Recasting Dewey’s critique of the reflex-arc concept via a theory of anticipatory consciousness: implications for theories of perception

Abstract

Dewey (1896)claimed that the word stimulus, if it is to be used in descriptions of organism–environment coordinations at all, should be used to refer, not to environmental events, but rather, to that aspect of the coordination specifying the state of affairs the coordination is striving to maintain. The present paper recasts Dewey’s critique by claiming that this specifying aspect of the coordination resides within a continuously generated, anticipatory body-in-the-environment “feel” that is not the result of afference. This theory of anticipatory consciousness is based primarily upon a synthesis of (1) Vandervert’s (1995) neuropositivistic integration of Lotka’s (1945) theoretical arguments regarding the prey-predator scenario, and Melzack’s (1992) empirical work on phantom limbs, and (2) research on a recently reported perceptual phenomenon known as the Phantom Array ( Hershberger, 1987), the existence of which supports the theory of anticipatory consciousness. This recasting of Dewey’s coordination-specifying “stimulus” is then used to reveal conceptual inadequacies that arise within representationalist theories of perception, for such theories tend to ignore Dewey’s critique and theorize perception to be a response to environmental stimuli. Such theorizing leads to the following inappropriate conclusions: (1) perception lags behind the world, (2) the perceiver’s view of the world is inherently inaccurate and incomplete, and (3) their exists a “physical” world of which we experience but appearances. The presented theory of anticipatory consciousness reveals that (1) the sequencing of perception is determined more by the control of body–environment relationships than by the moment of information transduction (i.e., transfer delays), (2) perceptual accuracy should be measured in terms of sensory-motor success versus the degree of correspondence between mental representations and the material world, and (3) the “objects” found in the world beyond the organism are not ontological, a priori “givens” in need of representation prior to entering phenomenology, but rather, are invariant thermodynamic “information structures” that find themselves “realized” within an organism’s field of control. Based on these arguments, it is then concluded that it is the material world, not perception, which qualifies as inference, and J. J. Gibson’s theory of direct perception, which does not demand the inference of a “material” world is, thus, the more parsimonious.