J. J. Gibson’s most radical idea: The development of a new law-based psychology

Abstract

J. J. Gibson spent most of his career developing his own theory of perception. The culmination of his work was the ecological approach to visual perception, but during more than three decades he had challenged many of the central concepts of psychology and his own convictions regarding the foundations of perception. In this article I argue that the driving force of the development of ecological psychology was Gibson’s most radical idea: that psychology needs a law-based explanatory strategy at its own scale to be successful. According to Gibson, instead of pursuing explanations based on the patching up of simple stimulus-response events with the postulation of more or less lawful sub-personal mechanisms, psychology needs its own laws at a proper scale to provide legitimate explanations for perception and action.