The Structures of Perception: An Ecological Perspective

Abstract

ames J. Gibson is one of the best known and perhaps most controversial visual theorists of the twentieth century. Writing in the vein of the American functionalists, and immersed in their profound sense of pragmatism, Gibson sought to establish a more rigorous foundation for the study of vision by reworking its most fundamental concepts. Over the five decades of his distinguished career, Gibson brought new clarity to the old problems of the tradition. He offered an alternative theory of perception – one that could accommodate the experimental insights of contemporary research programs. He characterized this new theory as a version of direct perception in order to distinguish it from the traditional indirect approach of Rene Descartes. On Descartes’ account, our perceptual awareness of reality comes through the representations we have formed of it within ourselves. In contrast, Gibson’s theory of direct perception states that the environment contains all of the information needed to specify its properties. Hence, perceiving these properties is a matter of detecting the information available in the environment. This theory avoids the difficulty of explaining how the mind organizes holistic perceptions from atomic sensations. In what follows, I will attempt to make good these claims by situating the concept of “structure” at the heart of the ecological program. I will argue that this concept is significant precisely because it allows Gibson to locate the moving, perceiving body at the heart of meaningful perceptual experience; an experience which emerges in the dynamical structures that cross the body and the world. In section one, I will distinguish Gibson’s concept of the environment from the Cartesian notion of the material world. This step is necessary in any account of visual perception. The environment must first be described, since what there is to be perceived must be stipulated before one can talk about perceiving it. According to Gibson, the concept of the world can be analyzed at different levels. Gibson does not wish to give an analysis of the world at the level of Cartesian physics, which reduces the world to extended matter and