Abstract
Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point and the new direction of inquiry that this opens up for psychology. It does so by detailing the development of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. Securing epistemic contact has been a leitmotiv in Gibson’s early work, but subsequent developments in Gibson’s works can teach us what it takes to adopt a pragmatic approach to psychology. We propose a reading of the developments in Gibson’s original works that shows that, since perception is a mode of acting, perception aims for pragmatic contact before allowing for epistemic contact. Amplifying these pragmatist lines of thought in Gibson’s works we end by considering situations where an individual is adapted to the intricacies of specific social practices. These situations show how pragmatic contact can also afford attaining epistemic contact.
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Notes
Interestingly, modern ecological psychology also uses the term ‘epistemic contact’ to signal that perception is direct and unmediated by mental representations (Turvey and Shaw 1995, 1999). We agree that perception is direct, thus in part this is a mere terminological issue (e.g. Warren 2005; Withagen 2004). But in some cases there seems to be a tendency to equate unmediated contact with a pragmatic environment, with correctly, truthfully or accurately perceiving that environment. This paper argues we should give up on such formulations: direct perception can be of pragmatic relations, such as affordances, but those experienced relations do not need to correctly reflect any of their relata (i.e. the world).
That is not to say that Gibson wasn’t a realist about the environment, but this only requires that the environment is objectively there for theorists and scientists to scrutinize given the species or “kind of animal” under consideration (Gibson 1979, p. 128).We develop a story about this in section 5, but note that such a position does not entail that an animal perceiving such an environment implies that the animal’s perceptual system aims to “get it right” relative to its species.
We here suggest a reading in which the relata of a relation take shape as the relation forms over time. That is, there are not first two separate entities that interact to form a relation, but both relation and relata are incomplete and take shape in process together (see e.g. Shotter 1983; Van Dijk and Rietveld 2018). Gibson alluded to a non-interactionist view of the organism-environment relation himself in response to a question at a conference in 1977. Gibson is quoted to have said: “The relation between the animal and its environment is not one of interaction […] it’s one of, well, reciprocity’s not too bad. There are several terms in the ecological approach to psychology that bridge the gap between animal and environment. But such a term that bridges the gap points both ways, like the concept of affordance. Another one is the ambient optic array. […] So with such concepts, I don’t have to ask a question about the relation between the animal and its environment. I’ve defined it out of existence in your own way” (Weimer and Palermo 1982, p. 234). The constitutional reciprocity we are after indeed implies no prior divide, and implies no (epistemic) bridge to cross it.
In a Jamesian vein, the perceptual process might be called a process of “knowing” (James 2000, p. 142 ff.). Although we do not apply the terms “knowing” and “knowledge” to perception to avoid misunderstandings, note that our view is deeply consonant with James’: perception as a process of knowing should not be confused with an epistemic notion of perception that would yield representational states of knowledge.
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Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Rob Withagen, Victor Loughlin, Jan Van Eemeren and Farid Zahnoun for sharing their insightful commentary. We also thank Julian Kiverstein and two anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions.
The research of Ludger van Dijk was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, project Thinking in practice: a unified ecological-enactive account [12V2318N]). The research of Erik Myin was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, project Getting Real about Words and Numbers [GOC7315N]) and by the BOF Research Fund of the University of Antwerp (project Perceiving affordances in natural, social and moral environments [DOCPRO3]).
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van Dijk, L., Myin, E. Reasons for pragmatism: affording epistemic contact in a shared environment. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 973–997 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9595-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9595-6