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Abstract: The primary difference between direct and inferential theories of perception concerns the location of perceptual content, the meaning of our perceptions. In inferential theories of perception, these meanings arise inside animals, based upon their interactions with the physical environment. Light, for example, bumps into receptors causing a sensation. The animal (or its brain) performs inferences on the sensation, yielding a meaningful perception. In direct theories of perception, on the other hand, meaning is in the environment, and perception does not depend upon meaning- conferring inferences. Instead the animal simply gathers information from a meaning- laden environment. But if the environment contains meanings, then it cannot be merely physical. This places a heavy theoretical burden on direct theories of perception, a burden so severe that it may outweigh all the advantages to conceiving perception as
Abstract: Since the 1970s, Michael Turvey, Robert Shaw, and William Mace have worked on the formulation of a philosophically-sound and empirically-tractable version of James Gibson’s ecological psychology. It is surely no exaggeration to say that without their theoretical work ecological psychology would have died on the vine because of the high-profile attacks from establishment cognitive scientists (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1981, Ullman 1981). But thanks to Turvey, Shaw and Mace’s work as theorists and, perhaps more importantly, as teachers, ecological psychology is currently flourishing. A generation of students, having been trained by Turvey, Shaw and Mace at Trinity College and/or the University of Connecticut, ecological psychology, are now distinguished experimental psychologists who train their own students in Turvey-Shaw-Mace ecological psychology. Despite the undeniable and lasting importance of Turvey, Shaw and Mace’s theoretical contributions for psychology and the other cognitive science, their work has not received much attention from philosophers. It will get some of that that attention in this paper. I will point to shortcomings in the Turvey-Shaw-Mace approach to ecological psychology, and will offer what I take to be improved versions of two important aspects of it. In particular, I will describe theories of information and of direct perception that differ from the Turvey-Shaw-Mace account
Abstract: James J. Gibson’s ecological theory of perception (1966, 1979) is striking in many ways. It is not merely a theory of perception, but also a theory of what the world is made up of, a metaphysics, and how we can know it, an epistemology. Furthermore, the metaphysics and epistemology Gibson describes are very unusual by present standards. Indeed, Gibson very clearly intended that his theory of perception seem old-fashioned, even pre-Modern. Witness, for example, the first chapter of Gibson’s posthumous An Ecological
Abstract: In her essay âÂÂInformation, Perception and ActionâÂÂ, Claire Michaels reaches two conclusions that run very much against the grain of ecological psychology. First, she claims that affordances are not perceived, but simply acted upon; second, because of this, perception and action ought to be conceived separately. These conclusions are based upon a misinterpretation of empirical evidence which is, in turn, based upon a conflation of two proper objects of perception: objectively with properties and affordances
Abstract: I examine the central theoretical construct of ecological psychology, the concept of an affordance. In the first part of the paper, I illustrate the role affordances play in Gibson's theory of perception. In the second part, I argue that affordances are to be understood as dispositional properties, and explain what I take to be their characteristic background circumstances, triggering circumstances and manifestations. The main purpose of my analysis is to give affordances a theoretical identity enriched by Gibson's visionary insight, but independent of the most controversial claims of the Gibsonian movement
