuated his ideas. His concepts aim to
redeem Kant’s vision: the schema is not merely a retrospective organization
of information. It is also a prospective template for knowledge. To fulfill
Selz’s vision is to reconstruct his concepts and perspectives on Kant and
psychology’s nexus with the psychologist as thinker. A reconstructive
history of ideas cuts across time and space. This reconstruction focuses
Kant’s ideas of the schema and the role of analogy. It addresses Selz’s
contemporaries’ ideas, and advances to present reductive views. To go
beyond to concepts that navigate between thought and representation, I
compare Selz’s ideas to Peirce’s. Re-schematized, the schema emerges as
thinking prospectively by utilizing analogies and abstractions.
Keywords Analogy Anticipatory schema Coordinate relations

Knowledge complex
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE SCHEMA CONCEPT’S ISSUES

The historical issues, defining and attending the schema concept, are spread
over a long period. They have evolved from theorists with different views of
the philosophy of mind and knowledge, the goals of psychology, its metho-
dology, and its relation to technology. Therefore, to bring key issues to bear
on the proposal for the potential of Selz’s impact on the resolution of

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48276-7_2
Kant’s challenges and their application to today’s view of the schema,

my review will be largely definitional. It will center on the present-
day results of Immanuel Kant’s legacy. That legacy is a concept of the
schema’s powerful place and influence on thought and knowledge—
along with the challenge of rectifying concepts of the phenomenolo-
gical loci of thought and the representation of knowledge. That
legacy is heavily invested in Kant’s idea that it is only by analogy
that one can bridge the gap between the unknown and the known or
knowable.
The Nuclear Role of Kant’s Approach to the Dilemmas

of Knowledge
The proposal that Selz’s concept of the schema would be more fruitful
for present-day psychology can now take this specific form: In compar-
ison to the current de facto concept and use of the schema and its derived
forms, Selz’s overarching assumptions and approach to the nature and
function of the schema would more fruitfully address Kant’s challenge.
This proposal calls forth historical determinants in light of their influ-
ence or contribution to Kant’s views on ‘knowledge’ as they are related
to a schema concept. The proposal’s purpose is to scientifically pursue
a psychology that would take on the dilemmas of thought and
its representation, as well as the impossibilities of displaying or depict-
ing—and thereby harnessing—the unconscious determinants of and by
schemata.
The more general issue of Kant’s ‘theory of knowledge’ intersects
with his ‘psychology of knowledge’ (see Popper, 1978/2014, p. 33).
Within that psychology, the schema would be a primary pre-influence
on the organization of cognitive objects. This approach to knowledge
was not an unalloyed pre-formism. Instead, an individual’s judgment
would be largely anticipatory. The sense emerging from Kant’s view, as
Popper indicates, is that any anticipation is subject to confirmation—and
its projections may not be right. Therefore, anticipatory is a genetic
term—it characterizes a combined psychological and epistemological
‘theory of pre-formation’—viz. a ‘deductivist-empiricist view.’ Popper
makes the link specific with Kant’s ‘psychology’ when he points out
(Popper, 1978/2014, p. 32) that the Würzburg School’s Külpe’s and
Selz’s experimental work corroborated Kant’s ‘psychology.’ Herrmann
and Katz (2001, pp. 226–227) pointedly make the tie between Selz’s
2 HISTORICAL CROSSCURRENTS AND CONCEPTUAL SYNTHESES 21
thinking and Kant’s ideas of anticipatory judgments. They cite Selz’s

view in his dissertation that
acceptance of the existence of things independently of consciousness is a

‘hypothesis’ which allows us ‘to explain countless complex state-of-the-
case—experiences and to predict the phenomena in a countless number
of cases.’
Building to the Schema as a Mediating Device

With Otto Selz’s ideas (Selz, 1929, 1924; Frijda and De Groot, 1981) as a
point of departure for a reconstruction and refiguring of the psychological
space labeled the ‘schema,’ new diagrams are possible. They would be
dependent on analogical thinking’s formats. These would be representa-
tional, but they would function prior to a schematization we would
recognize as an object → action → outcome sequence. Representation of
psychological space would be expanded to account for the schema ±
thought outside its borders. Later, I discuss the point May (1995) raised:
the ‘outside’ factor is missing from the default diagramming of the
schema. The potentialities for change are held at bay within the reduc-
tionist view of the schema. With Selzian changes to the concept of the
schema, it would become more than a chain of representations. It would
become a representation that links its origin in thought to the changes it
can mediate in the thought needed to advance its functions. I will suggest
that these fundamental changes can underlie changes to be made in
diagrams—such as Venn diagrams. But treatment of that topic in detail
lies outside this book.
KANT IN A TIME WARP

We need to look at Kant’s views as if we are perched in the present. We can
see them as they radically differ from the present constraining views. We
need to then focus Kant’s views—first almost nostalgically looking to fill in
the gaps. Then, having seen up close his dilemmas, we can go back to the
prevailing views, this time more sympathetically. With these alternations of
wanting a broader framework versus seeing the merit of a restrictive one,
we have motivation in both directions. The alternating sympathies should
help evaluate and even reconstruct the attempts by Selz—and his con-
temporaries—to reach for a more fulfilling concept of the schema and a
realization of Kant’s reach.
SOURCES OF THE PRESENT VIEW OF THE SCHEMA:

THE PERCH FROM WHICH TO LOOK BACK AT KANT
Frederic C. Bartlett, Kenneth J. W. Craik, and Jean Piaget have become
the traditional seminal sources of the present-day psychological concept of
the schema. [On Bartlett (1932)—see Wagoner, 2013; Gureckis and
Goldstone, 2010; Brewer, 1999a). On Craik (1943)—see Arbib et al.,
2014; Cervantes-Perez, 2013; Arbib, 2012; Johnson-Laird, 2004); and
on Piaget (1971, 1952, 1926)—see Kohler, 2008.)] With this lineage the
schema concept has become ubiquitous and powerful in cognitive science
and its applications to the psychology of thought—and as well to a
number of allied disciplines like psycholinguistics, cognitive anthropology,
AI, AL, and neuroscience.
Psychology in general and the above areas allied with and concerned with
psychological science treat psychological processing in terms of information
and representation. To a large extent, they eschew phenomenological
accounts of issues, such as the origin of ideas, the production of cognitive
objects by thought, the motivational dynamics inspiring and organizing
knowledge, and the inner forms determining logical concept formation. If
Otto Selz’s ideas about thought and its relation to the schema were more
predominant, the schema’s seminal source, viz., the phenomenological
aspects of thought, would come out of the shadows, and re-enter the
psychology of thought and mind. There have been accounts offered on the
scope and implications of Selz’s concept of the schema and its relation to a
psychology of thought (See: De Groot, 2008a, b; Duncker, 1935/1945;
Frijda and De Groot, 1981; Herrmann and Katz, 2001; Mandler, 2007,
1996; Simon, 1981; ter Hark, 2010, 2009, 2007; Van Strien and Fass,
2006; Wenzl, 1928). Aside from the difficulties with the skeletal nature of
Selz’s ideas—as already mentioned—there are the issues of reconstruction
and the interpretation of Selz from different positions in historical loci. So,
how should the present book present its look at the reconstruction process?
What do I have to do, and what do readers need presented to them?
Angles of Reconstruction
Although we can look at this present work’s reconstruction of Selz’s ideas
and their conceptual extensions as the interpretation of text, the approach
I use is not as robust as hermeneutics. It is to integrate the text’s ideas with
the contexts I identify and to use temporal ‘shifts of perspective’ on Selz’s
ideas. I look at ideas contemporary with his, ideas in the past that founded
the issues he attempted to resolve, and ideas that emerged in the recent
present that dealt with these issues. I also consider all these perspectives
from the point of view of what a future set of ideas might need to look like.
Hence, the approach—a historical one—is neither a chronology, nor a
counterfactual history. It is a resurrection of a buried point of synthesis
and an attempt to connect it with the past in a way that enriches its present
and yet-to-be-developed place in the psychology of thought.1,2 There are
1
It can be difficult, or it could be exciting to read Otto Selz. He is devoted to the
value of abstractions, and he favors them in his writing to launch his ideas. Selz’s
concepts are not only abstract; they are presented as if his job of connecting them
to their underlying and projected purposes were simply incomplete. One can
interpose the analogies that connect them to each other, to an overall theory and
to their analogous relations with the Kantian issues concerning the schema. Here is
a short list of these concepts:
‘schematic anticipation’ ‘involuntary response’

‘intermediate means abstraction’ ‘voluntary response’
‘Process abstraction’ ‘completion of the complex schema’
‘accidental means abstraction’ ‘means abstraction’
‘structural formations’ ‘cognitive operation of complex completion’
‘coordinate relations’
‘knowledge complex’
‘memory complex’
Selz is devoted to the use of analogy—not only in his thinking, but also in his
writing. There too, his process and method is analogical thinking. Sometimes in
his writing, this process includes examples. More often, however, it is a matter of
relating one idea to another—such as by his account of the desired completion of a
schema as a ‘knowledge complex.’ Analogy is a fundamental tool for historical
construction and enrichment. It is a method I use in the writing of this book. It
undergirds my reconstruction of and projections for his concepts and ideas. (See
note 2 for a brief statement of Foucault’s (1972) concept of history as ‘an analysis
of descent and emergence.’ It calls for a method of approaching history from the
past; yet, seeking meaning by asking. ‘What is it in the present that produces
meaning for philosophical reflection?’ (Krizman, 1988). Little (2010) has a broad
concept of history and what history should be. He focuses ‘historical cognition, ’
asking, ‘How do we conceptualize, represent, interpret, and discover the past?’
(p. 1). Thus, the historian’s thinking is a fundamental issue in working to interpret.
links between Kant’s unfulfilled agenda, Selz’s buried ideas, and their
nested intention. Bringing these links to light would illuminate—and
raise doubts about—the complacency that allows disconnects presently
accompanying the schema concept.
As it applies to this book’s task of reconstructing an understanding of Selz, I

focus the reconstruction somewhat in terms of the historian’s task that Little
(2010, p. 6) describes: ‘piecing together the human meanings and intentions
that underlie a given complex set of complex historical actions in terms of the
thoughts, motives, and states of mind of the participants’. This task ‘requires
interpretations of actions in terms of the thoughts, motives, and states of mind
of the participants’ (See Appendix A for a summary of three views consonant
with Little’s conception of the historian’s task.)
For those purposes, for the reasons of Selz’s style in presenting and communicat-
ing his ideas, intellectual aspirations and proclivities—and for the tragic reasons that
his life and work were cut short—the very content and purpose of the present account
requires analogical thinking. There are comparisons that need to be made with the
ideas of his contemporaries. There are comparisons to be made with his predecessors.
There are comparisons to be made with those who independently grappled with the
same Kantian dilemmas Selz faced. There are comparisons to be made with how we—
in Selz’s future—think when we read his thinking. From this nexus of history, it is
difficult to navigate the mix—past, the present, and the future matrices of thought
and concepts. Yet, if the fertile potential of Selz’s vision of the direction of the schema
for a concept of mind, thought, and productive thinking is to break into the monolith
of current thinking in psychology, cognitive science, and related fields, such as
psycholinguistics, the requirement is there.
The historian seeking analogies pursues what Hayden White in 1973 famously
identified as ‘the deep structural forms of the historical imagination’. These are
accessed by tropes— ‘the four figures of classical rhetoric (i.e., metaphor, meto-
nymy, synecdoche, and irony)’ (Chartier, 2011, p. 1). As I propose them, the
concepts of analogy and its applicability to thought are basic not only to the
dynamic functions of the schema but also to the thinker’s historical perspective
on the various conceptions of the schema. Thus, a full description of the historical
thinking includes imagination, its dependency on the analogy format, and the
thinker, who re-constructs cognitive objects and depicts their relations by way of
the pre-logical building blocks of analogy—namely, tropes
The re-construction is an empathic process of synchronically absorbing the
complex of analogies. It is a process for the experiencing of the writer—and it is
a process for the reader. To the extent that the reader should be aware of this, this
note’s aim is to help reading Selz and to facilitate reading this book too.
In the next section, I briefly introduce the origins of the traditional

schema concept. These origins—it is uniformly acknowledged—are
based in Kant’s concept. I will point to Kant’s conception and to the
underrepresentation of its breadth in the current version of the schema.
The Kantian origins and their unresolved conflicts are the impetus for
Selz’s ideas and for this book’s attempt to show that Selz’s ideas are
potentially a rich alternative to the present-day reductions of Kant’s
schema concept.
FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES KANT FACED
Past Precursors of Kant’s Way of Thinking and Future Perspectives

from Which to Think About His Concepts and Dilemmas
Kant wrestles with the nature of thought. He is very aware that that
thought is about the things and events of the world—whether these events
are the physical things, or the events are a function of beliefs, reasoning,
2
The look back and to the present to see what the impact of Selz’s ideas could have
meant—and could still contribute to the insights and riddles Kant left for the
psychology of thought—has elements in common with Foucault’s archeological
and genealogical method of approaching history (1972, pp. 139–140, 152, 233).
In describing history as archeology, he argues (1972, p. 140) it would produce ‘a
regulated transformation of what has already been written. It is not a return to the
innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse-object.’
He focuses the thinking involved as ‘philosophical reflection’ (Tamboukou, 1999).
Genealogy is ‘an analysis of descent and emergence’—approaching history from the
past; yet, seeking meaning by asking. ‘What is it in the present that produces
meaning for philosophical reflection?’ (Foucault, in Kritzman, 1988, p. 87; quoted
by; Tamboukou, 1999). ‘[G]enealogy is effective history understood as the “affir-
mation of knowledge as perspective”’ (Foucault—quoted by Tamboukou, 1999—
cited in Simons, 1995, p. 91). The method I use focuses the work and ideas of
others. Their influence on Selz does not go as deep as the Kantian origins.
However, the perspective that emerges helps to elaborate and contribute to the
implicature of Selz’s concepts. Foucault’s aim and method is instructive: ‘the more
the [historical] analysis breaks down practices, the easier it becomes to find out
more about their interrelation, while this process can never have a final end’
(Tamboukou, 1999). My objective is to ‘break down’ the processes that have led
to reductive solutions.
and values. All those thoughts can be the thinker’s; they can also be the
other person’s. Kant too is to be understood in terms of how he thinks.
That matter, from his point of view, is a function of the thinkers preceding
him. From our vantage point, it is also projected backwards in time. Our
present point of perspective is another junction of thinking and time that
have interceded. This junction informs the way we interpret Kant and the
various reactions to him that have succeeded him in time—in particular,
the set of reactions we focus—by Selz. But we also go to the time before
Kant. I select Plato and Aristotle’s ideas as forerunners. Their thinking
about thinking set the frameworks for Kant’s concepts of the dilemmas of
analyzing thought and for his attempt to levy concepts to deal with them.
Yet, I begin this account of Kant’s ideas about the schema, thought,
and knowledge by jumping forward from his time. From our present perch
we can look not only to Kant’s forerunners, but also to those who
succeeded him and tried different ways of framing his dilemmas. The
look to his forerunners helps to reconsider the reductive strategies of
those who followed Kant.
To make those reconsiderations, I select the account of Kant and his
forerunners within a framework Karl Popper (1949, 1959) described.
That framework, ‘logically possible worlds,’ is critical because it goes in a
forward direction—it would help to make sense not only of our present
concepts of the Kantian concepts. Those include ‘pure’ ideas, information,
knowledge, and the schema. That framework, ‘logically possible worlds,’ is
critical because it would help to make sense not only of our present
concepts of the Kantian concepts. Those include ‘pure’ ideas, information,
knowledge, and the schema.
But to consider the frame of ‘logically possible worlds’ would also help
to expand credible ways of conceptualizing approaches to Kant’s dilem-
mas. What is logically possible obviously is a function of the logic and
psychology of the different times—and from the present and projected
future perspectives from which we can view all these temporal junctures.
I look back at Kant’s ideas, and extend this back farther to their
origin points in the formulations of Plato and Aristotle to gain leverage
for an understanding of Kant’s dilemmas. This would be an under-
standing that appreciates the dilemmas as a struggle and that folds in
the ancients’ attitude to the vagaries of mind. In short, for their cosmic
reach for all-inclusive explanation, reduction is not the way to cope
with the difficulties. My look back is from a present vantage point.
From there, I can view Kant in the light of Selz’s follow-up reaction to
the Kantian dilemmas and in light of the possibilities for interpretation

inherent in Selz’s reconfiguration of the schema. Moreover, to shed
light on both Kant and Selz, I include another angle of perspective:
Karl Popper’s (1949, 1959) way of thinking about the way logic flows
from ideas: the ideas become premises for a logic of ‘possible worlds.’
This is a way of looking at logic vis-à-vis the thinker’s conceptualiza-
tions. With it, one can gain a good deal of perspective on how it is and
how it could be successful and productive that Selz approached Kant’s
dilemmas in the way that he did. In specific, to reconstruct Selz from
the perspective of Popper’s ‘possible worlds,’ we have a tool that
makes it possible to use the unwieldy tools that Selz suggested to
make predictions from the schema. That reconstruction would be the
schema—re-schematized. Moreover, adding up the general strategy, it
appears that the ‘looking backwards reconstruction’ is a use of the
various loci in the historical flows of interpretation to gain perspectives
on how one thinker thinks about how another thinker thinks (cf.
Haydu (1998). A historical approach to the reconstruction of history
that is present for Selz and his time—and for ‘history’ not there
(missing) is going to require navigating between language displays of
any accessible text and context, and thoughts represented—either in
the history or in the historian. For such a complex of requirements,
Hayden White (1987) referred to a ‘semiological perspective.’ It
treats the text less as an effect of causes more basic or as a reflection,

however, refracted, of a structure more fundamental than as a complex
mediation between various codes by which reality is to be assigned possible
meanings. It seeks, first of all, to identify the hierarchy of codes that is
established in the process of the text's elaboration, in which one or more
emerge as seemingly self-evident, obvious, natural ways of making sense of
the world. (p. 202)
Aristotle’s Move to Thought as Art

Imagination mediates between sensation and thought. (Hammond on
Aristotle’s principle of life; 1902, p. 1vi)
Behind imagination is the ineffable—the workings and experience of

thought. Behind its workings, and behind their use to know things and
to solve problems, is thought itself. Behind thought is the idea. This
regress reflects a classical account of the reconciliation of two (of the
three) opposite—and possible—worlds, which Popper described (Popper,

1978). His World 2 is the thought about the objects we encounter. World
3 is made up of these thoughts distilled as ‘cognitive’ objects. World 2 is
not as observable as World 1, which consists of ‘physical bodies’—living
and not. World 3 is observable, but only within our subjective lenses.
Therefore, its representation does not guarantee the identity of its objects.
How then to obtain acceptable representation of the objects of thought?
The reconciliation is via a medium.
Mediating: Kant’s Schema as Mediator

Aristotle’s device for representing the un-representable is ‘imagination.’
Its function as a medium is as a depiction of a concept that is ‘pure’—
perhaps like Plato’s idea or form. Kant viewed this classical problem by
considering the case of a ‘pure concept’ . . . ‘one that is not abstracted from
experience’ (Kant, 2012/1800, p. 97). He reasoned that to make the
‘pure concepts . . . applicable to experiences’, ‘there must be some third
thing’ (Kant, 1787/1929). That would be a ‘mediating representation’
[which, itself,] ‘must be pure, that is, void of all empirical content, and yet
at the same time, while it must in one respect be intellectual, it must in
another be sensible. Such a representation is the transcendental schema.’
Kant fashioned his mediator as a means of representation that could take
the phenomenological into an observable world. As a mechanism by which
to achieve the reconciliation, it profoundly affects the scientific journey
into psychology’s dilemmas of idea versus reality and of the phenomen-
ological versus the observable. This mediating representation is the schema
—a ‘seminal idea’ Hanna (2014b) describes this way:
schemata are products of the faculty of imagination, and more specifically,

they are supplementary rules for interpreting general conceptual rules in
terms of more specific figural spatiotemporal forms and sensory images.
Now we come to my view of the present way in which the reductionist

versions of the schema need fundamental ‘re-schematization.’ In my
view, the schema concept has lost the mediating function. The schema
has been relegated to the representation of the observable. World 3 is
inscrutable and isolated as is World 2. It is sad that the ‘worlds’ are
separated.
The Schema’s Dynamic Potentials and Selz’s Objective

In this work, I depict an attempt to resuscitate the schema concept’s
potential to bridge the worlds. The attempt is specifically aimed at depict-
ing the concept’s relation to possibilities in the diagramming of psycholo-
gical spaces. These possibilities include accounting for what is included
within the spaces, and, as well, what is outside those inclusions, yet affect-
ing them.
Selz’s ideas, particularly his anticipatory schema concept (Selz, 1929,
1924; Frijda and De Groot, 1981), go upstream against the current that
has kept the ‘worlds’ apart and kept the concept of the schema as a
representation of the observables. His concept had been anticipated by
Bergson’s dynamic scheme idea that the thought process ‘does not contain
the images themselves, so much as the indication of what we must do to
reconstruct them’ (Bergson, 1902/1902, p. 196). This focus goes a
significant way toward a view of the schema that restores the role of
thought in relation to knowledge. The needed images are outside that
which is schematized. Yet, if the dynamic schema is thought, the outside
particulars are part of the picture. Hence, the schema diagrammed has
logical bounds within which some particulars are included. But the dia-
gram also includes an overall dynamic. The picture is completable iff the
particulars that are outside the prevailing logical bounds are accessible.
Inside those logical bounds is the accepted ‘world’—viz. all that makes
logical sense for the problem considered and for its spatio-temporal con-
texts. When our premise is that the picture we seek is a dynamic scheme,
the picture expands. In this dynamic state of affairs, those particulars
outside the logical bounds are also includable within the schema.
Selz’s concepts go even further in straddling the aims to account for
thought, knowing, and specifying parameters of information. Critically,
Selz not only proffers concepts like the ‘knowledge complex’; he also
builds that concept by way of the analogy structure.
The analogy format presents the opportunity and the power to establish
the inclusion of new combinations of particulars—combinations that are
ratio-based relations, which are coordinate in a ‘knowledge-complex.’
These combinations in their analogy format qualify as ‘mediating repre-
sentations.’ To argue more fully that Selz’s concepts would lead psychol-
ogists to another, richer, course in the development of mediating
representations, I present another word about the nature and role of the
mediating representation as a function and functor.
The Schema as a Mediating Representation

A mediator could be a space in which relationships of wildly different sorts
of objects are depicted and depictable. One such space is a William Blake
painting. In it, the range of thoughts and images that mark a concept of
the human being take on opposing primeval forms. More abstractly, a
mediating space can be a geometric device. Diagrams (schematics) can
include morphisms, taxonomic charts, logic diagrams, computer logic
gates, and semantic diagrams. Selz did not make a semantic feature grid
as a diagram for his ‘word association’ tasks and responses. For Selz, the
mediator is even more abstract. Algebraic symbols are used to link or
coordinate representations of objects—some known; some unknown;
some present; some projected to a future status.
Positioning in a diagram can show opposing logical relations. These
may be of the part/whole organization of concepts.
Part/Whole Reorganizations and Genus–Species Exchanges

The part/whole issue in this book is related to Selz’s idea that the schema
dynamically moves toward a ‘completion’ and toward the specification of
its ‘coordinate relations.’ Part/whole issues are not fully elaborated in this
work. However, note that the ‘part/whole’ relation is one of inclusion and
that the ordering of part-to-whole entails classification. Parts and wholes
are objects that can be distributed in a genus–species ordering that is
reversible. As we have seen, where the ordering relation is a function of
ratio-based comparisons, genus–species (inclusion) relations are exchange-
able. This exchange, brought about by these comparisons, and made by
way of analogy and analogical thinking, can result in the reversal of genus–
species inclusions: In the part/whole case, the part can include the whole.
Reversal of inclusion ordering can help to identify key particulars. These
may help to specify the method to solve a problem. As we have discussed,
where the inclusion ordering is exchangeable, we are dealing with order-
ing or classificatory reversals that can occur when the objects are related by
ratio. In short, such ‘genus–species’ exchangeabilities are the stuff of
metaphor—so particulars can be in the spotlight as jump off points for
the identification of the specifics needed for a cognitive object. Fernandez
(1991, pp. 145–158) compares this way of categorizing to thinking by
synecdoche. An example in art is Escher’s (1935) ‘Hand with Reflecting
Sphere.’ The ‘hand’ having become the object ‘including’ the whole
(the artist, artist’s hand, and the ‘world’ it holds) becomes an object that
helps the thinker make another analogy to find a particular to solve the
recursion dilemma. This is an example of the need for a concept of—or
version of—depiction (and diagramming) that provides for an outside
(agent-like) factor. In the Escher example, the viewer or the thinker is
there—at the least by way of a work of art that exists in the light of the
viewer’s agentive attributions. All this is not merely a matter of poetry and
synecdoche. I am arguing that the same is the case for diagramming.
Analogy Progression, Refinement of Particulars, and New

Possible Worlds for Diagrams
In the ‘hands’ of the thinker, there can emerge a process of shaping and
‘completing’ a schema. Here is how that process works: The thinker, in her
mode of analogical thinking, engages progressions of analogy to refine the
particulars. That process engages a language and logic of progressive ratios.
These are to refine the equivalences of the ratio-based comparisons and
thus render their selected particulars more relevant to the thinker’s chosen
specific problems. The refined particulars then appear in the ‘anticipatory
schema.’
Diagramming would expand—not only to accommodate the different
possible worlds, but also to follow the need for the thinker’s access to its
prägnanz (‘good form’ or the fulfillment of a best form). We thus strive to
come closer to the specification of a schema that elucidates a ‘knowledge
complex.’ In specific regard to the dynamic development of the schema,
placing cognitive objects at different levels—and exchanging the ordering of
these objects in their genus–species relation to each other—affects the para-
meters needed for the diagramming of the relations of the objects. It expands
the possibilities and opens possible worlds. This is critical for locating just
where, in a changeable classification architecture, criterial particular relations
would be situated. These are sought for the thinker’s or scientist’s work of
assessing or imputing target analogical ratio relations and for assigning
logical identity to terms and relations. By ‘target’ ratios, Selz apparently
meant those that would solve a given problem. However, in a larger sense,
he was after a path to the completion of a knowledge complex.
This book presents the issue of classificatory exchange as a dynamic
process. It occurs in analogy, analogical thinking, and the development of
the cognitive objects in the anticipatory schema. In this section, we have
considered the part-whole relation as one accessible to the advantages of
thinking with options of classificatory exchange. To follow up on part-

whole ordering and its analysis, see Varzi (2016). He catalogs part-whole
(mereological) relations—particularly in regard to classificatory ordering.
Also see Keet’s Figure 2 (Keet, 2006, p. 16), which is labeled ‘Taxonomy
of basic mereological and meronymic part-of relations.’ It includes ‘struc-
tural part-of’ and ‘functional part-of.’
Diagramming to Show Oppositions and to Make

Dynamic Resolutions
Diagrams can show the oppositions of inclusion versus exclusion. A property
may be included or excluded from a class. Thus, the inclusion-exclusion
opposition may be shown in the relation of a property to a class. A
predicate may entail its conclusion, or it may exclude it. This inclusion-
exclusion opposition may also be diagrammed in a conclusion’s relation
to a predicate. With a diagram we have a powerful rendition of a schematic
for logical relations. With its possible representations, we can venture
forth and gain perspective and insight by showing the place and function
of logical oppositions as basic as inclusion and exclusion. A mediator
becomes a wonderful device that can bring about sense when there is
contradiction. To gain leverage on the role of a mediator, we can use the
diagram. It goes far into the origin and wide into the meaning of a
‘mediating’ representation.
A mediator can take the form of an abstraction marking a logical
class that includes opposites as subclasses. Thus, you can have the
class, ‘citizen politicians.’ It includes as subclasses, the ‘opposites’ of
Democrats and Republicans. The class, ‘citizen politicians,’ not only
can include both, but also can bring about agreement when there is this
opposition. Another mediating function of this move to an abstract class
is to bring about form from the absence of form. Where there was a
dynamic preventing the particulars from relating to each other, with the
abstract class, there is a classificatory ordering with logical rules for
‘coordinate relations.’ Such a mediator seems almost to devolve into the
mechanical in that it is (has become) a form and it has rules. As such it is a
device. Its classificatory rules construct and produce its form, and they
provide for its functions—identity and replicability. In this sense, the
classificatory rules bring about a device. But as such, the device, in turn,
makes another device. It too is a form, has a set of rules, and functions.
Thus, It defines the bounds of objects and their relations, such as patterns
of action and outcome in spatio-temporal contexts.
IS THE DEVICE A TOUR DE FORCE OR A TROMPE L’OEIL?

Can an abstraction or abstract set of rules mediate a psychological
experience and its products? It would appear intellectually satisfying
to have that mediator in the form of a device, when a mediating
representation allows, if not instigates, a depiction of the non-physical
or non-observable—or a transition from the unknown to the known.
So, if a new idea to solve a problem appears to require ‘imagination’ as
the mediator, it might be an intellectual tour de force to codify it.
That might be a matter of representing it, such that a computer could
display and levy ‘imagination’ to resolve problems. Breault et al.
(2013) investigate computer imagination as a program to create
novel images. Such a program is after all, a representation—perhaps a
linguistic one. If a schema were not merely a representation, but also
some version of thought or its cognitive experience, there would be a
factor inevitably outside any codification. With the computer program
approach, the picture is of and by a set of representations. That set is a
world closed off from the thought presumably being represented. In a
word, this presents ‘double trouble’—a mediator should presumably
represent the unrepresentable. However, if itself merely a representa-
tion, the mediator does not appear to engage thought. This dilemma
deepens. If we were to go the other way, and we conceived the
mediator qua thought, we would get mired in a series of ideas about
cognitive objects that conflict with scientific observability.
Poets and psychologists flesh out such concepts of thought that mediate
thought. Take two examples of a mediator as thought. ‘Conscience’ is a
‘mediator device.’ Shakespeare used it with a broad brush to explain the
hold we place on daring. We cannot see it—except as a phantasm. Perhaps
‘conscience’ is predicated upon what Kant would call ‘pure concepts.’ If so,
it would not represent anything; nor would it be a representation open to
observation. On the other hand, Freud’s device—the ‘superego’—
explained not only the hold on our thought due to guilt, but also the
struggle with other devices of one’s agency. Thus, it does not leave World
3 entangled inchoately with World 2. That is because the ‘agency’s’ func-
tions are assigned, such that the ‘Superego’ is not purely pure. Its origins
may be observable in a process of internalizing the voice of the other
(Church, 1991), and its effects manifested in social patterns. Still, it has its
own space, even as an ‘inner voice’ that may not be consciously observable.
‘Conscience’ and ‘superego’ are powerfully explanatory concepts. They
appear to mediate between their representational function and unobservable
thought. But scientists have trouble researching and demonstrating them.
We all have trouble grabbing on to such mediators and locating—if
not diagramming—their roles and functions so that we can employ,
direct, or predict their actions. Thinking about these ways (or devices)
of thinking and, in general, thinking about thinking takes a great leap
upward to imagination—if for no other reason than that we are using
imagination as a ‘mediating representation’ to grasp for mediating
representations!
In Search of Kant’s Schema as ‘Knowledge’: Schemas,

Mediators, and the Need for Rationality
All that dilemma is enough to make imagination and the mediating
representation (1) difficult to integrate as cognitive objects within Kant’s
idea of the schema as knowledge, and (2) difficult to depict (and/or
diagram) as a schema. There is yet another major hurdle. Knowledge is
predicated on the logical identity of objects. It is alluring to consider
thought not to be per se an object, but instead, a process. Still, to know
about that process is to come down to earth so that we can know it as an
object. Is the schema not also an object, even if we picture it as ‘some-
thing’ that contains objects? To have a concept of the schema that accom-
modates objects that have logical identity is surely a ‘possible world.’ To
have a concept of a schema is to know about it, but it is also know what it is
not. So it too is an object that has a logical identity along with a concept of
the schema’s products. We would need some idea that the schema’s
products or displays refer to objects in a stable and rational way. They
too would have to be logically identifiable objects, if we are to include
knowledge as one of the two Kantian functions and outcomes of the
schema. To include knowledge of the schema itself, our thinking about
it would need to refer to it as an identifiable object—even one with orders
of changeability. We are left with a dilemma of ‘aboutness.’ As we think
‘about’ each level of inclusion we expand to another level of inclusion.
If that level reaches the status of ‘knowledge,’ it does so only by going
‘outside’ the last boundary of knowledge or at least outside any schema
that diagrams its form.
THE SCHEMA’S LOGIC VERSUS IMAGINATION TRAVAIL

Objects—at whatever level of recursion—would need logical identity; their
relations would need a rational structuring. But, if imagination is involved,
thought and its pursuit appear to fall short of rationality. With imagination,
knowledge is of knowledge impugned: With Magritte’s famous challenging
depiction (‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’!) neither the object depicted, nor the
depiction may be known as a representation of itself. When imagination
focuses a proposition ‘If A; then B’; it can be declaimed—‘Well, maybe not.’
A would not have a relation with B, such that you can count on A as having a
specific identity. Maybe ~A can have the same relation with B. Maybe, ‘If A;
then B.’ Maybe, If ~A; then B. Maybe both. Concomitantly, with imagina-
tion involved, we fall short of a clear cause-effect phenomenon. Maybe the
idea ‘A causes B’ obtains only from a certain perspective—one that distorts
the facts! Therefore, the schema, reduced to a guiding map of a situation in
which A causes B—even if that map includes contingent or feeder events—
is a much truncated version of Kant’s vision of the schema as a mediating
representation—one that can navigate the oppositions of thought ‘versus’
knowledge. I do not argue that reduction was the path chosen without
good cause. The problem of the coexisting observable and phenomenolo-
gical ‘worlds’ is a head-spinner! Can you have a sensible idea of a schema
that can serve to hold logic together and yet watch it move apart?
POSSIBLE IMPOSSIBILITIES FOR A MEDIATING FUNCTION

TO THE SCHEMA
I would be remiss if I did not point this out. The Kantian idea of the
schema as ‘mediating’ runs into a classical problem with the need for a
logical identity. It would be needed not only for the particulars the schema
‘mediates,’ but also for the idea of the schema itself. After all, particulars
are cognitive objects; but so are ideas of particulars. This classical need for
logical identity at different classification levels has costs. Possible worlds
are closed off and possible mediations stymied.
Meta-logic Is Not Enough for New Possibilities

If the schema ‘mediates’ the identity of objects—and mediates what con-
stitutes knowing—then, its ‘logic of possible worlds’ is a meta-logic that
presumably sustains contradiction in the following bottom-line way: This
meta-logic has its own set of major propositions. They systematically posit
a consistent acceptance of a dynamic state within which these major
propositions can be ineluctably contradictory. Consider as the meta-
logic’s overall proposition that: ‘Since all worlds are logically possible,
then it is not possible that they are not.’ And, then, that denial of
possibility—negative as it is—can rise to the level of rendering the total
proposition not possible. Reductionists simply do not like a ‘no exit’
circular treadmill. Accordingly, some accommodation is needed to provide
a neo-Kantian view of the schema an escape from the exercise wheel, yet, a
dynamic return to a logical stasis. I suggest that the dynamics of
the situation require that diagramming a schema take into account an
‘outside’ factor.
KANT’S VIEW OF THE SCHEMA
The Two Versions of Knowledge: Thought and Language

Kant’s view of the schema is in the tradition of Aristotle, who shared the
use of Plato’s concept of phantasia (White, 1985). For Aristotle, this
referred to the inner experience of things—their reflection and inner
representation. ‘The faculty of thinking . . . by means of the images or
thoughts which are within the soul, just as if it were seeing, . . . calculates
and deliberates what is to come by reference to what is present’ (Aristotle,
Part 7, On the soul. See also Frede, 1992; White, 1985, p. 488). His
additions to Plato’s concept focus capabilities that are ‘“receptive and
reproductive,” as in perception, or creative and productive, as in fantasies
or the kind of “thinking out” that uses images’ (Cocking, 2005/1991,
pp. 13–20). Hammond (1902, p. 1vi) views these functions as ‘the power
of using images of absent objects.’ I mark them as an ‘Aristotelian device,’
which can culminate in representations and a set of capabilities. It is the
forerunner of Kant’s ideas of the powers of the schema.
Aristotle’s idea is in two parts—the ‘thinking out’ and its product images.
Thinking is located in subjective seclusion—a scientific nightmare. The
product images can be represented and shared—a scientific desideratum.
To get these two parts that are critical to the schema both working has been
and remains a harder slog than to take sides. Where a theorist presents
concepts showing both realms to be (or that show promise to be) aligned
in the pursuit of a scientific depiction, it is a remarkable achievement.
As Kant presents the schema it is linked to knowledge. The link is

primary. It may be by forms and representations, but insofar as these
can entail or produce knowledge, they would involve thought and the
need to represent it. With thought behind the curtain, Kant’s schema
is not simply a formatting for the observable or representable—qua
information and/or language. Instead, the schema is a dynamic form
that accommodates the relational coordinates of thought. From this
status, Kant’s schema idea divides into two versions. The first is knowl-
edge-as-thought. The second is knowledge-as-language—or more gen-
erally, representation in information.
Major thinkers in psychology—Bartlett, Craik, and Piaget—have taken
on the job of defining a ‘schema.’ Each of these contributors to the
psychologist’s use of the concept appears well aware of the legacy of
Kant’s premise that the schema is a ‘pre-structuring.’ It relates to knowl-
edge—both as thinking and as representation (of informational compo-
nents). The legacy’s continuing fate is that these components and
therefore their relations are not fully articulated. Pendelbury (1995)
describes the linkages as insecure for the two cognitive components affect-
ing thinking and its representation. Component (1): Pre-structuring
thinking functions, presumably instrumental to the schema’s transforma-
tion from unconscious functioning to a conscious application to the
thinker’s intention. Component (2): Thinking and representation func-
tions, presumably instrumental for conceptualizing, categorizing, and
representing. From Pendelbury’s perspective, the issue for psychology is
that thought has a number of unconscious determinants and these are
‘pre-structuring’ for the conscious version of the schema. If thought is the
object of the psychologist’s query, there is an inaccessible function and
effect unknown—and presumably unknowable—that contributes to its
role in a schema. Selz places the unknown within specific schematic
patterns. These patterns represent known factors, but they also lead to
the resolution of those unknown factor(s) that would compete the ‘knowl-
edge complex’ relative to a selected problem. In sum, the unconscious
contribution of thought becomes an unknown. By analogy it can be
compared to a known equivalent factor. The yield is a known factor, an
equivalent for the unknown. The unconscious contribution to the schema
is thus transformed so that it becomes an analog that now can appear in a
‘schema’ and replace the ‘unknown’ factor that had appeared in an antici-
patory schema.
A DEVICE WITH INACCESSIBLE ORIGINS

To describe how intrinsic the schema is to the person’s thinking, Kant
(1787/1929, p. 183) located its originating, forming, and affecting of
thought deep in the ‘soul.’ That site and its functions are inaccessible
—except in their inevitable impact on our images, concepts, and
categorizations. The schema is inherent but not an understanding in
itself. Instead, it is a medium. It acts as a template and can have
operative rules for transaction between the two distinct powers of
cognition Kant conceived: These are (1) our representations in images,
concepts, and (2) categories and understanding (Rohlf, 2014).
Thus, by way of ‘forms that structure our experience of the sensible
world’ (Rohlf’s description), we can apply our concepts and categories ‘to
any object’ (Kant, 1787/1929, p. 182). Kant sees the capacity of under-
standing and its outcome as ‘a product of imagination’ (p. 182). He views
this as a sequence in the complex relationship from which we build under-
standing. Rastovic (2013, p 10) depicts the sequence as
the imagination—the schema (categories + appearance)—image (look)
VIEWS OF THE SCHEMA THAT TAKE IT FROM AN ART

TO AN ACCESSIBLE FORM
I believe that the work of a creative artist is more closely related to the goal-
directed work of a scholar or scientist than is generally assumed. The general
strategies of productive activity operate in all fields. (Seebohn, 1981; tr of
Otto Selz’s professional opinion questionnaire.)
The Art of the Soul in Unconscious Thought and the Cognitive

Transformations to Accessible Schema
While unconscious factors and components can be transformed, there still
remains the issue of unconscious determination of capacities, such as the
capacity for and the form and format for analogical thinking—and for
other cognitive formats or patterns of comparison, grouping, logic and
computation. In short, these are the logical and psychological phenomena
of forming and re-forming an object of thought, whether focused as the
thought, itself, or as an object of that thought.
The schema may be as primary as an unconscious ‘given’ template by

which to picture (imagine) and identify objects. It is a wide-ranging orga-
nizer; it can account for forms of objects as things and as actors in relation
to other objects (Pendlebury, 1995). There are schemas that account for
objects, the concepts of objects, and their categories as well as their exten-
sions. The schema provides for an unconscious set of rules governing the
apprehension of any cognitive object. That object may be a thing, a con-
cept, and a category. It may be an object of thought, which describes events
in an action or time space. ‘Cause’ can be defined as a position in a
relationship. Such a concept is abstract, although it can be spatio-temporal.
However, like a thing, or a class of things, or a class of relationships, it is also
an object of thought. We can say there are schemas of cause and of the
objects subsumed within the phenomena of cause. Kant’s idea of the
schema is broad enough to include such generic and specific references to
observable events, their relations, and their interactions. This is great
breadth for the representation of meanings of objects and of their relations
in time and space. This representation in time and space diagrammatically
provides the information pattern for an object → action → outcome
sequence version of the schema.
Schema as Language and Its Direct Route

to Information
Kant’s ‘second version’ of the schema is as a language. This version’s claim
would be that information could represent knowledge of and by the schema.
This schema concept culminates in its role as a template for representing and
mediating outcomes and the production of information. These functions are
presently evident and central in cybernetics, cognitive science, AI, and AL
investigations and products and robotology (Gärdenfors, 2004; Brewer,
1999b; Weitzenfeld et al., 1998; D’Andrade, 1995; Lakoff, 1987; Casson,
1983; Rumelhart, 1980). In these enterprises, language and knowledge
combine to appear as information. Objects, such as ‘cause’ are information
patterns. They are accessible not merely to intuitive causal patterns (as if,
templates), but to a specification of these patterns as conscious diagrammatic
displays. The schema, transformed from the Kantian status of a deep
inaccessible origin, has become a particularly accessible form to present,
represent, reconfigure, and predict information patterns. To underscore
the significance of this transformation would require more of a history
than this book undertakes. However, the dramatic difference of the
contemporary view from Kant’s vision is apparent if I leapfrog to a clear

instance characterizing the transformation. Again, this is a way of under-
standing that how we presently think colors how we look back at Kant. This
is Haydu’s (1998) point about how to look at the phenomena of another era
by understanding how we think when we do the looking.
Picturing Kant from the Perspectives of Concepts of the Past

and of Concepts that Are Presently Influential
Kant is the pivot point not only for the different contemporary versions of
the schema but also for his fundamental, yet unresolved views of the
schema. These are of the schema as knowledge-as-thought, on one
hand, and as knowledge-as-language—or more generally, representation
in information—on the other. We pivoted to the origins of this concept in
Plato and Aristotle. The idea of phantasia set the groundwork for these
components, but it also set their difficult to resolve issues in perspective.
To go to the streamlined logical form of the schema as it influences
present-day thought and psychology, we do the leapfrog again—to a
more contemporary locus, viz. to the ‘frame’ concept (See Appendix A,
An Example of Perspectives on Perspectives).
At the height of the excitement about the potentialities of AI, the
cybernetic term frame crystallized. As a concept, it specifies the form,
format, and function of the schema—all focused to depict knowledge as
information about objects and their relations in the ensuing context of
psychology. To characterize this—as it has become the present and ubi-
quitous perspective on the schema concept—I look to Marvin Minsky’s
(1975, 1974) influential idea of the ‘frame’ (see particularly, Brewer,
1999b; also, Emmott and Alexander, 2014/2011). Let’s understand
how Minsky’s thinking is shaped. His idea did not come out of nowhere.
He built his ‘frame’ concept on the ideas of Bartlett, who along with the
other major thinkers, advanced influential definitions of the ‘schema.’
Kant had not clearly pinned down his comprehensive view. It included
that the schema is a ‘pre-structuring,’ that it relates to knowledge, but that
it also relates to thinking. Nor was that idea of the schema’s relation to
thinking given an articulated place or role in the schema concept by those
who converted (or reduced) to the ‘knowledge as language’ or ‘knowl-
edge as information’ view. That status of a floating component and vague
function is reason enough to try to see what Selz’s view would mean if it
were to replace the set of theoretical ideas that led to the frame and its
reductions. This is the challenge, which if an ordinary one, would simply

be for a link for an empirical chain. But, for the reasons given, Selz’s work
itself is not only abstract; it is skeletal and truncated. The jump-off ideas to
search should still be those from Kant’s envisioning. So, I will go further
to make Kant’s challenge more explicit and show the distance created and
reinforced by the currently accepted major thinkers in the next sections.
WITHIN, BETWEEN, AND OUTSIDE INFORMATION’S GRASP

Kant had gone as far to the inaccessible as to say, ‘This schematism of our
understanding is an art conceived in the depths of the human soul’ (Kant,
1787/1929, p. 183). ‘Art’ as method is problematic enough for science.
Even more fundamentally troubling than a question of method is access to
the source—the ‘deep’ level of the soul-affecting thought. If that source
were inherent to the nature of the schema, it would not be scientifically
accessible—except in its impact on our images, concepts, and categoriza-
tions. It would always be back a step from our grasp. We can presumably
configure with it, but not configure it. The questions that Kant left open
for science are elemental—and they had antagonistic cores.
The schema might be cast as a medium between understanding and our
representations in images and concepts. The schema’s mode for represent-
ing understanding is as a template that can have operational rules. These
make possible a particular kind of representation, namely, a diagram. It can
account for loci for identifiable transactions and transitions. Insofar as it can
represent and present these accounts, these diagrammatic versions of a
schema would represent an understanding. This function requires relating
the representations to the cognitive phenomena of understanding. When
achieved, this represented understanding is very powerful. With it, we can
apply our concepts and categories ‘to any object’ (Kant, 1787/1929,
p. 182). How does this powerful capability come about? The presence of
the schema’s template with its rules makes possible the schema’s function as
a medium. As such, the schema’s capacity is summative. It features spatio-
temporal rules and their geometric form. These can be diagrammed. The
products displayed not only can represent an understanding, but also can
relate it to an outcome. Still, that outcome requires another cognitive
capability—the identification of objects and their relation to each other.
As Kant views the schema’s function, it has a capacity and an outcome. Each
is a ‘product of imagination’ (p. 182)—a cognitive function. By its deploy-
ment, the schema articulates a space that mediates (⇆) between an
understanding (U) and its representation (R). Knowledge (K) is the result.
This can be symbolized: (U ⇆ R) ≡ (K). An example would be this: the
knowledge that a person understands can be a function of her visualization
of a pragmatic representation, viz., her list of the possible steps to solving a
problem. However, the representation can be at various levels of abstrac-
tion, symbolization, and distance from concept to application.
The way Selz uses his imagination is to invoke an abstraction. ‘X’ becomes
an unknown. It can be placed in a relation to a ‘known’ factor, or juxtaposed
to it via an analogy to that known factor (as Wenzl, 1928 describes Selz’s
formulation). The analogy is an understanding of a relationship. That under-
standing can be put into the form of a logical or an inductive relation. The
schema sets in motion a space for a sequence like ‘action → outcome.’ This
dynamic space, as a medium, further articulates the relation of its phenom-
ena at three loci or nodes: the understanding, its representation—say by an
abstraction—and an outcome of that configuration. The outcome becomes
a relation of (1) a representation of the problem, (2) of knowledge of
possible steps to solve it, and (3) the evaluation of applying the steps.
Kant’s groundwork is there for the two aspects of knowledge—thought
and language. This two-factor view can be traced through the historical
development and transformation of his schema concept. Even so, the
historical trend is toward a ‘scientifically friendly’ version, such that a
‘schema’ can be a specifiable format. To achieve that goal, but also account
for thought and representation, is a route with all sorts of obstacles, as
theorists travel from acknowledgement of the ineffable experience of
thought to the scientific preoccupation—viz., specifying a tool to direct
and configure it. Bordwell (1989) attempts to incorporate aspects of
Kant’s view of the schema (knowledge as thought) as a phenomenological
representation. He argues that Kant applied his seminal schema concept
‘to both the knowledge structure itself (conceived, it would appear, pri-
marily as a mental image) and [to] the rule or procedure by which the
mind produces and uses such structures’ (pp. 136–138).
The Road to the ‘Frame’ Is Paved with Good Intentions of Pressing

Kant’s Views into Sciences of Mind
The big logical and psychological conundrum Kant flagged is that the
schema’s form as a ‘tool’ will have its design emanating from an uncon-
scious source—or that deep locus in the soul. The tool would be a copy of
the design, which would be a copy of an original—which would be
unconscious. So, at the least, the tool would be like a copy of a copy, and
hence would take us only part of the way to the schema as an identifiable
object. Nor did that Kantian recursion issue completely disappear in the
great re-interpretations of the schema. One of the most influential,
Bartlett’s (1932), offers this definition: ‘“Schema” refers to an active
organisation of past reactions, or of past experiences’ (p. 201).
Bartlett’s view also becomes a copy-of-a-copy affair. With his approach,
the copying is in steps. 1. He ties the schema to the encoding of memory
(Gureckis and Goldstone, 2010). So, the schema is a copy (a coded one) of
memory—which is a copy of an experience. 2. He could get a ‘generic’
sense of the ‘schema’s’ operations and form by comparing the ‘specific’
schemas of the individual’s memory to each other (Wagoner, 2013). In
that step, the coded copy (a species level) is compared to the copy (con-
ceptually at a more generic level). With the idea of levels of code, the
schema is de-codable, displayable, and therefore conceptualized as infor-
mation. Still, there is the fly in the ointment. Brewer (1999a, p. 66)
highlights Bartlett’s proposal that ‘much of human knowledge consists
of unconscious mental structures that capture the generic aspects of the
world.’ That view leaves the source in ‘thought’ as a factor outside infor-
mation. In sum, the Bartlett schema remains fundamentally elusive.
If thought were specifiable as organizational functions, the schema’s
patterns would help to observe and predict how we organize knowledge.
However, the organization of thought is by way of unconscious forms—
and as Bartlett appeared aware, we can only advance part way to the
construction of the schema as a tool. We can predict how we may organize
knowledge, but not necessarily control, change it, or use it to create new
forms for new knowledge. In sum, encoding produces a copy, and mem-
ory is also a copy of some part, or even whole object. The original remains
elusive or unconscious and inaccessible. So it goes for ‘thought.’
MAJOR VIEWS OF THE SCHEMA

This mediating representation must be pure, that is void of all empirical
content, and yet at the same time, while it must in one respect be intellec-
tual, it must in another be sensible. Such a representation is the transcen-
dental schema. (Kant, 1787/1929, a 138, p. 181)
Kant’s direct challenge to making the schema accessible to empirical

representation is the clear start point for tracking the attempts to
transform the idea to the status of a form. A complete step-by-step history

of the transformation of the concept is not the immediate purpose here.
I only identify a few of the major views as they relate to the bifurcation of
Kant’s concept and its form as the debate, ‘Is the schema a structure of
thought or of knowledge’?
EXCHANGE OF DILEMMAS
From Kant’s Dilemma—Distance Between Thought
and Representation—To the Present-Day
Dilemma—The Regression of Origins
When a person can specify that a thought A led him to a thought B, it
becomes possible to represent this in many ways including abstract sym-
bolizing and also diagrammatic presentations. However, the distance
between thought and representation gets to be impassible because of the
inaccessibility of unconscious determinants of thinking, its forms, and its
experience. Piaget took on this issue in his attempt at a schema concept
(1926, 1952; also see Kohler, 2008). In his attempt, Piaget braved the
issue of a mind-structure—and its essentially unconscious determinants.
His view was that the structure’s epigenesis is a combination of genetic
and environmentally adaptive influences on structural change. In this, the
changes in the forms and structures of logical thought are not in the hands
of the conscious thinker. Nor is the change in a schema going to vary
during a developmental phase merely as does the particularity and newness
of a problem. Yet, knowledge is going to involve change. Piaget conceived
knowledge, itself, ‘both structurally and dynamically as a kind of schematic
action or schema’ (1971, p. 95). The schema’s logical rules will have
developmentally matured. The semiotic range for organizing particulars
and their assignment to classes or categories would therein be a matter of
the stage of the formal system. At the mature stage, logical and symbolic
transformations will have become capabilities for new ways of organizing
and affecting objects and their relations (cf. Zlatev, 2007, p. 322).
Structure and Dynamics: Contraries in the Interaction

of the Schema and Knowledge
Bartlett—and Craik, too—also attempted to deal with the problem of
change in the face of a commitment to the schema as a knowledge structure.
Bartlett (1932, p. 206) saw the person ‘using one schema in order to check
the action of another schema.’ There appears some level of a conscious act
there—an act of comparison. The act would be extrinsic to the more basic
generative function one would want inherently accessible in a form. That
basic function might be to form and identify a cognitive object, its inner
nature, and its place and function in spatio-temporal sequences. If the
schema is merely a schema in comparison with an ‘other’ schema, then,
isn’t Bartlett’s resolution of the schema, as a ‘knowledge structure,’ a regress
problem? That is, with all the comparisons you make to conceptualize the
schema’s nature, you continue to need more cases to constitute your aggre-
gate of the schema. Of course, this ‘completed’ collection of cases becomes a
definition of the schema as ‘turtles all the way down.’ If we insert a structural
assumption, it would presumably solve matters. So, assume the basic func-
tion is that of the analogy format. Then, all the comparisons flow from that
format (or form). Alas, we have just substituted one dilemma for another.
We’re either back to the Kantian problem of pre-formism, or we have
analogy to look at as an unconscious way of thinking.
Craik (1943, p. 57) is another theorist, who would like to move the
schema concept to the status of a scientific tool. By casting thought as its
representation, he uses that reduction to resolve (or perhaps discard) the
question of change of thought by thought. He divides the ‘process of
thinking or reasoning into . . . steps . . . [and] representation of thinking by
symbols, calculation, and retranslation into events.’ Both the process steps
and the outcomes are representations. This reduction presents a manifold
of regresses. If we stay with the idea of steps, it is of one step to another.
A representation can be at a given stage (say, of abstraction). Then, there
are more steps to more stages. (Steps all the way down? Stages all the way
down?) Consider this approach a conversion of thought into information;
and then, a matter of linguistic or semiotic forms by which to process that
information. These ‘forms’ are merely choices. They too have different
sorts of representations as outcomes at different points in the process. One
type of form would be a representation for choosing other representations.
Later on, this sort of ‘process and choice point’ approach emerges, fully
formed. It is Minsky’s (1986) concept of the ‘agent’ (Esnaola and
Smithers, 2006). Is Minsky’s ‘agent’ concept that of an outside factor? If
the agent is ultimately a matter of information about information, then it
appears that skirting around the divide between thought and representa-
tion has simply advanced what we can do with the idea of the schema as a
tool by saying that the agent is a tool. How far does that take us from
Kant’s challenges? When we look at his challenges to account for thought

and for its immediate access to knowledge, the specifics are behind a
curtain. In front of it, is his view of knowledge—but that which is open
to view is a regress of representations: ‘Judgment is . . . the mediate knowl-
edge of an object, that is the representation of a representation of it’ (Kant,
1787/1929, B 93 p. 105).
Craik set in motion a multilayered, but essentially ‘psycho-mechanical’
process of representations (cf. Johnson-Laird, 2004). He (1943, pp. 59, 61)
conceptualizes a ‘small scale model’ not only for ‘external reality’ but also for
the organism’s ‘own possible actions’—processes, including those of
thought. An external object or action sequence can have a specific replicable
representation of objects and their relations. This is mechanical—but this
feature repeats the regress problem of ‘representation of representations.’
Not only is the processing of representations mechanically predictable. The
rules they follow—and the thinker’s choice of those rules—are also ‘mechan-
ical’—viz., pre-determined and predictable. The small-scale model appears
like a schema; while the processing rules resemble a compact targeted pro-
cess. The targeted ‘compact’ processing rules are much like the ‘frame’ and
‘script’ versions of schemas, namely, structures of information that represent
information and reflect a more generic sequence of action and outcome.
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION: IT’S TURTLES

AS
ALL THE WAY DOWN!
We arrive at a seminal point of the present-day resolution to Kant’s concept
of the schema’: Minsky’s ‘frame,’ which he presents as a concept of ‘knowl-
edge representation.’ He defines it this way: ‘A frame is a data-structure for
representing a stereotyped situation’ which he specifies to be a ‘network of
nodes’ (1974). These ‘networks’ are, as diagrammable loci, versions of
schemata. Thus, Kant’s focus remains central: ‘Indeed it is schemata, not
images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible objects’ (Kant, 1787/
1929, p. 182; A141). However, in Minsky’s hands, knowledge is not only
represented by—but also becomes—information. His ‘frame’ concept is
complemented by Schank’s ‘script’ idea, viz., ‘a structure that describes
an appropriate sequence of events in a particular context’ (Schank and
Abelson, 1975, p. 151). The sequence is of actions and their effects. The
‘script’ offers ‘organised sequences of stereotypical actions’ (Ramirez,
1997) The result is information specifically representing producible inputs
and outcomes. These can be reproduced as schematic routines. Minsky’s

frame was a way to represent knowledge; the script could represent knowl-
edge in and of action. Each of these devices to organize representations
contributes to making machines intelligent. Representations thereby
empower the AI program (Brewer, 1999a).
Kant’s Logical Dilemmas and the AI Concepts

Kant’s dilemmas, if unreduced, lead to more than one possible world. This
sounds good, but it is Kant’s legacy that the possibilities clash. The
different worlds offer competing representations and predicates that
make for an uncomfortable set of antinomies and dilemmas. They mark
the different realities of thought and its relation to knowledge as these
inhere in the Kantian schema. They block psychology from investigating
its own concepts. To deal with the roadblocks, the AI agenda takes the
investigation of the schema vis-à-vis the dilemmas of thought and knowl-
edge down a reductive path.
However, to optimize that agenda, the reduction must entail an infinite
regress. It is manageable—but a master concept, although still a represen-
tation, has to be invoked to exercise hegemony over a line of representa-
tions. That master concept is ‘information.’ With it, by it, the regress of
representations comes to a stop. At that point, it is a world within which
there is no possible world it cannot contain. The question of what that
master universal, ‘information,’ does represent forms an impossible circle
leading back to itself or to an infinity therein. More modestly, the Kantian
idea of a generic schema can be reduced to the specifics of object and
process representations, depicted in the AI-friendly concepts of the ‘frame’
and the ‘script.’ All these representations would be particularized as infor-
mation that constitutes the Kantian schema’s form, contents, and
dynamics. This is a compression of Kant’s schema.
On the other hand, Ekholm and Fridqvist (1998) cast a dynamic infor-
mation system in a way that appears to optimize the differences between the
Kantian schema and the frame and script. The schema is an overarching
form, which they refer to as a ‘meta-schema.’ The frame and the script are
derivative applications to more specific phenomena. Relative to an informa-
tion system, ‘Through developing a meta-schema that defines and relates
classes that only indirectly and in a generic way refer to the domain of
discourse, it is possible to create a dynamic modelling system’ (p. 6). The
frame and the script appear to qualify as ‘dynamic modeling systems.’ With
the frame, ‘the user is free to create new classes and to reclassify model
objects between all classes, predefined and new, during modelling’ (p. 5).
However, the script may be dynamic only after the fact. After a given
routine is established and known, a ‘script’ is assigned. It is then a specific
prescription to handle different instances of a routine of specific objects,
actions, and outcomes. Presumably, even if the ‘choice’ is mechanically
determined; the range of choices can expand. Thus, if a metal screw is
required for a tightening operation, a binding plastic that had not been
invented when the original script requirements were routinized may work as
well. That material and its processing may require a whole new script. The
programmer, as an agent, can make such substitutions. So can a pro-
grammed ‘agent.’ Its governance functions include making choices and
specific assignments. (Minsky, 1986, in his prologue conceptualizes a
‘scheme’ ‘made up of . . . “minds”’—which he calls ‘agents.’)
Thus, the dynamics of the schema as an information system (that
includes various forms of dynamic subschematics) accommodates change-
ability as well as change agents and change patterns. Ergo, the entire
information system ‘substitutes’ for thought. We may say the information
system that includes changeability, change agents, and change patterns
constitutes a ‘knowledge complex.’ (That is Selz’s term. I invoke it here to
show the different lines of the Kantian schema issues as they set the stage
for Selz’s concerns and reappear in the potentialities for and the obstacles
to his concepts.)
In all, the reductive approach, capped off by Minsky’s contribution to
the schema, appears empowered to represent and replicate objectives and
outcomes. With Minsky’s agents built-in, we can equate a ‘super-frame’
(one that has hierarchized levels of object assignment and relations) with a
Kantian generic schema. It becomes one integrable information system.
Then, what is knowledge? It is reflected by diagrammatic representations—
forms of information that contain and display information—including
information about selecting and assigning new information. In all, an
information matrix. Since the information has to make sense either to a
computer or to a person, we come face-to-face with the struggle entailed in
depicting thought as ineluctably tied to some linguistic approach to mean-
ing and representation. (The diagram would appear to simultaneously
qualify as a linguistic representation and as information.) In that case, we
do not go back to a dead-end concept of the transcendental schema,
functioning in virtue of some pre-formism. A scientifically powerful way
of conceiving the schema is in two steps: (1) establish the controls and
parameters for representing factors in an information matrix. (2) effectuate

knowledge via linguistic representations and transformations.
The Turtles of Regress: An Alternative in the Violation of Bounds

Is there a schema for changing schemas—how far can you go with that
regress? Kant may have the last laugh: We get into this irresolvable regress
in the concept, if the schema is not taken in Kant’s sense as primarily
indigenous to thought and pre-formed!
On the other hand, we can simply admit that the nature of thought is
recursive. Recursion theoretically is infinite, but something always makes
thought or its loops stop short of that infinity (see Corballis, 2011). In the
schema, as thought, its recursive looping could be stopped as a matter of
its use that ends in solving a problem. Or, the loop’s recursions could be a
function of a limitation, such as one of memory, or time. Thinking about
the very nature of the schema could be a function of the adopted frame-
work—and reasons to keep it in place. So, there can be thoughts about
reductive views of the schema that justify its fit to an empiricist agenda.
Yet, there are also mitigations of recursive thought’s unwieldiness. You
can always take a step to think about your thought and the framework for
it. There is great value to re-thinking re-thinking—and rethinking our
patterns for these processes and their outcomes. Such mitigations are
reasons not to be over-dependent on reduction.
The space for a schema can always be transcended and its superordi-
nate–subordinate relations reconfigured. One might say in computerese
that no matter what level of focus and control a computer-located agent
may exercise, the ‘agent’ can migrate (be) outside the ‘program.’ If the
schema is elementally displayable as a matter of space, the ‘inside’ and
‘outside’ issues can be diagrammed as spaces in relation to each other. Yet,
there is still the issue of the bounds of the schema. What belongs within it?
What is it within? What is superordinate to it as a mega-schema that
includes inside and outside spaces?
The Schema and the Role of Analogy in Accommodating

the Transformation of Spaces
Kant saw the solution to the question of the schema’s bounds in two steps.
One, he identifies the schema’s basic function: to serve knowledge. Two,
he forms the concept of knowledge as a dynamism: a state of affairs
opposite to that of mechanical regularity. There would be a ‘dynamic law

inherent in the whole’ (see Wagemans, 2013, p. 5). Irresolution would be
a constant. This state of affairs is inherent in Kant’s axiom that knowledge is
never more than analogy. The nature of analogical thinking is bound in to
its requirement for continuous pursuit of the adequacy of its objective—
similarity to its referent(s). In this thinking, there is a continuous tension
motivating a resolution to the identity of objects. (See French, 2007 not
only for the philosophical basis, but also for the present-day computational
efforts in this regard.)
In general, for Kant, dynamism is intrinsic to the form and the limits of
knowing and of its representations in schemata. The schema is generically
a form for representing in spaces objects and their relations. Analogy is the
inescapably basic form of knowing. Its comparisons function to place,
within a specific schema’s spaces, the thinker’s targeted objects of thought
and the relation of these objects. But in addition, the comparisons made
by analogical thinking also mark out the schema generically—as a
bounded spatial entity with its loci for diagrammatically representing the
objects of thought and their relations.
Kant’s position here is a major clue that the analogy is the centerpiece
thinking process. It determines the ordering and the configuration of
spaces within the schema. This includes reconfiguration of ordering and
configuration. The schema appears both a representational form of think-
ing and a process of regenerating and reconfiguring the form. Yet, the
picture is not complete, if the dynamism of the thinking is not something
the thinker can think about and relate to the schema and its objects.
Hence, the need for the concept of a ‘mega-schema’—an account for a
space that includes the schema, the thought that affects it, and that
thought’s superposing space. We therefore need depictions of dynamism,
inner and outer spatial loci; the dynamism of objects at the various loci,
patterns of dependence, and interpenetration of patterning. Analogical
thinking provides a device that accommodates these complex but needed
transformations and their coordination. It is the process of and capacity for
classificatory exchanges of genus and species status.
THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED AND SELZ’S SIGNPOSTS

Kant presented a gigantic role for analogy. When we regard its capacity
and scope, we will see that the clue Kant signaled is analogy’s access to
unknowns as a matter of its capacity to cross boundaries, and juggle
classification. That which analogy’s tolerance for disequilibria signals is the

direction Otto Selz follows to find a road to explore. He does not take the
more traveled side routes to frames and scripts; nor does he shortcut an
inaccessible schema ‘deep in the soul.’
Inaccessibility of the schema remains a challenging factor. However,
combined with the elemental idea that the schema does have a form,
we can think of that very form as dynamism in its powers and func-
tions. The schema’s form moves its objects toward an origin → out-
come pattern. By subjecting its objects to analogy and to its capacity
for seeking proportional relations, the thinker instantiates the schema’s
form. If a schema’s form is that of a dynamic pattern of the loci of
objects; analogy’s form works as a recursive process of the comparative
relations of those objects.
Analogy—its form and its process—shuttles between thought outside
the schema, and thought within the schema, there selecting and organiz-
ing the particulars. This is a combination of dynamism, form, and capacity
for recursions. It allows traffic where otherwise, the schematics would be
static—new effects could not be integrated within stable and restricting
classes and categories. Differences—such as those between identified and
unidentified objects and those between different class levels of objects—
would otherwise have transactions blocked.
Selz’s Shuttle Between Abstractions and Particularities

In their present-day differentiation of static and dynamic systems, Ekholm
and Fridqvist (1998, p. 6) point out that ‘since in the static approach a
definite set of classes is implemented, only operations for managing these
classes are needed. In contrast, a dynamic system must provide operations
on a generic level—a much more complex task.’ Generic level operations
require super and subordination capabilities and patterns. Abstract and
symbolic representations can provide these. These representations func-
tion as signposts; they signal those of the schema’s root concepts and/or
propositions, which not only represent known relations, but also can
regenerate their organization and representational powers in new situa-
tions and for new objectives. These are powers of abstractions and sym-
bols, when they are used as representations—as Selz does. His Via Appia
to the organizing and dynamic capabilities of the schema directly tracks
such signposts marking generic cores.
Frames Versus the Kantian Quest for Harnessing the Powers

of Thought: Analogy as the Bridge
As an express route from Kant’s challenge to consider the schema’s rela-
tion to knowledge, Minsky conceived his ‘frame’ concept as ‘knowledge
representation.’ Representation can be by way of different forms and
levels. These can be verbal, symbolic, and diagrammatic. The ‘frame’
concept leads to the ‘scripts’ idea, which empowers AI specification of
schematic routines (Brewer, 1999b). Specification is by way of representa-
tions. The schema—or at least some aspect of it—is framed. The frame is a
boundary; it has internal and external contexts. Inside is knowledge as
representations. Outside, thought is inaccessible. Kant’s view of the
schema is as primordially indigenous to thought—something prior to
language. With the frame concept, we have, even if temporarily, gone
outside of this Kantian sense of the schema. The move is away from a
schema constituted by the sense of the ‘a priori’ and the inaccessible. The
move is to a schema, framed. So, the inaccessible is still there—but it is
now outside the schema. We have a tradeoff: In the place of the schema
infused with the mystery of inaccessible thought, we get into representa-
tions, but they are in an irresolvable circle of regress in the frameable
schema concept. Within that framing, a schema can function as a deter-
minant of thought. However, ‘thought’ is reduced to its presence (repre-
sentation) as cognitive objects. If the schema’s product were solely that;
we would still not know without spinning circularities what the schema is
in regard to its being a generative factor of thought. And by the same set
of distinctions between the status of a representation and that of knowl-
edge, we would not know the story of the schema’s relation to knowledge.
Recursion in Thought Versus Circularity that Never

Gets to Thought
Suppose we do not reduce to the frame, but instead we re-schematize the
schema. We would go back in time and stay with Kant’s focus on the
nature of thought. We would find another puzzle to solve—thought is
recursive: We can think about thought and use it to change that thinking
about thought.
Thought would be at both ends of a schema: The schema is thought’s
product, but then thought can affect and change a schema’s nature. There
is a bright side to this apparent circularity: the space for a schema can
always be transcended and its superordinate–subordinate relations recon-

figured. If the schema is prior—it produces the thought—then, why can’t
thought be reflexive and turn to focus the schema?
If the schema were thus modified, it would be within thought, not
outside it—as ‘other-than-thought.’ Within thought, concepts are
included as its objects. But one such conceptual object of thought can be
that of thought. The danger here is that if we cast our lot with thought,
what stability can we introduce to our representations of it? Are we going to
be able to diagram, as spaces and boundaries, that which is—and is not—
included in these objects? Clearly, the way concepts of thought and of
thought-about-thought relate to each other is not by simple logical inclu-
sions. ‘Thought,’ is not an object that has a boundary, as if encircled in a
standard Venn diagram, such that it could logically locate something that
has its own identity. It is more like a space-ship making loops in and out of
Venn-like spaces, and in the process marking and expanding its view of
those spaces—which now include various viewing points and parameters.
ANALOGICAL STRUCTURE IN THE SCHEMATIC

REFLECTION OF KNOWLEDGE
Dynamic Representation and the Mediator
While the schema does not simply superpose thought, the schema is also
not simply species to the genus, ‘thought.’ Instead, the schema interpene-
trates at many levels and intersections with thought. We offered two
points that make this possible. One—a schema is a dynamic entity and
logically transformable, say by way of its abstract representational form.
Two—as is the case with some representational formats, it is a mediator
(Kant, 1900/1781, p. 159; Allison, 2004, pp. 214, 215, 225–228). The
schema as a mediator has a wide enough scope to relate thought to
knowledge. Casson (1983) summarizes a broad range of conceptions
that represent those of psychologists, linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive
scientists, and cognitive anthropologists. In his view, the schema as a
mediator offers:
conceptual abstractions that mediate between stimuli received by the sense

organs and behavioral responses . . . they serve as the basis for all human
information processing . . . ‘They are ‘organic wholes comprised of parts that
are oriented both to the whole and to other parts.’. [Casson characterized
schemas as] ‘autonomous, automatic, generally unconscious, non-purposive,

and irreflexive . . . [R]ules in contrast are conscious, purposive, and reflexive.’
(p. 430, 431; also see Palmer’s summary, 1996, pp. 63, 66).
Twists and Overlaps in the Ordering of Schematic Spaces

The schema’s logical ordering is not merely of representations; it is also of
thought as objects. They are entities that can be compared in the same way
that terms of a metaphor or analogy can—despite the differences in and
exchanges of genus/species status. Selz saw these matters of comparison
and order exchanges as searchable ‘coordinate relations.’ The relations are
of particulars. That is, specific objects—say, on a species level—are cited.
For example, I might look to the sky and see ‘blue.’ It is a property to be
assigned to an object, say sky—but perhaps, not only sky. It could be the
blue of a dress or a bird, or a place in a color chart. As properties, these
specific objects are such in the light of the psychological choice of per-
spective. Via analogy, there can be jumps from the choice of objects
(concept or category) to compare and for the choice of which ways and
which sets of objects to compare. As Kant saw these relations, they
involved shifts in the subsuming order of thought and information and
of their position in relation to knowledge—where knowledge itself is
conceived as analogy.
Diagramming these shifts can be a major way of depicting the analogy
as a thinking process that determines the ordering of spaces within the
schema. Keep in mind with the ‘blue’ example that ‘blue’ can be a species-
level particular, and then via analogy, become a prototype-type genus,
under which there are many particulars (birds, color charts, etc.). (This
‘exchangeability’ applies to classification rank or ordering and also appears
in ‘order reversing’ of set and subset in ordered sets. Topologically, these
cases may be configured in diagrams of spaces as forms, such as circles or
rings in different planes. They have ‘borromean twists’—viz., twists in
the spatial plane position that produce exchanges of the ordering of
overlapping spaces [see the discussion below. Also, Ruskey and Weston,
1997; for a good depiction of the ‘twists,’ see figures 9 and 10 by
Bunji Tagawa in; Gardner, 2014, pp. 20–21.] The spaces can represent
cognitive objects, such as concepts or their properties.)
Particulars within a cognitive object can be re-ordered and/or re-situated.
Red can be a required particular for the concept of a ripe apple. But if the
object focused is a Granny Smith, red is not placed at a comprehensive level.
With a cause effect relation as the cognitive object, a scientific discovery can
sometimes switch a given particular’s position—showing it not to be a cause,
but instead, an outcome. The switch is one sort of reconfiguration of a
particular’s relations in the thinker’s ordering of thought and its spaces.
The schema is centrally involved. Since it reflects causal relations, a cause-
outcome switch affects the schema’s organization and functioning. Thus, the
schema is both a form of thinking and a process of regenerating and reconfigur-
ing the form. In Kant’s view—a mediator.
On the other hand, it is well to remember that Kant set groundwork for
the views we have been describing as ‘default,’ ‘reductive,’ and empirically
oriented. So, we have to take into account that in a revisit to Kant’s focus
on thinking, we also reconsider dealing with less than dynamics, and
instead focus more of a mechanical and computational affair. Even ana-
logy—the thinking process, which formats the objects and selects the
relation of its particulars—can be seen as ‘only a rule’ that regulates
knowledge. Kant [(Kant, 1787/1929, 1. Axioms of Intuition)] differen-
tiating a mathematical analogy from one of ‘experience,’ writes,
An analogy of experience is . . . only a rule according to which unity of

experience must arise out of perceptions in respect to objects (phenomena)
not as a constitutive, but merely as a regulative principle.
If we are dealing only with a mechanical rule, then frames and scripts are
all there is to thought, viz., mechanical sequences of empirically accessible
outcomes. Suppose, however, that analogy is a ‘form,’ how does it then
relate to an empirical agenda?
ANALOGY, COORDINATES, SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATIONS

Resolving and Not Resolving Kantian Issues
Kant views consciousness as transcendental—viz., outside the experience
of objects. There are given ‘pure’ ideas, which serve to structure objects
and ideas. If these ideas are outside our experience, how we can affect the
way we form percepts and concepts of objects? Over time, this Kantian
frame of reference did devolve from the idea of a universal given to an
inductive process—a ‘scientifically’ more consistent position. The empiri-
cal purpose has been to ‘reduce’ consciousness and thought ‘to an object
of science’ (Apel, 1972). This resolution would leave unconscious
thought, per se, inaccessible. Admittedly conscious thought more easily

would become available to representation. Still, since conscious thought is
a subjective experience, it is per se inaccessible. Although the person
experiencing conscious thought can ‘represent’ it; thought is thought,
and as such is outside the representation. In these terms, it is outside the
schematic space.
Was Selz fighting his way back to Kant’s focus on thought? For reasons
given, to think about Selz’s ideas requires that we reconstruct the relation
of his concepts to Kant’s views. For one perspective that provides for this
reconstruction, we can look to those attempts to fight back that did make
up some of the important context of his contemporaries’ thinking. That
context was close to Selz geographically, socially, and professionally. But it
also appears in different countries and continents.
The attempts to fight back involve the aim to depict formative
capacities of thought and their contribution to knowledge of objects.
While this battle between a reductive and a more inclusive account was
fought out in the transitions in the German traditions from Wundt to
Külpe to Selz (see Kriz, 2007), the scene of the changes—with an
empirical direction to the representation of thought—took place in
America too.
In the German and European theater, the attempt can be traced from
the Würzburg School through the Gestaltists and then on to Piaget.
A complete historical tracing is not the present focus (The British tradition
deviated from Hume in ways that require treatment beyond this book’s
scope). But since Kant’s view is kingpin to this book’s discussion of the
routes that led to Selz’s concepts, I cite the Würzburg School, and Külpe’s
and Selz’s related experimental work (Popper, 1978, p. 32).
SELZ AND THOSE IMMEDIATELY AROUND HIM

Schema, Analogy, and Thinking
The questions Kant left open were pursued two ways: One was via logical
positivism and the reduction that eschewed the subjective. The second,
the contrary, was by the Würzburg School and its oppositions to logical
positivism and Wundt’s experimentalism. ‘The decisive turn away from
association psychology “was initiated by Kant and carried through,
according to strict experimental methods, by the school of Külpe, espe-
cially Bühler and Selz”’ (ter Hark, 2007—quoting Popper, 1931). Instead
of systematically tracing that history, this short account will focus Selz’s
ideas in his having worked with and under Külpe in his institute
(Hoffmann et al., 1996).
Noting the context in which Selz produced his work, ter Hark (2007,
p. 14) points out that
After his Ph.D., Selz went to Bonn to do experimental investigations in the

laboratory of Külpe. Both Külpe and Bühler were among his subjects, and
he probably attended some of their seminars. These investigations resulted
in his first major work. (cited by ter Hark, 2007; see Selz, 1913).
Külpe acknowledged that Selz ‘made a significant step in Denkpsychologie’

(ter Hark, 2007, p. 88; also see; Wettersten, 1992, p. 128). We need the
additional parallels with Karl Bühler, who engaged in a contemporaneous
and collateral pursuit to resolve Kant’s problematic focus on knowledge.
This was by way of what appears a structural view of language. Sturm
(2012) analyzes Bühler’s ‘remedy’:
Bühler . . . aims for ‘axioms’ for linguistics, and it is clear that the validity of
these axioms relies neither on logical nor conceptual grounds alone, nor is it
derived from observation and experiment.
His ‘axioms’ (1934, p. 20f—cited by Sturm, 2012) are ‘constitutive.’

They function to ‘define the domain’ or they can be cast as ‘ideas for
induction necessary in every field of research.’ Sturm concludes the axioms
‘are nontrivial and necessary conditions for a unified empirical theory of
language’ and that ‘this clearly echoes the Kantian idea of the categories
and principles of the understanding as being constitutive for objects of
knowledge.’
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF STRUCTURE IN THINKING: ANALOGY

AS PSYCHOLOGICAL STRUCTURING
Structural Formations and Coordinate Relations

Bühler’s ‘axioms’ concept appears in tune with Selz’s focus on ‘structural
formations,’ which govern, result in, and can reveal ‘coordinate relations.’
As a group, Selz’s concepts of particulars, categories, structures, or rela-
tions include both his structural formations and coordinate relations and
Bühler’s axioms. All are psychologically based, formed, and changeable.

All are ‘cognitive objects’—whether axioms, rules, geometric forms, or
symbols representing them and/or their relations. Irrespective of the
epistemic status—known or unknown—and/or their conscious access—
it is by Selz’s use of analogy that these objects are psychologically evinced.
Thus, Selz coordinates Kant’s concepts of the schema and analogy.
Analogy is basic to the schema’s transformation of the unknown to a
known position accessible to thinking.
All of this is focus on the psychological nature of the cognitive object
and the access to that object provided by relational thinking. It is why I
include Bühler’s ideas in this reconstruction of Selz’s ideas and their
implications. Analogy is key to that relational thinking. In citing
Bühler’s 2012 article, ‘Denken,’ as an account of the relational thinking
that forms a cognitive object, Radler (2015, p. 404) sheds significant light
on these points about analogy. When relational thinking takes place, its
process is its product. Its occurrence as a product is coterminous with its
generation and governance by a process—comparison. This comparison is
also both process and a product—it is generated (and governed) by the
process of relating objects within an analogy.
Bühler’s focus was on thinking. His underlying understanding is of the
comparative relations and ordering of objects in an analogy. In general, this
understanding is central to this book’s projections and reconstructions for
present-day psychology. In particular, I focus these functions of the analogy
to illuminate the significance of Selz’s route through the schema and its
dynamic contributions to the achievement of a ‘knowledge complex.’
The Creative Transformations of Analogically Exchanging

the Role of Particulars
Kant’s ‘psychology’ began a regress of the thinker’s viewing and represen-
tation, which, like the Escher mystery of the ‘Drawing Hands’ (1948),
shows the viewer a regress of beginnings and products. This regress is a
‘tangled hierarchy,’ as Douglas Hofstadter sees it (1979; see also Keyes,
2006, pp. 55–56). Look at the Escher representation—two competing
classes (the drawing and the draw-er.). In your viewing you see that each
of the two ‘classes’ exchanges its status of effect and cause. For the psy-
chologist (as thinker), choosing a ‘cause’ (or method, as does Selz) can
involve such an exchange. The more complex the class of representations is,
the more particulars become available to choose from. In the ‘Drawing
Hands’ example, there is the class, ‘A drawing.’ It subsumes two subclasses,

‘Draw-er of hands,’ and ‘Drawing of drawing hands.’ The ‘class’ level (or
genus) is more complex—‘A Drawing’ has properties on several levels—art,
artist, product. After identifying (even by drawing) particulars from one
class—as at a class (genus) level—with a class exchange, the new ‘genus’
would yield new possible particulars. These could be drawn from the new
‘complex’ class. It is probably better here to call it a ‘category.’ In this case,
not to oversimplify Escher, but to make the point: say that new complex
‘category’ is ‘Art about Art and the Artist.’ This creation of a new order of
classification brings into play the genus–species exchange—which is central
to analogy’s logic. The exchange not only opens a route to a more complex
superposing classification, but it also enriches the possible particulars for
articulation of the subclass or species-level classifications.
THE SAGA OF SELZ—LIVING WITH INCOMPLETE

KNOWLEDGE COMPLEXES
Get Off the Analogical Exchange Merry-Go-Round at the Establishment
of Coordinate Relations
How far do you go in this whirl of exchanges involving refocusing
particulars and re-hierarchizing the conceptual organization of objects?
At the point of new particulars available at different levels of the
classification—and at this point of more complexity to the levels—we
consider Hofstadter’s idea that the resolution to the entangled hierar-
chies is to stop the exchange at their ‘inviolate level.’ This could be at
the level of the self or agent viewing the ‘Drawing Hands’ (see
Hofstadter, 1979, p. 387). In this analysis, for the psychologist, ‘the
inviolate level’ is that of thought and its phenomenological locus. Still,
the thinker, at that level of seeing the whirl of analogical ordering, can
turn the analogy on himself. Therefore, the self too is subject to analogy
and its entangled hierarchies. In short, there is a price to pay for
stopping at any point in the reshuffling of hierarchical position. Kant
left us with this price to pay. You can have new possibilities and new
possible worlds as a tradeoff for stability of identity to cognitive objects.
Selz elected to use the shuffle of analogy in his focus on pre-categorized
relations. Insofar as they were abstractly pre-categorized as relations,
for a given relation, an ‘analogous relation’ could be the product he
labeled ‘coordinate relations.’ These in turn could give a more articu-

lated view of the continuing elusiveness of the ‘knowledge complex.’
We can view Escher viewing the artist viewing an object. So, there are
‘viewing perspectives.’ In forming a view of a cognitive object, there are also
viewing perspectives. We add dimension to these perspectives by considering
viewing from Bühler’s concept of axioms and by way of the role of analogy.
Bühler’s student, Karl Popper (2014, p. 32), pointed out that the
Würzburg School, via Külpe and Selz, produced experimental work that
corroborated Kant’s ‘psychology.’ Popper claimed he influenced Selz. ter
Hark (2003) claimed it was the other way around.
At Würzburg the arrows of influence whirled from thinker to thinker.
We can stop the whirl of Würzburg thinking and make analogies that
illuminate the Selzian concepts. Specifically here, we add the dimension of
a Popperian logical and scientific discovery to the potential for a present-
day schema concept. We thereby sharpen focus on the Selzian resolution
to Kant’s dialectic between analogy and induction.
The Historical Reconstruction as Resurrection of Selz’s Thinking

Much of the point here is to get at the nucleus of Selz’s ideas and the heart
of his implications for a theory of thought and knowledge by citing key
links to Kant’s proposals and their dilemmas. The historical linkages have
as a major function, the resurrection of Selz’s thinking. This is to shore up
what is missing in his explications and what we can assume to be organic to
his thinking. To do this job of interpolating and explicating, the missing
pieces are assumed to be in the thinking of others. They are ideas that can
become integral with Selz’s ideas and frameworks, which ‘recalled to life,’
will-have-been ↔ will-become the foundations of his understandings and
hopefully his intentions.
These ideas may have been absorbed within Selz’s thinking, and
therein given rise to a coordinated pattern—although it remains an
unfinished quilt of meanings. Or, these ideas may remain those of
others’ thinking to make their own patterns—as if a collection of quilts
from the same guild. As analogous themes, designs, and statements;
these ideas of others may simply be ‘similar enough’ to add to those
of Selz. As work within the same school of thought, they may be so
complementary to Selz’s ideas that they patch the holes of his missing
ideas and designs. It would be as if to enrich the semantic patterning of
Selz’s ‘quilt’ of ideas (see note 2).
History and the Conquest of Fate

The Würzburg School history provides patches to the tears in Selz’s
journey to explore and expand the schema. But it does not account for
three things:
One—the personally imposed alienation of his ideas that engenders
their suspension from development in psychological theory (See the bio-
graphical descriptions of his sense of isolation in Reinert, 1981; Seebohm,
1981).
Two—the disconnections from Kant’s agenda. The causes and reasons
for Selz’s disconnections from Kant’s agenda surely involve the forces of
logical positivism and the influence of Wundt’s empirical agenda. All this
would be too complex to pursue within the compass of this book.
Specifically, we would be getting into the biographical detail that others
have covered more fully—and perhaps as fully as possible.
Three—more of a full sense of where his ideas were going. This is a
function of the alienation externally imposed. His ideas cannot be open to
any reconstruction unless the tragic events that include his dismissal from
his professorial post at Mannheim, and his ultimate arrest and final fate at
the hands of the Nazis are remembered. This is inestimable disruption of
life, thought, and the psychological contexts of his idea development. Yet,
the story cannot be told here. It is highlighted in tributes that introduce
his character, mind, and foray into the philosophy of thought and the role
of art in the science of psychology (See Seebohm, 1981; Reinert, 1981).
The reason I cite the tragedy of his fate and his attitudes toward and
alienation from it, is that Selz’s work cannot be separated from their
impact, nor from our obligation to reach for ‘what might have been.’
Nor can we underestimate what premonitions Selz had and just how he
decided to cope with what could become an ‘unfinished symphony.’
These existential disruptions create all-the-more critical need to make
the journey of return. It is to connect with Kant’s challenges; it is to
project forward what might have been; it is to reformulate the direction
that can be taken in the future.
Connecting by Looking Across the Ocean

In America, the movement to cope with the role of thought in a way
making it accessible to scientific explanations and descriptions advanced
with Peirce’s semiotic framework of representations. In his attempt to use
the diagram as a key to the percept, Peirce specifically veered from Kant
(Queiroz and Stjernfelt, 2011; Apel, 1972; Blumenthal, 1975, p. 1084;
Kriz, 2007; Sowa, 1987/1992). Yet, neither Peirce’s route through
‘representation,’ nor Selz’s schematizations of coordinates, vitiated
Kant’s point: Thought about objects can be (and be no more than)
analogy—thus, there are analogies ‘all the way down.’ There is that miss-
ing ‘bottom turtle’ again! In short, none of this—either Peircean repre-
sentations or Würzburg coordinate relations—takes us to the identity of
thought, or to the objects of thought. The resolution to this interminable
regression is to join forces with it and evade an attempt at the logical
identity of these objects.
For Selz, the Kantian focus on analogy remains a central epistemic
point. The logic of analogy frames the search—and the choice—of possi-
ble worlds and the capacity to select and chart particulars. For Peirce, the
focus changes; it goes through another German idealist—Hegel, and his
commitment to inevitability of change. But for Peirce it results in a kind of
‘realism’—based in ‘“thirds”: habits, tendencies, lawlike behavior, mean-
ings, representations, and various forms of metaphysical (as opposed to
purely logical) necessity’ (Burch, 2004). Peirce’s logic expands from
inductive/deductive paths to his ‘abductive reasoning.’ This is a way of
thinking about what is not known. It begins with a focus on the particular
as a lever to propel a concept or category. We will see later in the book the
similarities to Selz’s analogical thinking. The purpose in juxtaposing Selz’s
ideas with those of Peirce is twofold: (1) Peirce’s focus on pragmatic
representation and on heuristic logic advances the Kantian objectives of
inductive reasoning and empirical displays. A look at Peirce’s concepts
reveals enriching parallels to Selz’s concepts as they reach for and reflect a
solution to the use of the schema for induction. (2) In the light of Peirce’s
concepts, Selz’s ideas for the schema give a present-day perspective that
enriches the possibilities of diagrammatic representations of the schema
and its dynamic vicissitudes.
RE-STATEMENT OF THE RE-POSITIONING

IN SELZ’S VIEWS
Selz proposes a proactive function of the schema. To see how far this
function can go in resolving some of the issues Kant raised, I asked what
happens with Selz’s proposal to use the schema’s relations to develop a
representation when the issue is not of a known—but instead of a ‘new’

or reconfigured—relationship. To use the schema this way Selz offers his
idea—the anticipatory schema.
Is this idea a contradiction-in-terms? The schema represents informa-
tion. The anticipation would be for what is not information. If its function
is to represent information, how can a schema be anticipatory, that is, not
have the information to be represented? It would seem that to constitute a
schema, the information would have to be available. Thus, in Corcoran’s
summary, the schema is retrospectively applicable, even if to ‘a multitude
of instances.’ In its form, which depicts objects that we know about or
know how to know about, the schema can organize them. But this is after
it is admitted that they constitute information. The schema is applicable to
referents retrospectively—but not to referents that we do not know about
or do not yet exist. The term ‘anticipation’ appears to contradict the term
schema. This problem is inherent in the Kantian views of the schema’s
combination of thought and representation. With his proactive idea of the
‘anticipatory schema’ has Otto Selz’s brought thought into the picture
and thus brought Kantian-inspired distinctions between thought and
representation together? If so, what complications are the costs?
Analogy Within the Schema to Apprehend and Explore

New Relations
Selz (1929) diverted from the idea of inherent intuition. He also did not
think the opposing empirical view would explain the psychology of
thought, the forming of concepts, and how we know things. He took a
third path. It was to ‘psychologically structural laws’ (cf. ter Hark, 2007,
p. 100). These could be specified and engaged. For whole areas of mean-
ing, they would constitute and govern relationships and their coordina-
tion. The laws would reveal patterns of determination for meanings. The
structural laws thus take the form of apprehension of geometric patterns
and concepts of space. The schema follows these laws. They are inherent
within it, and they guide the capabilities to represent and order the
relationships of cognitive objects.
The ‘anticipatory schema’ appears to be Selz’s recognition of three
cognitive capabilities: The first is de facto knowledge of a relationship
(1922, for example). The second is the ability to designate a relationship
as symbolic. This is the ‘psychological structuring,’ which he casts as
schematization. The anticipatory schema makes use of this aspect of
schematization. It enables a third capability—to evoke a new and ‘coordi-

nate’ relation. This is a critical capacity for applying what we already know
as the leverage by which to achieve new knowledge.
If a symbolic relationship, representing a known relation is A : B; it can
become a leverage point from which to extend a new projected or
hypothesized relation (say C : D). The relation of the known to the
projected is one Selz called ‘coordinate.’ To achieve it, the extension—
or coordination—is made by way of analogy (A : B :: C : D). It emerges
that Selz’s focus on ‘psychologically structured laws’ utilizes analogy as a form
of thought to expand the schema conceptually and thus employ the schema as a
tool for new knowledge.
Selz’s Resolution of the Gaps Between Induction and Analogy

in Kant’s Logic
Kant identified the components of the schema as knowledge and/or
thought. The schema can be knowledge and can relate that knowledge
to other knowledge. For example, the schema can be the thinker’s knowl-
edge of rules of logical identity and/or causal direction. That knowledge
can be related to specifics like concepts and other cognitive objects. The
schema can be thought—itself organized logically or analogically. To
advance knowledge scientifically, focus on the schema can be on its
capacities, relations, and functions as they relate to either or both compo-
nents. Focusing the schema on knowledge can fold in the great advantage
of empirical specificity in information, information patterns, and of course,
linguistic evidence and designations of meanings. That brings to the fore
the issue of continuously new information—that which separates the
known from the unknown.
Focusing the schema on thought opens the issue of its recursion.
Thinking about thought brings thought to another level. It can be even
more abstract, such as thought about the structure of thought—even
about the schema, as a means and/or object of thought. All this would
open the issue of new and/or reconfigured cognitive objects. In either the
knowledge or the thought focus, the scientific progression is to new
additions, new organizations, and/or new versions of what is known.
Selz, in his objective of investigating new relations, seeks to move
toward the expansion and completion of a ‘knowledge complex.’ He
writes (1922, pp. 145–146) about the thinker’s apprehension of a specific,
but he reports that the thinker has the accompanying sense that the
specific known is not the whole of that phenomenon. That becomes for
the thinker, ‘an un-defined whole.’ Such thinking involves the possibility
of turning from thought about one object to something new; then turning
back to thought about that first object and its relation to the something
new! That process is one of comparisons, and the thinking is by analogy.
The analogy form provides the structural relations that can set in motion
comparisons of known and unknown relations of objects. These compar-
isons are the product of thought in the pursuit of structural relations. The
end product is a new set of structural relations. This thinking and its
knowledge products move toward defining the ‘whole’—the completion
of a ‘knowledge complex.’ But there is a dialectical pull between analogy
and induction.
For Kant, (scientific) focus on knowledge would be by induction—a
way of reasoning about a relationship requiring an inference with ‘ground’
(evidence through further collection of particulars). The reasoning would
legitimize existing knowledge. His focus on thought would be in opposi-
tion to the form and goal of reasoning by analogy. ‘In the inference
according to analogy . . . identity of the ground (par ratio) is not required’
(Kant, 1992/1800, p. 627). Analogy becomes the form of thinking to
leverage schematizing to do the job of obtaining new knowledge. It would
appear that is where Kant left us.
Otto Selz (particularly, 1924) faced head-on the problem of leveraging
the schema and its function of organizing relationships. Can a structuring
of thought help to solve new problems by not only regenerating that
schematic function of organizing relationships, but also generating new
ones? Is that structuring of thought, analogy?
A Topological Version of Kant’s Puzzling Logic of the Schema

We have looked at Selz’s ideas by relating them ‘back’ in time to Kant’s
puzzles. We gain perspective and context by considering the historical
contexts that impinged on Selz’s thinking. This ‘look back’ attempts at
reconstruction of Selz’s ideas and their implications is by looking to a time
past. But we do this from a present-day vantage point—which itself
becomes an historic dimension within which to develop the foundations
and the implicature of Selz’s ideas and concepts. This book cannot system-
atically trace a concept of history as it has been laid out from the idea of
Aristotle’s mimesis and its relation to time and causation (Ricoeur, 2012).
However, we can add Ricoeur’s idea as Dowling summarizes it: ‘[W]hat
matters is that both the conclusion and its anticipation count as what
might be called objective correlates of the “grasping together”.’ Ricoeur
sees this multi-directional temporal focusing as central to the logic of
narrative causality (Dowling, 2011, p. 6). His approach is to the narrative
and its ‘focusing’ the confluence of meanings. Apprehending the inter-
actions of different times (moving in different directions) constructs
(re-constructs) the meanings. The construction and apprehension evoke
the question of the thinker’s history. This brings to bear Haydu’s
(1998) concepts, developed as a specific view of understanding the
thinker’s perspective as a historian engaged in problem solving.
Concepts of the thinker’s perspectives are cited above in note 2.
(Ricoeur’s along with Haydu’s views may be considered within a
third—Little’s general view (2010) of an overall objective to historical
construction and reconstruction. The three approaches to time interac-
tions in historical reconstruction are briefly compared in Appendix A.)
Looking at the Kantian Puzzles as Topological Depictions

of Spatial Relations
Look at history as a narrative produced by our thinking about events in a
space. That space is subject to changes of focus that ‘deform,’ ‘stretch,’ or
‘twist’ it. This seems to be a ‘topological’ way of viewing the space
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The narrative would then be a function
of a ‘temporal space.’ This transformation is by a ‘viewing,’ which may be
from different temporal positions or foci. Straub (2005, pp. 60–61) has a
concept of ‘temporal space. ’ He predicates it on Ricoeur’s ideas about the
narrative and its relation to thought and to the consciousness of ‘temporal
space.’ The ‘temporal space’ is a function of ‘historical consciousness.’ Any
sorting that takes place is from origins in thought. The thinker can survey
from many temporal vantage points.
There is thought first, and then there is the construction of ‘narrative
time.’ Thought opens a ‘temporal space,’ about which Straub (2005,
p. 61) writes, ‘Only through the opening of temporal space, through the
rupture of the now by the past and the future, is the present constituted as
the space of experience’ To imagine these ‘ruptures’ as spatial vicissitude,
I refer to them as ‘topological.’ The advantage to Straub’s rendition is that
it accounts for the transformation to narrative time. All of which is to still
maintain that the linear causal space of the schema is still a phenomenon to
count on for a psychology that can deal with inductive patterns of
knowledge. Yet, the topological nature of the space allows the schema to
coordinate with diagramming the role of thought. In these terms, we note
that as we are left with the Kantian puzzles, there are ‘borromean twists’ in
the relation of thought to knowledge.3
3
Mathematical development of structural relations in a knowledge complex is a
topic beyond this book’s confines. The book cannot include the advances and
implications of current developments possible by geometric considerations of
topology, their relation to algebraic formations, and the potential for application
of diagrammatic explorations to the development of new concepts (knowledge);
see Brown and Porter (2009, 2003, pp. 4, 5, 10). Still, the thesis here remains that
Selz’s ideas in the psychology of thought and his approach to the schema and its
dilemmas have a great deal to offer in linking the psychology of thought with
current potentials for new perspectives on Kant’s dilemmas for psychology.
CHAPTER 3
Concluding Issues and Implications
Abstract This chapter presents future directions for a schema

re-schematized—integrated with the thinker’s cognitive dynamics. Selz’s
anticipatory schema features a symbolic and unknown factor, providing
for discovery logic and pre-logical search for key variables. The schema
opens to a search for knowledge—not dependent on input and outcome
locked into information and established sequences. The thinker’s imagina-
tion constructs the anticipatory schema. The unknown becomes a factor in a
picture of the knowledge and information sought. With the insertion of
the thinker as an agent seeking knowledge, the re-schematized schema can
be diagrammed in new exciting ways. To make the schematic projections,
the thinker uses analogy. Its ‘pre-logical’ relations open the schema to pro-
ductive thinking. Analogy generates new combinations. Formerly excluded
particulars enter the formation of concepts and new categories.
Keywords Agent Analogy Dynamic schema Spatial representation

Venn diagram
EXPRESSING THE UNKNOWN WITHIN THE SCHEMA

Selz’s major contribution to the thought/knowledge dilemmas was to
offer a version of the schema that could express the unknown within the
schema. The topological view of thought in relation to knowledge helps to
picture the schema as a diagram with this feature and capacity.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48276-7_3
Diagramming Thought and Knowledge

in a Borromean Twist
Analogy’s Unraveling of the Twist to Reverse Logical Exclusion

Picture thought as the sum of the two sets: knowledge and new
knowledge (that which is not known). Depict these two sets in the
form of two logical circles, but convert the circles to topological
rings. They link, and hence they overlap at points and not at others.
With their topological twists applied to logical sets now expressible in
the linked spaces, the logical inclusion relations are reversed. How
can this reversal be displayed and conceived as a function of thought?
The rings require a space that accommodates two planes in order
to show inclusion twists at overlapping points. This accommodative
‘mega-space’ can be that which justifies the label ‘thought.’ However,
more modestly, for the ‘mega-schema’s’ space here, we only need to
talk about the thinking that is ‘analogical thinking.’ So, let’s add it
up: Insofar as what is already known—a set (K) does not include
some new knowledge, the set (NK). The relation is K ⊉ NK. With
an analogy, the relationship of K to NK becomes a function of some
aspect of each that is common to or included in both sets—if only by
similarity or proportion. (So, then, there’s a switch: K ⊉ NK, as a
function of a comparison (c), becomes this reversal of inclusion rela-
tions: c (K ⊃ NK). This change is a borromean twist of inclusion
relations. In all, we have a ‘mega-schema’ representing thought and a
specific function—thinking by analogy (c)—all of which permits a
topological ‘twisting’ and the exchange of new knowledge for con-
scious or agreed upon knowledge. (The borromean twist is this: three
topological spaces—c, K, and NK—are linked. As logically describ-
able, these spaces, though, would include and not include each
other.)
Kant did view analogy as the solution to such twists of thought and
knowledge, pictured here as ‘borromean.’ Kant’s identification of ana-
logy’s elemental format for processing reasoning is a major clue for its
place and role as a thinking process determining ordering of spaces
within the schema. Reconfiguration within the schema makes it not
only a form of thinking, but also a process of regenerating the form—
and reconfiguring it.
3 CONCLUDING ISSUES AND IMPLICATIONS 71
Selz’s Analogy Relating the Anticipatory Schema

to the Schema
Selz’s Coordinate Relations

Selz pictured the schema’s logic with the odd capabilities Kant juxtaposed
in describing thought as both inductive and analogical. Selz used the phi
symbol, φ, to designate ‘relations’ as coordinate (Selz, 1924, p. 37). This
relation turns out to be one of the positions in a cognitive operation. Selz
called the cognitive operation ‘mental activities.’ Consider it simply gen-
erically as ‘thought.’ Selz constructed a complex analogy. It was based on his
experiments with the relation of terms that have a ‘whole’ ‘part’ relation.
Although the method he used in getting his subjects to relate the terms is
‘loaded’ by his directions, it reveals Selz’s thinking about cognitive objects
and the thinker’s work to achieve ‘wholes.’ The ‘whole’ as a pattern of
particulars would be in accord with the rules and dynamics of a schema. An
incomplete whole, can motivate the thinker’s ‘anticipatory schema.’ This
would activate the schematic rules of organization to work toward the
completion of the ‘whole.’
The analogy Selz constructed (Selz, 1924, p. 47) relates the schema
and the anticipatory schema. It shows the function of their relation to each
other. It also compares their relations to an overall framework, namely,
thought. (For this comparison, in the case Selz describes below, he postu-
lates a specific aspect of thought—memory. He refers to its ordering as a
‘memory complex.’)
We see that the right-hand side of the memory complex resulting from
application of a solving method . . . as the schema of a complex relates to the
complete complex. The sought-for means M can therefore be actualized by
an operation of complex completion and the operation of routine means
actualization is thus identical with this subcase of the operation of complex
completion. (1924, p. 47; emphasis mine)
The analogy is based on a logical ordering: The schema is a generic set of

organizing rules for the ‘whole’ object. That set folds out its rules and its
potentiating formats as a manifold. This would be a space [like that of the
analogy (c) above]. It can accommodate a cognitive object in forms that
can be organized in structures. These structures can assume forms
opposite to each other. In Selz’s terms, that cognitive object is/becomes a

‘structure,’ namely, a ‘memory complex’ that is generically accommoda-
tive. (I do not find that Selz had an articulated view of the relation of a
‘memory complex’ to the generic idea of ‘thought.’ So, for the time, we
can leave this matter as one that can swing both ways. That is, thought (T)
can be either a superset to or equal to a memory complex (MC): That
would be T ⊇ MC. Moreover, (T) can be either subset to or equal to a
(MC), namely T ⊆ MC. As we discussed earlier, the logical potentials for
such a schema/cognitive object (our thought about what thought entails
and what it can accommodate) include both modus ponens logic and
inductive cause effect sequences. Thus, the ‘memory complex’ can coor-
dinate super- and sub-ordination and also the relations of cause and effect.
We are talking about the schema here as a generic form.
The Schema Is a Cognitive Object that Has Cognitive Objects

In addition to the schema as a generic form, is the more particular type of
schema—the anticipatory schema. It is incomplete, but it has particulars
that go part of the way to solving a specific problem or providing a
structure for missing elements of a ‘whole.’ In Selz’s analogy, it can be
compared to a ‘generic’ schema, which would cover the operations and
the logical ordering patterns for a class of such problems. That class
(‘complex’ in Selz’s terms) would include particular problems a thinker
might entertain. Selz’s analogy makes a specific schema a species-level case
within something like Kant’s more generic and abstract schema. Thus, if a
known ‘method yields results’ that is a completion—namely, a ‘whole.’ Its
particulars are consonant with a generic level pattern or schema. In turn,
that schema can be compared to an anticipatory schema, that is, a parti-
cular, but incomplete, pattern on its way to become a yet unknown
concept. The comparison, as Kant would have it, is as a proportion.
Selz’s Analogy as a Psychological Form of Thought

A key interpolation I make is of the analogy as the psychological form of
thought for evincing proportions to represent and inform Selz’s schema
and anticipatory schema comparisons. The thinker, making the compar-
ison, works to do so in a psychological effort. It is to realize an intended
cognitive object and its coordinate relations. Psychological resources and
capacities, such as those of memory, the collection and selection of parti-
culars, and concept formation are employed. To go further with this
comparison of the anticipatory schema and the schema—and to place
each of these two concepts on a different ‘class’ level—is to elevate the

comparison of the two to classificatory places (or slots) in an analogy. The
terms, ‘known schema’ and ‘anticipatory schema’ begin with an assump-
tion of a generic versus a specific class. (Even if you can figure out how the
‘whole is included in the part’ the structure is classificatory.) So, the terms,
‘the schema of a (known) complex’ and ‘the complete complex’ are
members of those respective classes. For Selz, the analogy appears as the
following comparison:
Known schema: anticipatory schema:: complete complex: incompletely

coordinated complex.
It is important not to underestimate the genus–species reversals possible in

the analogy. The anticipatory schema deals with the unknown, but its
product is a return to the status of the schema—in that the new knowledge
creates a coordinated complex!
Essentially, I mean this analogy to reach for, perhaps indicate—if not
constitute—that which Selz called ‘coordinate relations.’ I consider ‘coordi-
nate relations’ in terms of an analogy, to demonstrate that the relation of
one concept to another would be specifiable as a ratio. Moreover, I hold
that this ratio could be the form that allows the pursuit of (anticipation of)
yet unknown ways of designating the relations of a known to an unknown
concept. These ways may be in line with the generic schema capacity
bundle—which includes logical, analogical, inductive, and deductive
patterns.
(Reading Selz’s comparisons requires some unpacking. Appendix B
below may help. I include it to show that although Selz does not empha-
size the ‘analogy’ as a way of thinking, his use of it is central to potential
changes in the present-day concept of the schema and resolutions of the
Kantian dilemmas.)
Thought Versus Representation

The artist casts around in his own rich store of experiences and lights on
particularities. His selections are ‘accidental’ or ‘chance’—outside the sche-
matic space of the problem being conceived (cf. Selz, 1924) There are the
two factors of the ‘accidental’ and the personal storage of experience. The
accidental is a degree of freedom or unpredictability, and it could be part of
a computation. The personal storage is oddly a comforting factor—in that it
is finite. These two factors would make for a comprehensibility that would
resolve the dilemma of a regress to schemas-behind-schemas.
As shown with the discussion of topological views of the schema, it does
complicate diagramming—if the diagram is to include coverage of a region
of thinking ancillary to that of the known terms and meanings of the
problem. But the complication is a tradeoff. With importation from out-
side the boundaries of the schema, boundaries for the unknown terms may
be organized into an ‘anticipatory schema.’ A diagram of thought is then
one of an expanded space and reflects thought that can be enriched and
consequent access to knowledge of new relations.
Selz deals with the richness of thought through his ideas of chance and
‘accidental means abstraction.’ This expansion of the contexts of particu-
lars, instead of being too concretely computational is handled by an
abstraction, and it becomes accessible to algebraic expression—like an
‘X’ for an unknown. Hence, it presents a tolerance for the uncodified. It
backs up the work that takes the problem solver from the richness and
unpredictable associations of her own thinking to a logical organization of
discovery.
The Unknown as a Point in a Progression

Selz (1924, p. 37) considers that a schema’s operations can take place at
various points in the progress toward a goal. At one stage of the game,
the goal may be only a part of what is a larger intention. We cannot get
into a full-blown discussion of ‘intention’ here. Suffice it to say, that to
obsessively seek the origins of an intention is like insisting on a ‘first
cause.’ It can lose touch with the dynamic status of the schema. It might
be like focusing the nucleus of an atom and ignoring the activity of the
orbiting electrons. Kant avoided obsessing about the ‘soul’—its deep
first cause status for the explication of the schema. By focusing the
schema Kant took a position that required neither a backward nor a
forward move to a determinant. The schema could reflect both temporal
loci as origins; hence you can focus its form ‘midstream.’ From there you
can use the thought about a known object or relation to form ideas about
intention as an origin and as reflected in an outcome.
Selz too, instead of talking about intention, refers to a ‘knowledge
complex,’ which tends toward a ‘whole’ ‘to be actualized.’ The knowl-
edge complex has an organization—but not all the elements, nor the
completion of a category. That would mean that at that point of not
yet being a whole, not all operations are specific either. The schema is
assumed as encompassing and guiding, and the anticipatory schema as

a formula dynamically and analogically moving toward the schema—
recapitulated. Accordingly, Selz’s view appears to take off from Kant’s
schema concept. As Selz sees it, the schema can function as a repre-
sentation of an array of coordinated representations. The coordination
is achieved by way of analogy or the comparison of one relationship
with another. We are in the midst of a dynamic development. We have
neither the origin nor the ‘final’ whole. The analogy always falls short—
leaving a choice: Try new analogies that would reveal new possible objects
to complete the picture. Or, collect additional information about the
present concepts and objects and their relations. While there appears to
be room for accidental focus on particulars—objects or operations—Selz
develops his view by way of his ideas about working toward knowledge
(which culminates in knowledge of a ‘whole’). He depicts the conceptual
relations of a schema—particularly, how one cognitive object relates to
(coordinates with) another.
For Selz, for his subjects, or for any thinker, to do this is to begin
‘midstream’—by depicting a known set of relations. In Selz’s work this
set of relations involves an involuntary completion of a task or objective.
That task or objective would constitute a ‘complex.’ Its stimulus–action
or response–outcome pattern would be complete. It would constitute a
‘whole.’ At least as far as its confines go, its stimulus–action–response
relations would represent and be a complete schematic for a ‘known’ set
of relations. However, for Selz, the schema can appear in more than one
form. That results at least from the thinker’s focus on a midstream
conception and representation of method and outcome. But since the
actor does not yet ‘know’ the method (action) that would complete the
pattern and produce the response, her choice is not yet involuntary. She
needs a method that fits into an analogy with the method that does work
and does produce a ‘completion.’ Overall, the analogy is a ‘structural’ fit—
hence, a ratio; hence, an abstract relation—to a set of particulars known to
work. By this approach to analogies and abstract representations of struc-
tural relations to depict the schema, the thinker can thereby accommodate
the need for and advance to new knowledge. Thus, in Selz’s version of a
word association task, the subject is faced with associations not yet con-
ceived. For these tasks there is no established or ‘involuntary’ response.
Voluntary choices have to be made. These are a function of anticipating a
schematic for completion of the projected stimulus–response pattern or
relation.
An ‘anticipatory schema’ sets a temporary template for seeking out a

response that would fit. Via this template, the thinker tries to fill in
possible responses. They are ‘voluntary’—not simply a repetition of what
is a known relation to complete the task. So, the response(s) that would
complete the task—and thus include a ‘complex’ completion that relates
this task to those tasks already completable by involuntary responses—
would now move the schema to a more encompassing depiction. It would
by reflecting the relationships analogically, represent the relations of the
‘whole’ of this complex.
Reproduction of the Schema’s Coordinating Relations

In working to fill the gap(s), the thinker’s search for completion takes
place through a ‘reproductive process.’ This entails a search for responses
that fit. The search probes memory for particulars that appear in like
relations. There, the similarities to the target unknown response that
would fit the relation sought can be a function of many levels of meaning
and conceptualization. This relation of multi-leveled objects and concepts is
precisely at the heart of comparisons by analogy.
I specifically propose here that the reproductive mechanism of the
search to complete a schema is analogy. That is a formal issue.
Nevertheless, there is, in Selz’s terms, ‘psychological structuring.’ As in
other views of the schema, such as Bartlett’s—remembering emerges as a
critical avenue to the comparisons. The goal of adding to knowledge, as
Selz envisioned it, is ‘completion of the complex schema.’ The mental
activities involved constitute ‘recollection.’ This cognitive process ‘col-
lects’ by going ‘back’ either to memory or to the known particulars and
relations. The re-collection takes place in the present. Psychologically and
logically, this is midstream. It is on the way to the completion of a
psychologically dynamic schema and its coordinate relations of the com-
pleted complex, that is, the achieved outcome. It is logically on the way
from abductive guesses to identifiable patterns. Historically, this is ‘mid-
stream’ in that it is in a temporal space that thinking constructs the
historical relation of the known schema and its coordinate relations with
the unknowns that fill a ‘historical knowledge complex.’ The recollection,
as a process of thought, is the use and fulfillment of the schema as an
historical reconstruction aimed at achieving a ‘knowledge complex.’
We reconstruct Selz’s concepts here. Their reconstructed aims, capaci-
ties, and outcomes not only serve a fulfillment of Kant’s theory of
knowledge. Selz’s thought about thought to recollect the schema emerges

to fulfill the dynamic power of the schema. We see and foresee it as a
structural representation to mediate the historical denouement of formal
relations at different points in the achievement of knowledge objectives. In
this reconstruction, we impute to Selz that the future (although unknown),
say in capacity, method, or outcome, is employed as a part of the historical
denouement employed to foresee the schema’s fulfillment. (Again, see
Appendix C.)
Selz’s Concept of the Schema’s Depictive Powers in Relation

to Knowledge and Representation
For Selz a ‘knowledge complex’ is a set of relations. This set includes
relations produced by analogy, recollection, and conceptualizing. The set
of relations constitutes a ‘whole’ structure. The schema—a mega-space—
represents such a knowledge complex as a ‘relationship.’ In this regard, the
schema itself is a coordinate relation of concepts. These are at a level that
Selz represents symbolically. I can also use the term ‘abstract.’ This use is
in Kant’s sense—a representation that has logical identity separate from
anything else. The term ‘symbolic’ sometimes means the same thing, but
its reference is linguistic. A symbolic representation is also a representa-
tion; so it too is other than its referent. Each of these features of repre-
sentation permits its navigability, say from the general to the specific, and
from the known to the unknown. Selz’s use justifies both the abstract and
symbolic terms’ meanings.
Peruzzi (1999, p. 197) sums up that the set of the relations conceptua-
lized and represented contributes to the understanding of the recursive
nature of the schema’s spaces. Consider that set of relations as a set of the
relations of and by analogy. The schemata—through the form and process
of analogy—carry and coordinate ‘meaning across domains’ of objects that
are represented and coordinated in space.
In the Kantian tradition, Peruzzi’s formulation appears to tie the schema
to a sweeping psychological account of knowledge. ‘[T]here are basic pat-
terns of meaning, rooted in perception (and, prominently, on propriocep-
tion) of geometric and dynamic relationships.’ (p. 191) Peruzzi’s analogy to
the Kantian scope of knowledge gives perspective to view the range of the
schema as Selz unfolds it. Still, in the tradition of Lakoff’s psycholinguistic
approach, Peruzzi conceives knowledge mainly through its reflection in
language. He writes (2000, pp. 170–171)
Each scheme is discretized into finitely many slots, cognized as positional

(‘thematic’) roles, of a topological-dynamical character, which provide the
means by which the structure of any thought manifests itself in language.
What is missing is a picture of interpenetrations. These are of thought as

the origin point and of language as its representation. To provide the
picture would require a medium of semiotic transfer. A depiction of the
schema that would fulfill this account can emerge from a reconstruction of
Selz’s ideas and their directions.
Selz’s version of the schema emerges as if from a powerful integrative
nucleus, namely, a symbolic and dynamic structuring that accommodates
transports of particulars and achieves a yield of conceptual relations. These
are Selz’s ‘coordinate relations.’ The resultant picture is geometric in that
the coordinates are reproducible in a space. Therein the symbolic repre-
sentations can be various and include the geometric configuration. The
schematic is also algebraic in that the symbolic representations are—as are
abstractions—reproducibly transformative. The picture is semiotic in that
the symbolic and the abstract representations are signs that can be coordi-
nated with thought. In this case, the representations are products that are
concepts. Therefore, their coordinate nature cuts across the semiotic
levels, their relationships, and the relationships of the concepts to which
they refer an organization.
Selz finds his way to describe thinking that is directed toward a goal.
The schema is key to charting the direction, to finding and organizing the
goal’s outcome, and to the psychological acts of selecting and achieving
each of these. In his conception, ‘all goal-directed cognitive operations are
guided by . . . schematic anticipations’ (Selz, 1924, p. 44). This function of
the schema is toward its own completion. It is to search for and find the
unknown—the element(s) to complete the knowledge complex and make
more specific the schema’s ‘coordinate relation.’
Psychological Processing to Achieve Logical Structuring
Identity Achieved Despite and Because

of the Presence of Unknowns
The achievement of a complete complex or ‘whole’ calls for a logical
structuring of its various concepts and representations. However, to work
productively, cognitive operations have to go off course to unknowns. So,
the structuring would also allow for factors of the unknown and provide for
a store of thinking to be accessible and to be used. The objective is to widen
the net for the selection of particulars that would be instrumental to the
completion of a knowledge complex. The coordination of the selected
particulars, though, would be only as a relation by ratio and equivalence.
Kant (1992/1800, pp. 626, 627, note 1) had held that Analogy infers
from particular to total similarity of two things, according to the principle
of specification. The relationship of a given comparison is that of a
proportion—a ratio. This ratio is open to the comparison with other
ratios that employ different particulars or different species terms (See
Callanan’s analysis 2008; also see Appendix C below). Accordingly,
analogy is the logic governing the discovery of reproductive symbolic
representations (rsr) of the concepts being compared. In brief, these
(rsr)s are representations that allow projected ratios for yet unmade
comparisons. This role of analogy, generally announced by Kant, has
its echoes brought to a clear pronouncement in Selz’s concept, the
anticipatory schema.
In my view, although Selz does not specifically say so, the schema’s
‘coordinate relation’ is a form of thought—specifically that of the ratio-
comparisons of analogy. This form of thought symbolizes and abstracts. It
therefore presents relations about the known concepts it represents, and
these relations can represent the ratio-comparisons of new or not-yet-
determined concepts too. Hence, the ratio-comparisons guide the instan-
tiation of and the search for specific concepts. All these—the concepts
being compared, the concepts being sought, the relations between and
among them—are advanced in analogies that yield ratios for the compar-
isons. The ratios express the concepts’ relations, which culminate as
coordinate relations; they become the schema for a given ‘knowledge
complex.’
The Schema’s Final Cause’s Reach for a New Analogical Status

The schema too becomes its own ‘whole’ constituted by its ‘coordinate
relation’ at some point of its complete convergence with the existing
whole for that knowledge complex. That point of complete convergence
is out of reach, but it is the constant object of the reach. Here is another
historical nexus, which in a narrative form would go from Aristotle’s ‘final
cause’ to Kant to Selz. However, as I reconstruct from the present, a
contemporary view would be more in focus if we looked at how Peirce
viewed Aristotle’s ‘final cause.’
I can only touch on this briefly here: In the Kantian picture of the schema
we sense the Aristotelian resolution of different kinds of causality. Aristotle’s
view of final cause seems to haunt Kant’s approach to the schema and to
knowledge and to reappear in Selz’s sequence from coordinate relations to
knowledge complex. But if we take our historical leap to Peirce and his
derivation, we also get something quite similar to Selz’s conception. Peirce’s
conception of ‘final cause’ is that which Hulswit (2001) calls ‘relational.’
Final cause reaches its end or its ‘final state’ in ‘different ways.’ That final
state is only a ‘general end.’ With Selz’s view, even when we do seem to
know enough to fulfill a given goal, the complex can be re-defined. Its form
then expands. An apt example is the concept of ‘memory’ itself. The
concept of memory has followed a course of becoming specific within a
variety of given metaphors (Draaisma, 2000; Norman, 2013). But new
technologies yield new concepts, and they can expand the ‘knowledge
complex.’ Thus, the concept ‘memory,’ as a whole, opens to new searches
for coordinate relations and new metaphors. Even with a new ‘up-to-date’
metaphor, the new whole’s schema is at best penultimate.
Instantiating the Schema
Selz’s View of the Schema’s Representational Range: Abstraction

and Symbolizing
Selz not only expands the schema’s range for representation, but also
presents a route to its potential for discovering patterns and projecting
thinking to represent new knowledge.
He shows that the schema’s representational capacity ranges from
specific to abstract; from classificatory to causal relations, from known to
anticipated and projected relations.
A schema can articulate the relations of semantically loaded terms,
such as the words in Selz’s ‘association’ tasks. It can also express the
relations of ‘productive mental activity.’ This can be done by way of
graphic (symbolic) diagrams with abstract designations of the particulars
(Selz, 1924, pp. 50–51). A representation can be an abstraction of an
existing or a projected causal relation. That may be either a known one,
or a ‘projected’ one not yet affirmed or established.
Problems and the way(s) to solve them is Selz’s vehicle; therefore, he
conceives of a representation of a method or operation to achieve a result.
His terms for representing these are ‘means abstraction’ and its outcome,
a ‘goal’ or G. As abstractions themselves, these terms are symbolically

represented. His idea of a relation is even more abstract, because it is for
a causal sequence not yet identified. For that case, he suggests a symbolic
representation for a ‘means actualization.’ That representation utilizes the
abstractions, G—projected outcome—and R—result. However, represen-
tation of the yet-to-be identified achieves yet another order of abstraction
when marked with a mu sign (μ). That mark indicates that representation’s
referents are anticipated—and realizable, either by heuristic use of partial
information available or by memory.
In present-day cognitive analysis and identification of schematic ele-
ments and patterns, either of these—sources or means—continues to be
subjected to the proportioning of analogical comparisons. This propor-
tioning is currently conceptualized within the default framework of cog-
nitive analysis we have described.1 However, this book projects an
expanded view of using analogy to sharpen the proposed equivalence.
Appendix C presents this as a view of thinking by way of a progression
of analogies.
Diagramming
As I have argued, a follow up on Selz’s ideas here develops the thought,
knowledge, and information components of Kant’s view. It would yield
very rich arrays of schema-inspired diagrams. Terms can be abstract in
that they are concepts instead of simply words that designate objects or
instances. Selz (1924, p. 61) shows that you can use circular representa-
tions for the concepts and link them by straight lines. This geometric
diagramming can place the concepts’ circles symbolically at the three
1
This does not trace these considerations to the present-day ideas of analogy as
‘mapping.’ In general, such views reduce analogy to induction. While this direc-
tion is also derivable from Selz, it is more consonant with the prevailing present-
day schema concepts as they are derived from Bartlett, Craik, and Piaget—for the
reasons given. The point in this present work is more in line with the extension of
Kant’s ideas about the schema in relation to thinking and the thinker. The wide
array of schematic diagrams that can be a function of the schema’s forms for
accommodating information and information patterns is informed by the inductive
approaches. But that’s only part of the story, and it isolates the unsolved portions
of Kant’s legacy.
corners of the lower base of a triangle, and then place another circle
representing their relation at a higher level, namely, the triangle’s apex.
The whole depiction is of superordination of concepts to their relation to
each other.
More contemporaneously, Simon (1981, pp. 151–152) calls for descrip-
tions of thought relations for associations and for predications. He relates
such descriptions to Selz’s aim to discover the thought processes and their
organization relative to their role in problem solving. Unlike the powerful
and ubiquitous default reductions to the inductive approach, the diagrams
that are projected here are meant to fold out the schema’s reflection of
thought and projections of thought patterns.
The Conceptual Organization of Knowledge as a Structure

of Coordinates
For Selz (1924, p. 37) to achieve a goal or complete a task is to elicit and
realize a ‘knowledge structure.’ A schema can be depicted at various levels
of representation and superposition. Thus, it not only can be the form that
generates, but also, it can become the form that expresses the knowledge
structure. The way to think about the schema is to conceive its capacities
generating, guiding, and resulting from different orders of the knowledge
structure. That knowledge structure can be specific to a problem or group
of problems and their outcomes. Even if, as a subclass, the knowledge
structure includes many like problems and their outcomes, there is a more
general structure on a symbolic level representing this specific ‘knowledge
structure.’ A symbolic representation at the level of a mega-space, the
schema is structurally a knowledge complex; it has many levels at which
classification of knowledge and information is selected, specified, and
organized. The schema’s logic and form, inherent within its mega-space,
can be generatively engaged relative to the overall knowledge complex.
That engagement would be at a symbolic level. There, the schema forms,
expresses, and opens for exploration, a coordinate relation of a target
concept with another concept. So, starting with an abstract version of a
coordinate relation, Selz comes up with an algebraic type formulation.
Using the phi symbol, φ, for this relation, Selz indicates the ‘cogni-
tive operation of complex completion’ (1924, p. 37). This ‘phase’ of the
schema is a ‘general’ or symbolic representation for the ongoing orga-
nization of knowledge. Although generative—and not anywhere near
the final form that would fit a completed knowledge structure—this
order of representation heads toward apprehending and instantiating a
‘whole.’ Therein, Selz’s concept is one of the organizational steps along

the way to a ‘whole.’ These become possible by way of phase-specific
templates—which the thinker can construct as the relations in an ‘antici-
patory schema.’ Its knowledge structure is incomplete. The anticipatory
schema, thus tied to reflecting and acquiring knowledge, contributes to
Kant’s conception and vision of the schema. But in addition, the present
thesis is that it is Selz’s concept that opens many avenues of current
pursuit in psychology (see again notes 2, 3; also the book’s Concluding
Summary, p. 113).
Dynamic Change
As I picture it, the spatial structure of the schema is of concentric spaces,
starting with a generic schema and proceeding to inclusion of groupings
(e.g., of types of problems and the specific problems within the type).
Navigation from one level of inclusion to another is by thought. However,
the recursive movements and the reproduction of spatial patterns, such as
the ‘action → outcome’ or ‘method → result’ sequences, are not only
dependent on the generic schema and the characteristics of its mega-space.
They are also a function of the ‘phase’ of the schema and its organization.
Thus, the knowledge complex can be incomplete, and yet the thinker
needs to move along within this. Presto—the anticipatory schema.
Consider the structure of the anticipatory schema as a phase of a
general symbolic representation. This idea of ‘phases’ in the knowledge
capabilities of the schema is not entirely dissimilar from the Piagetian
view of ‘unfolding’ and its basis in fixed steps. Phases are not merely
mechanical unfoldings of the structures of thinking and ways to accrue
knowledge as fixed steps in logic and its application to induction. Instead,
Selz’s structure of the schema has dynamic elements and phases. This is
like Fischer’s (2008) description of a ‘dynamic growth process.’ Within
it, dynamic change can unfold via growth spurts involving clustering,
consolidation, coordination and tier development, network growth,
nested networks, and emergence. For Selz, the schema’s phases are
dynamically responsive to the immediate problem, instead of develop-
mentally tied to a timetable and static at given points. Thus, the dyna-
mism in a ratio of unknown to similar but known relations can move the
analogy between the two to the generation of a new schema. The order-
ing proceeds to ‘express . . . fixed linkages within a system of specific
responses’ (Selz, 1924, p. 35).
Dynamism and Logic a Combination Enhancing the Concept

of the Schema
Kant’s idea that analogy can function to express proportionality between
concepts of the known and the unknown extends the analogy to induc-
tion (Callanan, 2008, pp. 8, 9). Strikingly, the implications of Selz’s
concepts also extend to ideas about induction. His concepts (1924,
p. 47) show the schema and its dynamic phases and capacities at
work, evolving toward an order of completion. With the advance of
analogy and movement toward logical organization, the schema’s repre-
sentational strategies enhance and produce inter-relations. These repre-
sentational strategies—abstract, symbolic, algebraic, spatial—use and
advance the interdependencies of the analogy and the schema, as ways
of leveraging the known to its relations with the unknown. This com-
bination and its projected outcomes are in a direct line from Kant to
Selz’s elaboration.
Anticipatory Logic and the Cognitive Object

With Selz’s concepts we see not only present-day applications to cognitive
analysis, but also the implications for the logic of advancing new ideas,
namely in Peirce’s logic of abduction. As I argued (p. 75) Selz’s concepts
reflect a solution to the Kant’s objective to use the schema for induction.
We can reconstruct Selz’s purpose by seeing it from the present-day
perspective that includes Peirce’s focus on pragmatic representation and
on heuristic logic. An example of this perspective is Sowa’s (1987/1992)
elaboration of Selz’s anticipatory schema.
Sowa organizes a Selz-like schema into ‘slots’—some specified;
some not. Selz had asked his subjects for an association to words he
presented. The association was to meet the requirements of a category
that Selz also presented. To respond to the task, the subject’s associa-
tion had to relate to the word in such a way as to provide another
word that would fit into a category of comparison. For example, it
could be the task to find a word that would function superordinate to
the word presented. So, the subject’s offered word in that case would
fill in a ‘superslot.’ To give the association, Selz’s subjects for his word
association type problems will have filled out one or another catego-
rical ‘superslot.’ To do this, as Sowa pictures it, the subject would
work from the ‘subslots.’ The different order ‘slots’ provide a picture
that can help organize information in either logical or analogical
ordering patterns. Unknowns—like Sowa’s superslots—are genuses;
‘known’ terms are ‘species.’ Working from the ‘species’ to fill in the
genus is now a specifiable strategy—very much like Peirce’s articulated
logic of ‘abduction.’ To broaden the elaboration so that the Kantian
ideas of the orders of thought are realizable, I use the terms, ‘class/
subclass’ in relation to logical organization. The thinker chooses a
particular as likely to heuristically reveal enough so that the class of
phenomena can be tagged or affected. For Selz, this cognitive process
of choosing takes the form, ‘accidental means abstraction.’ Selz ap-
pears to be grasping for a description of the thinker’s best guessing—
almost in the abductive thinking form. Thus, this best guess is
made by assuming that a process or method can be the key for
producing a desired response places that method as superordinate to
the objective.
Pulling Together Slotting of Abductive Guesses, and the Logic

of Analogy’s Advance to a Knowledge Structure
You—the thinker—might know what outcome you want (O) and then
select a method (p) to achieve it. But you can turn this around.
By stating the method as an abstraction, (p), you can then assume
that (p) → (O). ‘Process abstraction’ ‘reverses its course’ (Selz, 1924,
pp. 55–57). First, knowing what you want leads you to an abstract idea
of the method to achieve it. Then, the reversal logically leads to a
knowledge structure. (O) becomes a case subordinate to (p). An
extremely important observation here is the reversal of order, which
is characteristic of the logic of analogy by which genus and species
levels are exchanged. (Note that if the task were to cite a word that
would be subordinated to the target word, the selected word would
still go into a ‘super-slot.’)
In the thinker’s ‘intermediate means abstraction’ (pp. 80–81), she can
assume that a phenomenon’s known feature can be one in common with
a second phenomenon, which has an unknown feature in a parallel ‘slot.’
This too, appears like the thinker continuing to think by way of analogy.
Choosing a method or process to produce an intended outcome can lead
to the kind of thinking that says, ‘intelligence is what intelligence tests
measure.’ On the other hand, the method is sometimes heuristically

predictive. Setting a mode for creative thinking—like ‘brainstorming’—
can result in fertile associations of unlikely pairings of methods and
outcomes. I asked a hardware representative, What’s better to loosen a
screw that is rusted into its slot—‘WD 40’ or some other product?’ ‘Coca
Cola,’ she said. In sum, the logical structuring afforded by the method of
analogy facilitates such reversing of the status of the mode and
objective.2
The Logic and the Classificatory Structure of Selz’s Anticipatory Schema
Logic of the Anticipatory Schema

A Selzian view of the anticipatory schema has a dynamic logic. It
involves thinking by analogy. Sowa (1987/1992) noted this think-
ing’s close conceptual relation to the proto-inductive logic of Peirce’s
method of ‘abduction.’ Working from Sowa’s idea of slots, cognitive
objects—that is, concepts and other phenomena of thought—can be
organized logically and displayed in information (or representation)
networks. Selz and Peirce can be considered pioneers of the idea that
networks can ‘grow dynamically’ (Sowa, 1987/1992). Peirce (Peirce
et al., 1974, pp. 61–65; Peirce, 1906/1991, pp. 249–252) had a con-
cept of existential graphs. These were tied to the particularity of events.
Since each event is an individual occurrence, there is no certain out-
come by logical identity. However, Sowa (1987/1992) points to
2
Place a cause-and-effect relation in the ‘slots’ for the analogy’s relation of the
two sets of features: These sets are Set 1—A : B. Set 2—x : D. (x is the
unknown). For the analogy, ‘A : B :: x : D,’ B and D have an order of
equivalence. If the analogy’s comparison is assumed to be one of cause and
effect; then, where ‘→’ signifies a cause effect relation, A → B :: x → D. That is,
A causes B as C causes D. The ‘x’—or the thinker’s guessed factor—is hopefully
to be the feature in common. Placed in the analogy as a cause–effect relation, it
is assumed to be in a ratio with Set 1 and therein instrumental for Set 2. The
slots for the analogy’s sets are on a parallel level, but if x is extracted, the logical
structure can then be a conceptual one: The feature (x) in a ‘super-slot’ then
superposes the phenomena being related or compared, namely, the ‘feature ⊇
phernomenon1 and phenomenon 2. Notice this is the logic of abduction too,
since the particular is assumed a key to the class ordering.
Peirce’s view ‘… that the inference operations on existential graphs

could be considered “a moving picture of thought.’ In common with
Külpe and Selz is the idea of finding a scientific way to depict and
predict.
In this nexus of Peirce and Selz—via Sowa’s ‘slots’—the role of
analogy would be finding particulars that would fill the slots. A
progression of analogies and their products of ‘growing networks’
of slots/subslots relations make it possible to diagram the exchanges
of genus and species classificatory positions as a ‘moving picture’—
(See Appendix C). The implications for this concept of ‘growing
networks’ can be in expanding possibilities in Artificial Intelligence.
More directly in line with the themes of this book, the depictability
and predictability have implications for cognitive theory. They also
imply that ‘the transformations could be interpreted as network
operations initiated and carried out by the network itself ’ (Sowa,
1987/1992, p. 15).
For Peirce the depiction had been the diagram—a manifestation of
thought, and also a way to depict it. The upshot for this present book is
via our reconstructed understanding of Selz’s contribution to the schema
concept: Its dynamism and predictability can lead to integration with the
semiotic relations of thought and representation and in turn with the effects
on the relation of logic to scientific induction.
Classificatory Elements and Structure
The Elevation of the Particular to a Genus

The anticipatory schema has a slot for an unknown component! The
thinker fills that slot with a guess that a particular feature (marked ‘x’) is
the unknown component with causal powers. ‘x’ is a component
in common with a causal factor (A) already known in a comparison
cause–effect relation, say, A → B. In the analogical comparison of that
relation, the known (A) and the unknown (x) factors are in parallel
positions. The analogy would be
A : B :: x : D:
Assume x is a particular feature and that it is present along with or in

A. With the analogical comparison, the two become subclasses in a
classificatory structure. Thus, (C) represents the class of causes that could
lead to the class of effects (E):
C ! E
In the analogy, A and x are subclasses of (C), and B and D, subclasses of

effects (E). Thus,
C A; X
E B; D
The thinker is focusing the unknown, x. The analogical comparison rela-

tions are in service of identifying x. The chosen feature (a particular) that
would do the job is a component common to both causal factors posi-
tioned in the analogy, A : B :: x : D.
Suppose A is a toothpaste that cleans teeth, and x is something else that
would clean them but make them white. If baking soda were to perform that
double action, we’d have a particular common to A’s cleaning and x’s
cleaning function.
Analogy’s Psychological Move from Logical Classes

to Psychological Concepts
We now go more deeply into the classification possible as integral to the
analogy’s dynamic exchanges of genus and species. Instead of a stable
logical ordering of (C) as the class and A and x as subclasses, that logic
drops to the background, and the thinker psychologically selects a parti-
cular, namely, one that would serve to ‘cause’ a solution to a selected
problem (e. g., perhaps some chemical component of baking soda!) The
formal vehicle is more a conceptually organized structure than a logical
classification. Thus, now conceptually, the particular (x) overarches both A
and x. The x plays a double role. It is vaulted into a genus slot to organize the
concept of the causal factor. But it also operates as a causal factor. (This is an
approximation of what I think Selz’s logic is structuring—vis-à-vis his
conceptualization of the anticipatory schema.) My point is that for the
anticipatory schema, as an inclusion structure, the particular ⊇ the phe-
nomenon. As a format for the unknown relation, this species ⊇ genus
ordering results from an analogy: The particular is to the known :: an

‘equivalent’ particular is to the unknown.
In all this, we have noted the central place of analogy—a pivot point for
Kant from the underlying artistic and imaginative capacity of thought to
the employable aspect of thinking. Thus, Kant (1992/1800, p. 625) refers
to the ‘reflective power of judgment’ as having ‘only subjective validity.’
‘[T]he universal to which it proceeds from the particular is only empirical
universality—a mere analogue of the logical.’ Selz fixes a pivot point from
subjective judgment to empirically sound concepts and outcomes. That
point is in the synthesis of the analogy’s powers with the causal—and
logical—sequence of the anticipatory schema. For Peirce, the pivot is the
thinking process guiding the potential of diagrams to visually present
mathematical relationships. But in addition, the logic becomes that of
abduction, and it is a lever to pragmatic particulars.
To be sure, for each—Selz and Peirce—representations are both the
outcome of and the key entrée to the thinking process. For Selz,
analogy is the nature of the proto-logical relationship, which allows
particulars to be proposed as coordinates to known relationships. The
present-day upshot for this interpretation is that it links the thinking
involved in developing articulated schematics to prototype classification.
That, psychologically, is very fertile. Classification by prototype opens
paths to the heuristic and imaginative values of analogy in the realization
of knowledge patterns.
With Selz’s approach, knowledge is constructed by leveraging analo-
gies, such that their relations provide particulars as information. Since
information theory and its products are central to cognitive science, one
line of development leads Selz’s approach to the schema’s established
function in cognitive science and its related disciplines (Van Strien and
Fass, 2006, pp. 191, 192). In a second line, the schema becomes a fertile
conception that would further affect cognitive anthropology, psycholin-
guistics (see Casson, 1983), semiotics, and geometric diagramming of
cognitive objects and processes (in the patrimony of Gärdenfors 2004).
These transactions can be semantic, conceptual, and logical. The schema,
funneled into an information model of knowledge, is too reductive. But
Selz’s concepts open the path to potential for thought and language
transformability patterns in Kant’s schema’s knowledge dynamic spaces.
The schema’s mix of dynamism and logic become the stimulus to topolo-
gical diagramming of cognitive transactions.
The Aesthetic Idea, Irrationality, and Phases

of Art and Science
Kant viewed art as ‘purposive representation,’ yet he divided aesthetic from
rational ideas. That separation opened a gap, requiring a mediator to bridge
it. The two basic Kantian conceptions are congruent with—if not forerunners
of—Selz’s pursuit of the form of the ‘schema.’ Selz’s phase of the schema as
anticipatory is a form he conceived as providing a mediating template. That
form is aesthetic in that it requires ‘imagined’ representations. As with Kant,
for Selz, these representations, albeit aesthetic, can be ‘purposive.’
I have assumed that Selz’s anticipatory schema becomes explicit as a form
when its relations are opened to an analogy. So, I will refer to a Selzian
‘anticipatory analogy.’ It augurs an imaginative, hence aesthetic, idea—and it
is purposive. The anticipatory analogy can accommodate and provide for the
traffic between its conceptions. These, as I indicate in the analogies constructed
above, involve comparisons of ‘imagined’ representations with perceived or
rationally known ones (cf. Ginsborg, 2014; Kamhi, 2003; Kant, 2000/1781).
Thinking about a given set of relations yields outcomes, but these are in
a continuous state of change. Still, just by thinking about a psychological
process, it does not merely follow that one can improve the concept of the
determinants of an outcome. The thinker may think that A enhances B.
Imagine A is ‘praise’ and ‘B’ ‘self-esteem.’ Taking into account change,
A repeated too often may sound hollow. The thinker may have to add that
‘praise’ is a function of frequency. With too much praise, B—a person’s
‘self-esteem’—may be so enhanced that A loses or changes its value. One
can thereby change the terms of the comparison, so much that the
comparison is turned on its head. If you know A enhances B; you may
have to think that A can also be an inhibitor.
This principle is emblematic of a general trend in the outcomes of
thinking: The outcomes will not be merely in a line with their objectives
(cf. Hergenhahn, 2008, p. 270). Any thinking can lead rationally to a given
concept or proposition—which automatically has the underside of its direct
contradiction. Thus, Kant’s antinomies can reappear for any specific cogni-
tive object. Selz saw that this principle combining the purposive and the
unintended outcomes of thinking had to be incorporated in an account of
thinking. The principle had to be reflected in the course of working with the
schemas to account not only for known but also for unknown relations.
Further thought is needed to seek out information to subject to schemata to
help depict and define objects and patterns we can live with.
More broadly, change in a conception, category, or proposition is in tune

with Hegel’s characterization of the ‘Geist’—as thinking and/or knowing
that is changeable. ‘For Hegel, every intellectual position has its own inner
contradictions, which propel Geist forward to overcome them and hence to
achieve a new position in which they are superseded’ (Burch, 2014).
Selz’s concern took the form of admitting and utilizing the importance
for development of ‘unintentional and chance’ factors within the compass
of a Kantian schematic account.
The unintended can include the opposite of what is proposed,
intended, and conceptualized. The schema can handle the opposition.
Thus, within the schema, the unintended can include not only the out-
come of a schematically guided idea or concept; it can also include chance
factors in the input—including ways of bringing about outcomes. In
general, Selz recognizes that in moving into new and unknown territory
the schema has to not only accommodate the thinker’s experience, but
also engage in productive thinking. Thus, the thinker’s psychological
landscape requires preliminary ‘apperception of experiences.’ The thinker
also needs access to chance by way of ‘coincidental means abstraction.’
These are Selz’s requirements as they refer to his concept of the ‘antici-
patory schema’ and its role in thought, representation, and knowledge.
The Opposite and the Unexpected

The ‘opposite’—unintended—side of an issue can be just as deep an
influence on Selz as the mutual development of like ideas, such as
those of Külpe, and Bühler. More broadly, such opposition marked the
development of the Würzburg enterprise. Hoffmann et al. (1996) trace a
series of influences on that enterprise. Külpe ‘together with Karl Marbe,
founded the institute.’ They modeled it on Wundt’s institute. However,
Wundt ultimately was at odds with Külpe. Wundt’s attack, rejecting the
Würzburg methodology, argued that its being neither objective nor
experimental was tantamount to not being scientific. On the other
hand, Wundt had an important concept characterizing psychological
process, which fits to Selz’s conceptions of thought. It goes outside of
the issue of method, perhaps into the philosophical foundations for
thought about the method of studying thought. It would appear to lead
not only to the nature of findings, but also to the expectations of those
findings, and the design of methodology to cope with that, which is not
predictable inductively. Wundt argued the principle, ‘heterogony of
ends.’ It is not dissimilar from the legacy of unexpected outcomes out-

lined by Kant and Hegel:
This principle of continually changing relations is most striking when an idea

of ends is formed on the basis of the given relations . . . The relation between
the actual effects in such a case and the ideated ends is such that secondary
effects always arise that were not thought of in the first ideas of ends. These
new effects enter into new series of motives, and thus modify the old ends or
add new ones to them. (Wundt 1897; tr. Judd, pp. 326–327)
An idea formed from given relations can yield a modification that is a new
relation. This is phrasing sounding a lot like Selz’s intent for the antici-
patory schema. Wundt’s principle was broadly conceived:
The principle of heterogony of ends in its broadest sense dominates all

psychical processes . . . however, it is to be found primarily in the sphere of
volitional processes. . . . (1897)
The point is echoed in Selz’s idea of the role of chance and accident—which
coalesces with his view of thinking and its role in producing schematic
configurations. In this hall of echoes, Wundt’s more encompassing principle,
heterogony, reverberates in Selz’s commitment to the schema in the Kantian
mode. That is not simply as a formatting for information or language, but
instead as a form of and for the relational coordinates of thought.3
3
These points concerning heterogony are formally in tune with the discovery logic
of Peirce’s abductive reasoning. Thus, for Peirce, the diagram has potential for
dynamic change. Thought and perception are in a relationship with its representa-
tions. Therefore, they can interrelate in different ways in accordance with Peircean
representations, like the interpretant. Thought interrelates with representation
and it implies change as an outcome. This interrelation and its prospective changes
are assumed to be inherent in the function of a diagram like the schema.
The heterogony principle is also consonant with a sweeping theory of art
(Gombrich, 2002). In Gombrich’s theory, the organization within a work of art
is stable until there is too much stability. Then the art is historically dynamic. It can
reverse the relation between its representations, when they are logical, rational, and
representational. It can turn that governance on its head, and present primitives—
psychologically motivated elements unstabilized. I bring this connection with art
to the fore because of the dynamism and inspirations of analogical thinking—its
CONCLUDING SUMMARY: CHANGE INFUSED

INTO THE SCHEMA AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF THINKING ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY
Adding up the Present Constraints

The concept of the schema formulated by major theorists—Bartlett, Craik,
Piaget—has become a reliable and reproducible framework. It accommo-
dates logical terms, propositions, and empirically directed hypotheses. It has
given rise to, it supports—and it reproduces—present-day scientific models
of psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science. Presently, there
are neo-neo-behavioristic models of cognitive psychology. These models had
developed and reigned in the 1980s. In the predecessor models that Neisser
(1967, 1976) described and championed, the schema could reflect a stimu-
lus–response causal sequence. This template had its predecessors in various
behavioral theories, and the successions in cognitive behavior and cognitive
processes kept psychology alive as a science responsive to the ‘empirical
domain’ (Danziger, 1993). Thereafter, cognitive psychology moved farther
in the direction of thought as ‘representational.’ Cognitive psychology
therefore became even more congruent with information processing. This
information-based approach yielded two outcomes. It (1) deepened the
dependency on computational sequences to simulate thought and mind
(2) led to the ascendency of ‘mental models’ to account for thinking and
reasoning. These mental models would be reflective of the problems the
individual might encounter to adapt in her environment and need to solve.
The solutions would be such that the representations needed for cognitive
problems, and to be used to cope with and resolve them, would be schematic
and reflect action–outcome sequences. (See Johnson-Laird, 2002)
Support for a Language-Based Version of Thought

and a Schematic Base for Both
As discussed earlier in the book, Peirce’s semiotic approach had been to
bridge the deep gap between the phenomenological experience of thought
and a variety of representations. His view was that representations could
omnipresence and fecundity in thinking about new particulars, their role in under-
standing the relation of existing relations, and their potential for new knowledge
about them and about newly illuminating coordinating relations.
mediate between signs that communicate—like those of language—and

signs that interrelate with thought. Peirce’s views provide a significant
perspective on the issues flowing from Kant and taken on by Selz (see
p. 80 above). To develop Peirce’s views, this book would require much
more latitude. I can make a summary point particularly relevant to the
language/thought issue at the center of the struggle to keep psychology of
thought scientific: By his focusing signs and articulating the different semio-
tic levels of representation, Peirce could keep the scientific eye on language as
the vehicle by which to represent thought. The schema, as it was developed,
could remain a format, which could account for the relation of the terms and
forms of language as well as for the cognitive objects they represented.
In the book, I have incorporated the issue of the psychologists’ deep
dependency on the schema’s causal sequence. In particular, following the
concepts developed by Lakoff, I discussed how it has affected psycholin-
guistics. With the schema as a template that could accommodate both
thought and language, one could focus language and impute organization
to thought—and further hypothesize that the organization would then be
‘reflected’ in language and meaning. Since the book’s treatment of the
implications has been broadly applied to anthropological linguistics and
less specifically to the fate of psychology and cognitive psychology,
I suggest the following points within this summary.
The role of psycholinguistics is not the only influence on the psychol-
ogy of thought. Yet, I focus it here. That focus is justified because of the
close relation of language to thought that psychologists have adopted.
Consider the general effects of the psycholinguistics concept and use of
the schema as they have an impact on psychology. This impact is a two-
way street. Psychology’s need for its access to the empirical domain is
causative—but the applications of the psycholinguists to language and its
relation to thought reverse causative direction to affect psychological
concepts. Still, for the reasons I have argued, the psychology of cognition
is strongly committed to language as its evidence for thought. Language is
a form of social expression, which gets internalized as thought patterns,
but the thought patterns are reflected in (and by) the linguistic represen-
tations, acts, and outcomes and their patterns. The reasoning appears very
circular. Even so, it makes sense that the two-way interactive effects of
psycholinguistic theorizing are powerfully reinforcing. The schema
becomes a convincing and defining form for depicting the psychological
and the linguistic transactions.
With All This Two-Way Determinism, How Can the Schema Lead
to Changeability—Productive Thinking?
To bring this summary to Selz’s potential impact on psychology, I move on
to the disruptions that can issue, because of the changeability of ends
(heterogony). How do we take this into account in the schema—so tradi-
tionally a concept providing stability of causal sequence and logical form?
What does the move toward a Selzian concept of the schema reflect in and
offer for the changeability of a model of psychology and cognitive science?
Implications of Selz’s Schema Concept for Change

in Psychology
Psycholinguistics Influence on Psychology: The Empirical Resolution

to Kant’s Schema Concept
The psycholinguistic enterprise’s focus on the schema has been in line
with the mainstream resolution of Kant’s dilemmas about the schema.
Language and information became the focal points, and the issue of
thought and knowledge leveraged from there. This approach affects a
wide array of issues that cut across language and psychology. The impact
on psychology is elemental in relation to cognitive psychology’s commit-
ment to thought as ‘representational’ and to the idea that thought and its
processing are reflected in mental models of those causal sequences.
Thus, in the work of Lakoff (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999)
and their followers, the causal action sequence becomes the driver. That
basis is represented by the focus and dependency on the schema. In the
psycholinguistic approach, this focus and its conceptualization are
famously developed for describing and explaining the organization of
metaphors—but the development is not only for those figurations. The
causal action sequence is the underlying schematic template for mean-
ings; hence there are figurations (schematically engendered) behind all
semantic units. These assumptions entail a psycholinguistic idea of mind,
which extends to the psychological development and employment of
concepts and their linguistic presentations and representations. The
approach therefore leads to a support for and renewal of the familiar
cognitive behavior model of cognitive psychology. The schematic sequence
culminates in a compleat stimulus–response model. It is expanded to
include a neurological set of determinants (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999;
Gallese and Lakoff, 2005). The compatibilities entailed extend to infor-

mation theory as well.
Implications for a Present-Day Psychology

The cognitive behavior model of cognitive psychology with its replicable
schematics of object/action/outcome has emerged in a range of phenom-
ena from neurological to linguistic to psychological to information. The
range is gigantic, since the neurological phenomena are considered as
structurally determinant—and we have this tribute to Kant’s idea of the
‘deep’ influence of the schema as a form. All this synthesis and agreed
upon identification of the role of the schema, adds up to its insistent
replicability and penetrative effects on a wide scope of phenomena.
Therefore, the question of thought and knowledge would appear to
need a breakthrough—if only to go beyond the veil between representa-
tion and the thought represented.
The thinker seems to be able to make navigations, but the psychology
to describe and account for that is only ‘reproductive.’ It is not in tune
with ‘productive thought’ of a given thinker, who decides not to navigate
back and forth from schematic patterns that are parallel or mutually
dependent. Nor, is it in tune with the productive thought of a thinker
trying to access seemingly inaccessible experiences of originating concepts,
ideas, and new knowledge to solve unsolved problems.
To complete the book, I make the following comparisons. They zero in
on the ‘schema re-schematized.’ These comparisons are to contrast the
prevailing state of affairs with the needed changes that a shift to a Selzian
concept of the schema would make possible.
Analogy as a Route to a Selzian Dynamic Schema

I focused the thinker’s analogical thinking at work in the process of
navigating the schema. Selz applies such thinking to develop his concept
of the anticipatory schema. It becomes his ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’
Informed by analogical thinking, the anticipatory schema becomes a
form that engenders analogical thinking.
A view of ‘analogy’ as an important under-structure to thinking is
compatible with the general direction of present-day cognitive science
and cognitive psychology. Still, that view of analogy is an attenuated
one. It is a mechanical Sorcerer’s Apprentice, having lost its connection
with the outsidedness of agency. It is not reflective of the role of the

thinker as an agent seeking knowledge (May, 1995). Instead, it is tied
to the concept of the schema as a template for information processing
and sorting. In relation to the study of analogy, two directions presently
prevail. They both constrain analogy, making it accessible to reproduc-
tive, but not productive thinking. One of these present directions is to
consider the analogy as mappings of figurative terms onto schematic
sequences (Gentner, 1983; Gentner and Holyoak, 1997; Hofstadter and
Mitchell, 1994, for example). The second is to consider the Hofstadter
(2001; Hofstadter and Sander, 2013) information theory approach as an
approach to mind. In that case, memory and feedback loops are subject
to agent direction. That would seem to promise a breakthrough; since
the agent should be an ‘outside’ determinant that could shake up the
system—the meanings, the logic, the schematic determinants. But, alas,
the agent is just another computational routine—albeit one on a ‘gov-
erning’ level. All together, we have a computational model in which the
schema and its causal sequences are subordinated to Minsky-type
‘agents.’ These are merely determinative sequences. (They govern super-
ordinate actions that are situated in schemata.) In short, the ‘agents’ are
actions that determine other actions (Minsky, 1986). The can is kicked
down the road!
All of this is a picture of action reproduction of the schema and its con-
straints—a picture of determinative sequences that move both ways in an
action sequence: agent ⇆ outcome. In this mode, logical forms appear and
advance their patterns in concert with the same schematic direction and
formation of sequences that govern sentences and propositions.
Consequently, the question of re-conceptualization—the need for new ideas
and new knowledge—is then not what a Selzian approach can afford: a
tolerated deconstruction of the logical forms, an elevation of the terms of the
schema so that they become more symbolic and abstract. They are therefore
accessible to representations of the unknown and to reversals of classificatory
order.
These moves of the ‘anticipatory schema’ result in incorporations of the
unknown. It comes about that X is in the schema. The presence of an
unknown call for moves outside the logical identity and in contradiction of
the terms and groupings that we most often regard as required for a
‘logical read’ of the schema. That ‘logical read’ is one where the terms
are identified and defined and the action sequences can be expressed in
ways that can fit the requirements of logically related propositions.
Selz and the Road Beyond the Logical Read

of the Schema: A Form for Discovery
A ‘logical read’ sounds good for a science that wants to have specific hypoth-
eses, which can be tested and verified. However, the logical read has tight
constraints. They hold at bay the value of the anticipatory schema as a route
outside formal logic. That outside route involves a modal logic—within which,
a schema-with-unknowns violates rules of identity and contradiction. Selz’s
anticipatory schema, in allowing a symbolic and unknown factor, provides for a
discovery logic and also for a non-logical search for variables or particulars.
Hence, it opens to a search for knowledge; it entails not merely a dependency
on input and outcome, locked into information and its established sequences.
This ‘pre-logical’ state of affairs has a great advantage. It permits new
combinations and new formerly excluded particulars to enter the forma-
tion of concepts and new categories—as if there can be, as Karl Popper
saw, a route from the anticipatory schema to a discovery phase (Popper,
2005, 1959, 1935; Simkin, 1993; ter Hark, 2007).
Currently, in cognitive science, information theory, and their influ-
ence on a cognitive psychology, the Minsky-type schema prevails. It
blocks an advance to a more complex logic that can break out into
different modes. Some of these modes do not follow logical rules. Yet,
the modes can match those psychological processes of thought seeking
the unknown and a ‘completion’ of what Selz called the ‘knowledge
complex.’
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A: THREE APPROACHES TO TIME INTERACTIONS

IN HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION
Consonant with the general description in Note 1—viz., Little’s (2010)

focus on “historical cognition” in his broad concept of history and what
history should be—are three ways of viewing and dealing with time inter-
actions in the historian’s approach to and analysis of history. These are
Foucault’s, Haydu’s, and Ricoeur’s.
Foucault has two approaches: (1) archeological: History is philosophically
reflective thinking. It is to systematically describe a ‘discourse object.’ (2)
genealogical: ‘the affirmation of knowledge as perspective.’ It is ‘an analysis
of descent and emergence’—approaching history from the past; yet, seeking
meaning by asking. ‘‘What is it in the present that produces meaning for
philosophical reflection?” (Foucault, in Kritzman, 1988, p. 87; quoted by
Tamboukou, 1999).
Haydu (1998) conceives the historian as a thinker, who is a problem-
solver. He advocates an account that reconstructs the problem-solvers’
understandings and choices. How they make use of the past enables us to
account for trajectories across multiple periods (p. 367). Haydu’s is an
account of the historian’s problem-solving understandings and choices,
deployed to understand the “trajectories across multiple periods.”
Ricoeur (2012), approaching history as narrative, sees a multi-directional
temporal focusing as central to the logic of narrative causality. ‘[W]hat

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48276-7
100 APPENDICES
matters is that both the conclusion and its anticipation count as what might
be called objective correlates of the “grasping together”’ (Dowling, 2011;
p. 6). For Ricoeur, history is narrative as a text, which can be seen as both a
conclusion to a problem and its anticipation.
All three approaches have in common the idea that history is under-
standing—a problem-solving selection of perspectives. These are per-
spectives on the anticipation of conclusions and from which to focus the
light the conclusions shine on the selection of method and the different
stages of forming the problem. All perspectives have in common a flow
that focuses anticipations and conclusions in exchangeable looping
directions. These are directions to and from temporal, spatial, and
causal slots and their turns as origin and outcome of their object
identity.
An Example of Perspectives on Perspectives
The Frame Concept’s Subtractions

Picture your standing on top of your contemporaneously viewable per-
spective. It allows you to look back how Plato and Aristotle viewed
thought—and its antecedents in the soul or in ‘form’—as a projection
that enabled thought and in turn knowledge. From that perspective—as
best you could experience the thoughts of the ancients—form a picture of
the schema. Of course, that picture has undergone centuries of transfor-
mation to get to a point of resolution that significantly influences the
present view. But the look back to the classical view gives us a picture not
merely of what they were missing, but also of what they tried to achieve.
So now leapfrog to that point of resolution—which I identify as the
‘frame’ concept, particularly Minsky’s. We can see what was added, but
also what was subtracted from the classical view. However, by looking
back from the present all the way to the Plato/Aristotle concepts, we have
a two-way perspective. There is the distance between their ideas and
Minsky’s ‘resolution.’ For the moment, call it a ‘gulf.’ There is also the
difference between our present understanding and that ‘gulf.’ We now
have a view from a contemporaneous perspective that allows a re-assess-
ment—and a search for mediators. With this multi-perspectival considera-
tion of the ‘gulf’ between the Plato Aristotle view and the ‘frame concept,
we can re-litigate the issue of art versus the elaboration of a device as a
route to knowledge.
APPENDICES 101
APPENDIX B: CONCEPTUAL TERMS AND PERSPECTIVES

IN SELZ’S USE OF ANALOGY
Reading Selz can be complex. His text presents comparisons, but in a

compressed way (see quote above from Selz, 1924; p. 47). They are in an
analogy format or mode, but each concept is related in more than one
logical or semiotic or cognitive sense. Although analogy is used, more than
one perspective on the terms compared is being offered—or indeed com-
puted. His terms (which I will explain constitute “concepts”) are these:
Anticipatory schema, (AS); schema, (SC); memory complex, (MC); and
knowledge complex (KC).
The general level comparison he is after is
AS : SC :: MC : KC:
That set of ratios would show that two relations are structured the same way:
(1) The anticipatory schema will be the layout that underlies (and can
result in) the memory complex. (2) The schema will be the layout that
underlies (and can result in) the knowledge complex.
The analogy (in the two sets of comparisons above) is complex. That is
because the concepts it is drawing into comparison are organized as pairs—
but this is in three different ways.
1. They are organized as pairs of categories (cg). For example, SC is the
genus for a type of schema, AS, viz., a species level of the generic
category.
2. They are organized as pairs of representations (r). For example, the
two ‘complex’ terms, MC and KC, represent the particulars of a target
domain. The MC is the psychological domain that has a store of and
an organization of particulars that constitute an extension, intension,
and implicature of a target domain—such as the one in Selz’s experi-
ments, namely the associative chain of particulars in the association of
two categorically selected words. The KC is a broader domain repre-
senting all that is in the MC plus different ways of accessing and
understanding and organizing and verifying that information.
3. They are organized as cognitive objects of thought (t). For example,
the AS is a symbolic level entity. It consists of algebraic symbols for
the relation, as well as for the known and unknown particulars of
meaning and method being related. This entity is a conceptualization
102 APPENDICES
of a geometric space—somewhat like a morphism with causal patterns

that determine aspects of the space.
So, there are three ways of organizing (cg, r, and t) the two sets of
comparisons (AS: SC and MC: KC). I treat these three ways as perspectives
and assign them as subscripts to the concept entities: anticipatory schema,
AS; schema, SC; memory complex, MC; and knowledge complex, KC.
I assign conceptual status to each of these. The perspective subscripts
(cg, r, and t) are assigned for each of the concept entities.
Now to Selz’s description: In it you can discern two analogies. The first
compares the concept entities as categories; hence shows the ‘whole’ ‘part’
relations of AS and MC in relation to those of SC and KC. The second
analogy shows the relation of the concept entities as representations to
those entities as thoughts:
Selz’s text presents the comparisons, but in a compressed way. The
comparisons are in an analogy format or mode, but each concept is related
in more than one logical or semiotic or cognitive sense. Selz’s terms
(which constitute “concepts”) use analogy in more than one of the three
perspectives I identified for the terms compared. His terms are:
Anticipatory schema, AS; schema, SC; memory complex, MC; and

knowledge complex, KC.
Using their symbols, I can now state the two salient formats of Selz’s
analogy for which he appears to have assigned the different perspectives
they are addressing:
AScg : MCcg :: SCcg : KCcg
ASr : SCr :: Mt : MCt
APPENDIX C: ANALOGY RECURSIONS,

THE USE OF ANALOGY PROGRESSIONS
Analogy Recursion, Individual Thinking, and Historical Evidence
The use of analogy as a key to thought and to history depends on sharpening
the selection of the explanatory concepts and their relationships—as analo-
gies bring them to the surface. However, since the analogies give only
APPENDICES 103
equivalences, these have to be tempered and sharpened. Using the method

of equivalences simply leads to a progression of analogies that are used to
elucidate initial analogies. This involves what Armstrong (2006, pp. 39–46)
describes as the recursive use of analogy. He details Freud’s fruitful use of
analogy-upon-analogy and argues its value to the creativity in forming
theoretical concepts. But Armstrong carries the point further. He argues
the intersection of the personal and the evidentiary as an instance of analo-
gical reasoning and its recursions. The personal in this book involves our
reconstruction of Selz’s thinking. The evidentiary involves a series of sources
at different historical loci. The intersection affects the relation of the indivi-
dual as thinker and the historiography involved in accounting for the think-
ing of the individual. In this book, the approaches to historical factors—
particularly Haydu’s and Ricoeur’s described below—are congruent with the
approach to understandings through recursive analogies.
I take the view of analogical thinking in its use to historically reconstruct
Selz’s view of the schema—and to describe the general use of analogy basic
to the schema and the anticipatory schema. (In the course of the unfolding
of Selz’s concepts, I also show that Selz used analogy to make his bridges
between the unknowns of the anticipatory schema and the schema.)
Progressions of Analogy
I propose a view of analogy for the book’s discussion of its role in
productive and creative thinking—and for the historical understanding
of Kant’s legacy issues in his concept of the schema. The view takes into
account the recursive potential of analogy, but suggests that it plays out in
a systematic use of progressions to evince new relationships and to sharpen
the selection of particulars that would be key and/or dispositive in tar-
geted understandings.
Analogy as progression.
Analogy: The form is a ratio of two ratios. Call that ratio, R2
Analogical thinking: A progression of ratios of two ratios. Thus,
A : B :: C : D is symbolized as R21 ðr1; r2Þ. That is, R21 is a particular ratio—
the first in a progression, viz., R21n . To explain, R21 would refer to a
first comparison in the progression of analogies that are compared
with (A : B :: C : D) is compared with (E : F :: G : H). R22 can refer to
( I : J :: K : L) :: (A : B :: C : D) :: (E : F :: G : H).
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INDEX
A Concepts, 1, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,

Abductive reasoning, 62, 92 12, 15, 16, 17, 26, 29, 33, 36,
Agent, 45, 48, 49, 59, 97 38, 39, 40–41, 47–49, 53, 56,
Analogy, 6–8, 12–13, 15, 16, 17–18, 58, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 75, 79,
20, 23, 24, 30, 31–32, 37, 42, 80, 82, 84, 87
49–51, 52, 54, 55–59, 60, 62, Contradiction, 32, 35, 91, 98
63–65, 70, 71, 72–73, 75, 77, 79, Coordinate relations, 16, 17, 30, 32,
84, 86, 88–89, 97 54, 57, 59, 60, 71, 73, 78, 80
Anticipatory schema, 1, 6, 9, 12–13, Craik, K. J. W., 7, 9, 22, 37, 44, 45,
14, 16, 31, 63, 71, 72–73, 74, 76, 46, 81, 93
83, 86–87, 89, 91, 98
B D
Bartlett, F. C., 7, 9, 22, 37, 40, 43, 44, Danziger, K., 93
45, 76, 81, 93 Discovery, 55, 60, 74, 79, 98
Bergson, H., 13, 29 Dynamic schema, 29, 76, 96–97
Borromean twists, 54, 67, 70
Bühler, K., 56, 57, 58, 60, 91
F
Foucault, M., 23, 25
C
Frame, 9, 40, 42, 46, 47, 52
Class, 12, 16, 32, 39, 59, 73, 85
Classification, 15, 30, 31, 35, 54, 59,
82, 88, 89
Classificatory exchange, 31–32, 50 G
Cognitive behavior, 93, 96 Gallese, V., 96
Cognitive objects, 10, 20, 28, 31, 33, Gentner, D., 97
34, 35, 52, 58, 59, 64, 71, 72, 89 Genus-species order, 30

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48276-7
118 INDEX
H M
Haydu, J., 8, 27, 40, 66 May, M., 21, 97
Heterogony of ends, 92 Minsky, M., 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 97
Historian’s, 23, 24, 27, 66 Mitchell, M., 97, 97
Holyoak, K. J., 97
Hofstadter, D. R., 57, 59, 97
N
Neisser, U., 93
I
Identity, 32, 35, 50, 53, 62, 65,
78–80, 98
Information, 4, 6, 8, 13, 22, 26, O
39–40, 45, 46, 47–49, 54, 82, 98 Outside agents, 31, 49, 97
Involuntary response, 76 Overton, W. F., 3
J P
Johnson-Laird, P. N., 22, 46, 93 Particulars, 30, 31–32, 35, 44, 54, 55,
58–59, 72, 76, 79, 87, 98
Peirce, C. S., 61, 62, 80, 84, 85, 86,
K 87, 89, 94
Kant, I., 1, 4, 5–8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 20, Piaget, J., 7, 9, 13, 22, 37, 44, 56, 93
21, 22, 24, 25–27, 28, 29, 34, 35, Popper, K. R., 20, 26, 27, 28, 56,
36–37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42–44, 45, 60, 98
46, 47–49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, Productive thinking, 4, 5, 6, 91, 95, 97
58, 59–60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 70, 71, Psycholinguistics, 22, 77, 89, 94, 95
72, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 89,
90, 91, 94, 95, 96
Knowledge complex, 15, 16, 17, 23, R
29, 31, 37, 48, 58, 60, 64, 65, 74, Reduction, 8, 26, 41, 45, 47, 56
77, 79, 80, 98 Representation, 2, 20, 21, 39, 41, 43,
Knowledge structure, 5, 11, 13, 45, 52, 53, 55, 58, 62, 73–78, 81, 84,
82, 83, 85 87, 90, 91, 96
Külpe, O., 5, 20, 56, 57, 60, 87, 91 Ricoeur, P., 65, 66
L S
Lakoff, G., 39, 94, 95, 96 Sander, E., 97
Language, 5, 27, 31, 36–37, Schema, 1–3, 4, 5, 6–8, 9–13, 16–17,
39–40, 42, 78, 90, 19–21, 22–25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 34,
92, 94–95 35–36, 38–55, 56, 58, 62–67,
Little, D., 23, 24, 66 69–98
INDEX 119
Sets, 12, 15, 42, 54, 70, 76, 77 44–46, 49, 51, 53, 55, 61, 63, 64,
Simkin, C. G. F., 98 69, 70, 71–73, 83, 91, 94, 96
Simon, H. A., 14, 22, 82 Topological depictions, 66–67
Slots, 18, 73, 84, 85, 86, 87
Sowa, J. F., 62, 84, 85, 86, 87
Spatial representations, 50, 84
Sub-class, 12, 32, 59, 82, 85, 88 V
Subordinate, 16, 49, 53, 85, 97 Venn diagrams, 21, 53
Subsets, 54, 72 Voluntary response, 76
Superordinate, 11, 49, 53, 85
W
T White, H.V., 24, 27
Thought, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 17, 20, 22, Wundt, W. M., 56, 61, 91–92
26, 27–28, 35, 36–37, 42, 43, Würzburg School, 5, 20, 56, 60, 61

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Schema Re-schematized

ISBN 978-3-319-48275-0 ISBN 978-3-319-48276-7 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Mono Circles © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The schema concept is central to the explanation and exploration of

This book’s main proposal: The present-day concept of the schema

My deeply felt thanks go to Editor Philip Getz and to Assistant Editor

1 Introduction: Following the Kantian Dilemmas

2 Historical Crosscurrents and Conceptual Syntheses 19

3 Concluding Issues and Implications 69

Introduction: Following the Kantian

Abstract Major deﬁnitions of the schema include those of Bartlett, Craik,

Keywords Analogy Cognitive objects Reduction Frame Information

PURPOSE AND COURSE

© The Author(s) 2017 1

versus what promises to be more relevant to a fuller view of psychology.

THE SCHEMA’S TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL SEQUENCE

Object/Action Outcomes, Sentences, and Logic

Logical Possibilities in Extending the Schematic Pattern

Productive Thinking and New Patterns

THE BREADTH OF KANT

dilemma as one of the accessibility of either source. There is not only an

SELZ AS STANDARD BEARER: RE-AWAKENING

able to deal with the problem of productive thinking under the

ANALOGY AS CENTRAL TO THINKING ABOUT THE SCHEMA

scientiﬁc enterprise with scientiﬁc assumptions and methodology. Given

There is violence to chronology here. One justiﬁcation for it is to

Reconstructing the problem-solvers’ understandings and choices—how

THE DE FACTO MAJOR VIEWS OF THE SCHEMA

de facto major views inﬂuencing psychology’s use of the schema. With

THE PROSPECTIVE FOR ENRICHMENT

Otto Selz’s Approach: How Far Could He Go?

The Knowledge Structure

Kant’s Concept of Analogy: The Dynamic Basis for Selz’s Logic

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would

A mutation in a swan may appear anomalous—but it can cause a reshuf-

Kant’s view of analogy as ‘a proportion of concepts’ allows for inferences

The Logic of Correspondence and of Constituting a ‘Whole’

relationship is via analogical thinking. Wenzl characterizes it, using the

In Duncker’s version of Selz’s ‘schematic anticipation,’ aRb is a schema,

1. aRb ‘exists in the thinker’s experience.’

This idea of ‘reason by partial correspondence’ is awfully close to casting

‘Partial correspondence’ is an intrigue that comes up again, now closer

[t]wo-termed relations are essentially more powerful than simple predi-

The two-termed relation, like Duncker’s ?Rb, is powerful in that the

Selz’s Anticipatory Schema as an Analogy that Reaches

‘parts,’ ‘wholes,’ and that would fall into a ‘super’ or ‘subordinate’

From Completing a Schema for an Unknown to Achieving

‘Part to Whole’ Summarized in Selz’s Terms and Carried

Within this comparison, there is an equivalence relation of the analogy’s

Abstract Otto Selz’s thinking, writing style, personal dispositions, and

Keywords Analogy Anticipatory schema Coordinate relations

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE SCHEMA CONCEPT’S ISSUES

© The Author(s) 2017 19

Kant’s challenges and their application to today’s view of the schema,

The Nuclear Role of Kant’s Approach to the Dilemmas

thinking and Kant’s ideas of anticipatory judgments. They cite Selz’s

acceptance of the existence of things independently of consciousness is a

Building to the Schema as a Mediating Device

KANT IN A TIME WARP

SOURCES OF THE PRESENT VIEW OF THE SCHEMA: