Abstract
Radical embodied cognitive science is split into two camps: the ecological approach and the enactive approach. We propose that these two approaches can be brought together into a productive synthesis. The key is to recognize that the two approaches are pursuing different but complementary types of explanation. Both approaches seek to explain behavior in terms of the animal–environment relation, but they start at opposite ends. Ecological psychologists pursue an ontological strategy. They begin by describing the habitat of the species, and use this to explain how action possibilities are constrained for individual actors. Enactivists, meanwhile, pursue an epistemic strategy: start by characterizing the exploratory, self-regulating behavior of the individual organism, and use this to understand how that organism brings forth its animal-specific umwelt. Both types of explanation are necessary: the ontological strategy explains how structure in the environment constrains how the world can appear to an individual, while the epistemic strategy explains how the world can appear differently to different members of the same species, relative to their skills, abilities, and histories. Making the distinction between species habitat and animal-specific umwelt allows us to understand the environment in realist terms while acknowledging that individual living organisms are phenomenal beings.
Highlights
James Gibson’s theory of affordancesJames Gibson’s ecological approach was developed from a confounding collection of influences: like nearly every American psychologist in the middle of the 20th century, Gibson considered himself a behaviorist; he considered himself a Jamesian radical empiricist; he worked closely with the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka; he was a careful reader of phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty (see Gibson 1967; Reed 1988; Käufer and Chemero 2015)
There are currently two main flavors of radical embodied cognitive science
Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987). Both ecological psychology and enactivism reject the idea that cognition is defined by the computational manipulation of mental representations; both focus on self-organization and nonlinear dynamical explanation
Summary
James Gibson’s ecological approach was developed from a confounding collection of influences: like nearly every American psychologist in the middle of the 20th century, Gibson considered himself a behaviorist; he considered himself a Jamesian radical empiricist; he worked closely with the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka; he was a careful reader of phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty (see Gibson 1967; Reed 1988; Käufer and Chemero 2015). Merleau-Ponty wrote that “The world, inasmuch as it harbors living beings, ceases to be a material plenum consisting of juxtaposed parts; it opens up as the place where behavior appears” (1942/1963) James, in his late writings on radical empiricism, defended what was later called neutral monism. The key to Gibson’s theory of affordances, and the most radical part of his theory of perception, is the distinction Gibson makes between the physical world and the environment of animals. The sub-atomic particles that make up the physical world do not, in and of themselves contain meaning, but when looked at the from the point of view of a behaving animal, a portion of the physical world is the meaningful environment Gibson was, as he often put it, a realist about affordances. In the remainder of this paper, we will argue that the distinction between the world and the environment cannot carry all of this burden alone. (In what follows, we are building on arguments we have developed elsewhere; see Baggs and Chemero, to appear.)
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