Abstract
The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured for the animal. Koffka made a sharp distinction between the “behavioural environment” and the “geographical environment”. We show how this distinction picks out the difference between the environment as perceived by an individual organism, and the shared publicly available environment. The ecological psychologist James Gibson was later critical of Koffka for inserting a private phenomenal reality in between animals and the shared environment. Gibson tried to make do with just the concept of affordances in his explanation of molar behaviour. We argue however that psychology as a science of molar behaviour will need to make appeal both to the concepts of shared publicly available affordances, and of the multiplicity of relevant affordances that invite an individual to act. A version of Koffka’s distinction between the two environments remains alive today in a distinction we have made between the field and landscape of affordances. Having distinguished the two environments, we go on to provide an account of how the two environments are related. Koffka suggested that the behavioural environment forms out of the causal interaction of the individual with a pre-existing, ready-made geographical environment. We argue that such an account of the relation between the two environments fails to do justice to the complex entanglement of the social with the material aspects of the geographical environment. To better account for this sociomaterial reality of the geographical environment, we propose a process-perspective on our distinction between the landscape and field of affordances. While the two environments can be conceptually distinguished, we argue they should also be viewed as standing in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence.
Highlights
Kurt Koffka began his Principles of Gestalt Psychology by explaining what he saw as distinctive about the science of psychology as compared with other sciences
Koffka’s vision of psychology as aiming to integrate the natural, life and human sciences amounts to a rejection of any dualist view that would separate the human mind from the natural world
Koffka suggests it is a virtue of his Gestalt approach to psychology that it can avoid the shortcomings of such a positivist conception of science by integrating matter, life and mind through the notion of Gestalten
Summary
Kurt Koffka began his Principles of Gestalt Psychology by explaining what he saw as distinctive about the science of psychology as compared with other sciences. In targeting molar behaviour in its explanations, radical embodied cognitive science aims to do justice to the lived experience of engaging with a meaningful world just as Koffka did. Gibson took Koffka’s behavioural environment to be a private phenomenal reality illicitly inserted in between an organism and its environment He sought to avoid any such commitment by providing an account of the geographical environment (or what he referred to as the “ecological niche”) as making available affordances. Gibson introduced his notion of affordances in part to do the work of Koffka’s behavioural environment in explaining molar behaviour. The field and the landscape of affordances, we will argue, stand in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence with each other
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