scholarly journals Interface Theory vs Gibson: An Ontological Defence of the Ecological Approach

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew D Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Direct Perception ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Interface Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Perceptual Systems

Interface theory (Hoffman, Singh & Prakesh, 2015) is the hypothesis that inferential, representational theories of perception entail that fitness, not truth, dictates the evolution of perceptual systems. They show, with simulations, that ‘veridical’ perceptual mappings (ones that preserve at least some of the structure of the world) are routinely out-competed by ‘non-veridical’ interfaces (ones that make no attempt to preserve that structure). They therefore take particular aim at the direct perception, ecological approach to perception (Gibson, 1966, 1979; Turvey, Shaw Reed & Mace, 1981) and work to show that such a system, even if technically an option, would never be selected for by evolution.. This commentary defends the ecological approach from this novel attack by showing that a) Gibson does not make the mistakes he is accused of and, more substantively b) that the ecological hypothesis is so different in kind to the inferential, representational view of perception that it simply falls outside the scope of interface theory’s critiques. The heart of this defence is identifying the profoundly different ontologies (assumptions about the nature of the world to be perceived) underlying inferential and ecological approaches, and examining the consequences of these ontologies (including key problems for the inferential ontology that interface theory makes clear). Interface theory is a strong, clear formalisation of the inferential ontology, but it has no fatal implications for the ecological approach.

Music and affordances

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Luke Windsor ◽  
Christophe de Bézenac
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Perception And Action ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Music Psychology ◽  
Empirical Context ◽  
Musical Context ◽  
Perceptual Systems

This paper explores the extent to which ideas developed in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems and further refined in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception ( Gibson, 1966 ; 1979 ) can be applied to the analysis of perception and action in musical settings. The ecological approach to perception has rarely been applied to music, although some recent work in ecological acoustics, music theory and music psychology has begun to show an interest in direct perception of events and objects. We would argue that despite this pioneering work, Gibson’s most radical and controversial idea, that of the direct perception of affordances ( Gibson, 1979 ), has not been adequately addressed in a musical context. Following an introduction to the theoretical background to affordances and a review of the ways in which previous authors have investigated ecological approaches to auditory perception, we show how both the production and perception of music can fruitfully be analysed using the concept of affordances, and how such an approach neatly integrates seemingly active and passive engagement with music. In addition, we place this ecological approach to music within a broader empirical context, giving examples of music-psychological, ethnomusicological and neuroscientific evidence which complement our more theoretical approach. In conclusion, we argue that the links between the performance, composition and reception are underpinned by the mutuality of perception and action.

What are Senses and Sense Modalities?

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Traditional View ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Sense Modality ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Modalities ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
Phenomenological View

AbstractPerceptual experiences not only have cognitive aspects, through which we acquire information about some objects, but sensory aspects, through which we experience how the object appears. In the traditional view, the sensory aspects have been reduced to sensations or senses, which have the function of supplying materials for cognition. Against this view, E. Strauss characterized sensing as a kind of “communication” with the world in a pathetic dimension and each sense modality as a way of embodied “Being in the world” in its own way. My paper tries to combine this phenomenological view of senses with the ecological approach of J.J. Gibson, according to which senses are considered as perceptual systems. With this attempt at an ecological phenomenology, the paper focuses on the embodiment dimension of perceptual experiences and clarifies the multi-dimensional and multi-sensory character of various perceptual experiences.

On specification and the senses

2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Stoffregen ◽  
Benoît G. Bardy
Keyword(s):  
Perception And Action ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Physical Motion ◽  
Order Relations ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Acoustic Arrays ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
Taste And Smell

In this target article we question the assumption that perception is divided into separate domains of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. We review implications of this assumption for theories of perception and for our understanding of ambient energy arrays (e.g., the optic and acoustic arrays) that are available to perceptual systems. We analyze three hypotheses about relations between ambient arrays and physical reality: (1) that there is an ambiguous relation between ambient energy arrays and physical reality, (2) that there is a unique relation between individual energy arrays and physical reality, and (3) that there is a redundant but unambiguous relation, within or across arrays, between energy arrays and physical reality. This is followed by a review of the physics of motion, focusing on the existence and status of referents for physical motion. Our review indicates that it is not possible, in principle, for there to be a unique relation between physical motion and the structure of individual energy arrays. We argue that physical motion relative to different referents is specified only in the global array, which consists of higher-order relations across different forms of energy. The existence of specificity in the global array is consistent with the idea of direct perception, and so poses a challenge to traditional, inference-based theories of perception and cognition. However, it also presents a challenge to much of the ecological approach to perception and action, which has accepted the assumption of separate senses.

Numerical symbols as explanations of human perceptual experience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barner
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Number Words ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Systems ◽  
Perceptual Systems

Why did humans develop precise systems for measuring experience, like numbers, clocks, andcalendars? I argue that precise representational systems were constructed by earlier generationsof humans because they recognized that their noisy perceptual systems were not capturingdistinctions that existed in the world. Abstract symbolic systems did not arise from perceptualrepresentations, but instead were constructed to describe and explain perceptual experience. Byanalogy, I argue that when children learn number words, they do not rely on noisy perceptualsystems, but instead acquire these words as units in a broader system of procedures, whosemeanings are ultimately defined by logical relations to one another, not perception.

scholarly journals Psychology in an Indeterminate World

2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162095800
Author(s):  
Ludger van Dijk
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Material World ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The World ◽  
Indeterminate World ◽  
Over Time

By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal’s activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of “affordances,” the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.

scholarly journals Affect, Belief, and the Arts

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rami Gabriel
Keyword(s):  
Social Practices ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Tertiary Level ◽  
Cooperative Groups ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge

The cultural project is a therapeutic melding of emotion, symbols, and knowledge. In this paper, I describe how spiritual emotions engendered through encounters in imaginative culture enable fixation of metaphysical beliefs. Evolved affective systems are domesticated through the social practices of imaginative culture so as to adapt people to live in culturally defined cooperative groups. Conditioning, as well as tertiary-level cognitive capacities such as symbols and language are enlisted to bond groups through the imaginative formats of myth and participatory ritual. These cultural materializations can be shared by communities both synchronically and diachronically in works of art. Art is thus a form of self-knowledge that equips us with a motivated understanding of ourselves in the world. In the sacred state produced through the arts and in religious acts, the sense of meaning becomes noetically distinct because affect infuses the experience of immanence, and one's memory of it, with salience. The quality imbued thereby makes humans attentive to subtle signs and broad “truths.” Saturated by emotions and the experience of alterity in the immanent encounter of imaginative culture, information made salient in the sacred experience can become the basis for belief fixation. Using examples drawn from mimetic arts and arts of immanence, I put forward a theory about how sensible affective knowledge is mediated through affective systems, direct perception, and the imagination.

Ecopedagogy and Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruyu Hung
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Fundamental Understanding ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
Ecological Worldview

The neologism ecopedagogy was coined in the late 20th century to represent the joining of ecology and pedagogy. However, ecopedagogy is not an education about ecology but an education through ecology, meaning that it is an education based on an ecological worldview. A worldview is the fundamental understanding of life and the world. Ecological worldview means the ecological approach to the understanding of life and the world. The basic ideas of the ecological worldview come from the science of ecology, of which there are two interpretations: ecology of stability and ecology of instability. Both provide a general, shared outline of the world and how it works but each offers distinctive values of philosophy, ethics, culture, and society with regard to the ecosystem. Ecopedagogy, which encompasses both ecological worldview and education, develops into two broad movements: philosophical ecopedagogy and critical ecopedagogy. For the former, referred to as ecosophy, focuses on the metaphysical investigation of the human-nature relationship and related issues in education. For the latter, ecojustice, the mission is to critique the injustice and oppression involved in environmental issues and to construct a utopian society of planetary civilization.

Augmented Reality: Breaking into What World?

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4-2) ◽  
pp. 351-371
Author(s):  
Vladimir Ignatyev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Relational Theory ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Biological Substrate ◽  
The Individual

The article considers the phenomenon of augmented reality as a special hybrid reality and a part of social space. The author compares the differences in approaches to the interpretation of reality in philosophy, social theory and natural science. The provisions of phenomenological sociology are used as a methodological basis for the study. The author substantiates the necessity of conjugation of ontological and epistemological perspectives of interpretation of the “multilayer” social reality. The lack of concentration of attention in most studies on distinguishing these angles leaves the category of social reality on the periphery of the construction of social ontologies. And this is not a paradox, but a desire to avoid difficulties in choosing a research position when solving a problem of a certain class each time that arises: either to build ontological models of each layer of the social, or to re-enter into polemics about the permissible limits of avoiding solipsism. The article shows one of the possible ways out of the vicious circle of polemics about the demarcation of ontology and epistemology by presenting the concepts of ‘social reality’ and ‘social actuality’ as a means of separating research angles. Their application makes it possible to establish that the environment formed by augmented reality is much more complex than it seems to the individual in his direct perception. It includes four spaces: 1) the objective world; 2) the mental world; 3) a hybrid world as a symbiosis of real and imaginary worlds; 4) symbiosis of fragments of the real world - torn apart in space and time and combined with the help of technologies in devices, which make it possible for an individual to be present while observing their combined existence and to operate with them. The author comes to the conclusion that this feature of the organization of space with the help of augmented reality implies the specificity of the changed social space in which individuals have to interact. There is a transformation of the basic ‘cell’ of society - the system of social interaction. It has been established that augmented reality technologies provide additional, qualitatively new opportunities for influencing individual pictures of the world. Augmented reality also complicates virtual reality, introducing, in addition to fictional characteristics, the content of practical actions. Augmented reality not only ‘comprehends’ the world, but is in direct practical contact with it, turning into a special side of constant reality. It was found that the interaction of augmented reality with social reality is reversible. Thanks to this process, social reality from ‘augmented’ reality is transformed into a ‘complex’ one, the qualitative determination of which can be designated as ‘hybrid social reality’. Its mode of existence is more complex than that of the human community, and is inaccessible to them as long as they retain the biological substrate of their corporeity. But no less significant consequence for social and anthropogenic transformation is the emergence in society of its new structural unit - a techno-subject, as an actor of a new species and a new agent that forms a hybrid society. It has been established that the user of augmented reality transforms the provided visual effects in his imagination into really (beyond imagination) existing things and phenomena (ontologization). A reverse movement also takes place - from illusions fixed in the imagination as objects (created by augmented reality), back to pure illusions (reverse hypostatization). The distinction between the observed and the hidden through the introduction of the concepts of social reality and social actuality makes it possible to discover a more complex structure of the social - its multi-layered nature, supplementing the ontology of social reality and, in particular, P. Donati’s relational theory of society, with ideas about such layers as actual and potential, virtual and valid. The article considers the possibility of extending the idea of the heterarchical principle of the structure of society (developed in the works of I.V. Krasavin on the basis of the model of W. McCulloch) to the further development of the augmented reality ontology. The formation of space connections using AR technology is a continuation of the embodiment of the heterarchy principle, which brings the social structure beyond the structures of a constant society.

Knowledge from the Outside

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-79
Author(s):  
Hilary Kornblith
Keyword(s):  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
Obvious Source

Knowledge may be examined from the third-person perspective, as psychologists and sociologists do, or it may be examined from the first-person perspective, as each of us does when we reflect on what we ought to believe. This chapter takes the third-person perspective. One obvious source of knowledge is perception, and some general features of how our perceptual systems are able to pick up information about the world around us are highlighted. The role of the study of visual illusions in this research is an important focus of the chapter. Our ability to draw out the consequences of things we know by way of inference is another important source of knowledge, and some general features of how inference achieves its successes are discussed. Structural similarities between the ways in which perception works and the ways in which inference works are highlighted.

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