Field theories. Psychology, linguistics, biology

The present issue focuses on the origin and transdisciplinary nature of the notion of “field”, illustrating some of its twentieth-century developments and its recent resurgence in popularity. “Field” is a migrant notion: born in physics, it was re-elaborated in Gestalt psychology and in biology. In all these variations, the study of physics, perception and the origin of forms remain closely interrelated. The notion of “field” encounters the question of “totality”, of the mereological relation between the whole and the parts, between subject and object, of continuum and discrete, in the frame of the traditional dualism between the supporters of matter and friends of ideas and of the dichotomy between facts and values. A complex pattern whose common thread is the question of totality, involving not only the Gestalt school and phenomenology but also structuralism, if we consider that, as noted by Cassirer, there is a line stretching from Goethe’s and Cuvier’s morphology to modern structuralism, going through above all the notion of organism, that is, of the mutual interdependence between functions and structures, and the notion that any change to any of these parts inevitably affects the others. It is in this context that the metaphor of the “field” is extended from physics to language theories and to the biology of “morphogenetic fields”.