The Methodology of Denkpsychologie

With fewer than 250 copies sold two years after its publication, Selz's Zur Psychologie des produktiven Denkens und des Irrtums was soon destined to become forgotten completely. The short summary of his main ideas did not succeed in warding off this gloomy scenario, for the book was translated only into Chinese but not English, which was to become the official language for psychology, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Yet those who had taken the trouble to plough their way through Selz's bulky work were richly rewarded. Indeed, members of the Gestalt movement, orchestrating their campaign against association psychology with consummate skill, profited much from his holistic theory of schematic anticipations. Much later, in the 1940s, the Dutch psychologist A. D. de Groot would apply the main ideas of Selz's psychology of reproductive and productive thinking to the analysis of problem solving during chess, published in his Het Denken van den Schaker (1946), a book which in its turn would stimulate the pioneering work in artificial intelligence of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon. Roughly in the same period Jean Piaget, by then a famous child psychologist, would exploit Selz's evolutionary revision of psychology and epistemology for his own project of a genetic epistemology.

Reading Selz somewhere between 1926 and 1928, and using his ideas in analyzing first the foundations of pedagogy and psychology, and later in transforming epistemology, the young Popper therefore showed precocious yet consummate discernment in interpreting new scientific developments, preceding de Groot and Piaget by almost two decades.