Wolfgang Köhler

German-American psychologist (1887–1967), one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, known for his insight-learning experiments with chimpanzees (The Mentality of Apes, 1917) and for extending Gestalt principles to physical systems under the heading of "dynamic order."

Matters to this vault as the origin of the terminology Michael Polanyi borrowed and later renamed: Polanyi's 1941 essay adopted Köhler's "dynamic order" vocabulary, and his 1951 retrospective credits Köhler by name before switching to "spontaneous order" for simplicity (claim-polanyi-1941-used-kohlers-dynamic-order-exact-phrase-debuts-1948). Köhler thus sits one step upstream of the whole spontaneous-order priority dispute — the man who named the concept well before the phrase everyone argues about was coined.

References

• claim-polanyi-1941-used-kohlers-dynamic-order-exact-phrase-debuts-1948