Marxist Esthetics by Henri Arvon (review)

336 Books years (7 years). A major portion of the book is a presentation of the author's own studies. One of the strong values of the book is her attempt to find general trends in development that unify a diversity of empirical findings. These generalizations should help to focus future research. In addition, she applies imaginatively a variety of theoretical perspectives. An example is her discussion of Gottschaldt's embedded figure problem, in which a young child must discover a particular line drawn shape hidden within a second one. Vurpillot argues that for the 3- and 4-year-olds, a line drawn picture is rigidly organized according to Gestalt principles of organization into unanalyzable primary perceptual structures; only at age 6 or 7is a child able to use the same line to simultaneously make up two shapes. She speculates that these structures may have their genesis in the growth ofDonald Hebb's neural 'cell assemblies', and that, later, growth of neural 'phase sequences' may account for the increased flexibility of schoolaged children. In the first section of the book, she employs this notion of perceptual structures to discuss the development of size and shape constancy, orientation discrimination, topological and Euclidean form perception and part/whole perception. In the second section, she reviews work on the role'ofverbal mediation, selective attention and the discovery of distinctive features in discrimination learning. In the final section, research on changes with age in the nature of visual exploration is presented, with a critical discussion of the motor copy hypothesis advanced in the U.S.S.R. Vurpillot integrates the findings in each of these areas to present what she sees as the causes of the poor performance of young children on the tasks discussed. A young child is described as globalist, rigid, unable to articulate part and whole, held to Gestalt primary perceptual structures, unable to abstract distinctive features and dimensions of difference, and limited in visual exploration. She suggests that the absence of visual exploration may account for many of the deficiences listed above, and that the cognitive level of a child determines visual exploration. However, this approach emphasizes what young children cannot do. The limitations are described and given a label that functions as a low-level explanation for developmental differences; for a more general explanation, Vurpillot looks to cognitive development. Basically, she is a Piagetian who accounts for the course of perceptual development in cognitive change. In addition to the many indirect ways in which cognitive change influences perceptual performance, Vurpillot suggests that the concept of identity itself undergoes developmental changes. Although the book is titled The Visual World ofthe Child, the visual world that is explored is very rarely the 3-dimensional environment in which children actually function but rather the 2-dimensional world ofline drawings on paper. In this world, the task is to understand the meaning of an experimenter's instruction to find a hidden shape or to judge whether two drawings are the same or different. One might ask how much of the developmental change that is observed reflects basic changes in a child's functioning, and how much is due to the child's learning of techniques necessary for the highly arbitrary tasks that children are asked to perform in formal schooling. Only experiments that assess whether younger subjects can be trained to perform in the manner of older subjects can answer this question. Such studies have not been done. The translation is at times quite taxing, with its archaic usages and a sybtax often more French than English. The non-specialist may be befuddled by its jargon and may suffer its lack ofclarity. For readers more familiar with the research it contains, it is a comprehensive review and a useful resource. More important, it summarizes and presents in context Vurpillot's own substantial contribution to the field of perceptual development. Philosophy ofBeauty. Francis J. Kovach. Univ. Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1974. 350 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Allan Shields* *Dept. of Philosophy, California State University, 5402 College Ave., San Diego, CA 92115, U.S.A. Kovach accurately characterizes most current aesthetics as subjectivistic and has set himself the task of writing an objectivistic alternative...