Chapter 10: A Unified Topological Approach to Umwelts and Life Spaces

Some psychologists are interested in qualitative phenomena. Some topologists—who are, roughly speaking, ‘qualitative geometers’—may already have appropriate mathematical structures available and ready to be applied to the tasks of describing and predicting some of these phenomena. Examples include psychological time and related aspects of psychological development (Rudolph 2006a,b,c; cf. van Geert 2006), personality (Kawauchi, 2006), and schematic displays that evoke emotional response (Rudolph et al., in preparation). In this speculative paper I describe a topological approach to the description of Umwelts in the sense of von Uexküll (1920/1926); in a sequel (Rudolph, in preparation), I modify and extend this approach to generate descriptions of “life spaces” in the sense of Lewin (1936).