“If knowing were habitually conceived of as active and operative…the first effect would be to emancipate philosophy from all the epistemological puzzles which now perplex it.”

– John Dewey (1957, p. 123)

Gibsonian ecological psychology draws on both phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. On the one hand, ecological psychology’s emphasis on the first-person perspective of organisms and direct experience are shared hallmarks of the phenomenological tradition. Gibson himself insisted that his students read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception if they wished to study with him.Footnote 1 On the other hand, Gibson’s intellectual genealogy through his mentor Holt lands him firmly within the pragmatist line. Gibsonian ecological psychology shares with the pragmatist tradition a commitment to empiricism, naturalist non-reduction and a keen interest in the biological (cf. Pearce, 2020). Yet there is an apparent contradiction between these two traditions. Phenomenology, according to Husserl, is an attempt to theorize what is given to consciousness. Pragmatism, however, is marked by a critical suspicion of the given. One side takes what is given to consciousness as the foundation for further inquiry. The other side rejects any notion of said foundation. At first blush, it would appear that Gibson sides with the phenomenologists in his insistence on direct perception. Yet, as we will argue here, Gibson’s notion of direct perception does not fall prey to the myth of the given. Specifically, we will argue that neither Merleau-Ponty nor Gibson fall prey to the myth of the given, because what is directly perceived is not given in any pernicious sense and is instead always and only available in and through bodily action/motion. Importantly, this emphasis of perception as motion and action that Gibson shares with Merleau-Ponty is shared by the Pragmatist tradition as well.

Previous literature has already pointed to the general tension in Gibson’s mixed pedigrees. As Heft notes, Gibson’s rich use of phenomenological observations might appear inconsistent with a rejection of traditional mentalistic attitudes, yet “both phenomenology and [logical] positivism assert that knowledge is ultimately grounded in immediate experience” (2001, p. 116). What we aim to do in this paper is show Gibson’s pragmatist commitments do not in fact clash with his phenomenological instincts, and this convergence is what prevents Gibson from falling prey to Sellars’ criticism of the given. To do this, we will subject Gibson to the Sellarsian test of the “Myth of the Given.” After recapping the Sellarsian myth, we will start our test with an earlier Husserlian static phenomenology that others have argued is in fact susceptible to the myth (Sachs, 2020; Williams, 2021), then we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical phenomenology of the lived body, building on Sachs’ case that it is not susceptible to the myth. We argue that Gibson’s phenomenological commitments align with those of Merleau-Ponty and that his perception and action cycle not only avoids the myth but also rests on both phenomenological and pragmatic views of dynamic interaction between embodied organisms and their environment.

1 Sellars’ ‘pragmatist’ critique of “the given”

The pragmatist critique of the given comes to head in Sellars’ Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind, first published in 1956. While undoubtedly a seminal work within the analytic tradition, we follow Misak (2013) and Pearce (2020) in treating Sellars as a thinker also deeply influenced by pragmatist ideas and well ensconced in pragmatist lineage.Footnote 2 The myth highlights tensions, ambiguities and overlap between innate abilities to perceive and the immediacy of perception, the epistemic status of sense experience, as well as the role of non-inferential knowing vs. preconceptual or presuppositionless knowing. Sellars’ critique of the given has been understood to apply to Kantian, empiricist, and potentially Hegelian positions (Sachs, 2020, p. 292), but there remains some debate as to whether the myth of the given applies to the phenomenological tradition (e.g. Sachs, 2020; Soffer, 2003; Williams, 2021). Whether or not it applies to the phenomenological tradition depends on what you take to be the heart of the myth. In this section, we briefly characterize the myth of the Given, and tease out several tensions in perceptual theories it finds problematic.

Sellars offers his reader 3 theses that characterized the general consensus around perception in his day (EPM, I):

  1. 1)

    Sensing sense-content is a non-inferential knowing that;

  2. 2)

    The ability to sense content is innate and not learned;

  3. 3)

    We learn how to classify sensed content.

Sellars holds that not all three theses can be held simultaneously without contradiction. Any attempt to do so will result in a sense-perception as a muddled concept that blends the notion of primitive inner experiences with the kind of inferential knowings necessary for empirical knowledge. The tricky part is pinpointing where and exactly how the illegitimate crossing of concepts has occurred.

As Heath Williams defines it, “The mythological given refers to innate pre-conceptual capacities (or entities ‘given’ by those capacities) that serve to justify a set of propositions that are supposedly foundational for empirical knowledge” (2021, p. 6372). Williams has stressed that the non-inferential and pre-conceptual aspects of sense-data together are what make it vulnerable to the myth, taking the myth to reject any notion of preconceptual inner episode which does double duty as both a preconceptual sense-data and a non-inferential knowing (EPM I §7; Williams, 2021, p. 6373).

Sachs has argued that some misunderstandings of the myth arise from thinking that Sellars denies non-inferential knowledge altogether, when his primary target was preconceptual knowing (2012). Similar to Misak (2013) who reads the myth to mean there can be nothing given without prior values, Sachs also takes the myth in a more anti-foundationalist bent, arguing that the myth denies that concepts are passively given by experience while at the same time denying we perceive without concepts. O’Shea (2007) speaks of “the Myth of the Categorical Given,” on whose reading the myth has more to do with our orientation in the world. Drawing on Sellars’ later work, Behaviorism, Language and Meaning (1980), O’Shea stresses that the later Sellars, at least, understood the myth as a rejection that the world of things imposes its structure on our perception, the way a seal imposes itself upon passive wax (Sellars’ example) (2007; 2021). Sachs takes O’Shea’s version of the myth one step further when it comes to his treatment of Merleau-Ponty (see below). In a nutshell, Sachs thinks not only that the world does not impose its categories onto the perceptual experience of the organism, but that it is also a fallacy to assume that the mind, bereft as it is of categories that correspond with the structure of the world, is given to itself, and it is this version of the myth which he contends concerns phenomenology (2020, p. 292).

2 Husserl’s phenomenology: “Given to consciousness”

Perhaps Gibson finds a way to explain the process by which knowledge is generated from direct experience, taking the epistemic burden away from sense-data. After all, one important piece of the myth is the notion that we have basic sense experiences which, confusedly, both are and are not a form of knowing. By locating the epistemic in the process of perception rather than in sense-data, this might steer clear of the confusion. At the same time, direct experience and its phenomenological lineage seem to imply that the beginning of the inquiry starts with what is given to consciousness. How do we know that Gibson hasn’t also fallen into the trap of the myth of given?

Take for example the case of Husserl, who frames phenomenology as the systematic study of what is given to consciousness. For instance, his Cartesian Meditations (1982; original publication 1931 in French) runs against empiricist instincts and posits “Ideen” or regulative ideals as an integral part of perceptual experience. Experience is a form of mental seeing, but more importantly it is a matter of the objects in the world giving themselves to perception (Husserl, 1982, p. 13). Is this giving of the things in themselves to perception a matter of presuppositionless or non-inferential knowing? It is certainly meant to be the foundation for all knowing that, as Husserl bases any notion of sound science upon such experiences. And the givenness of things in the world seem indeed to be non-inferential. There are several views on whether Husserl’s phenomenology falls prey to the myth of the given. Some argue that he steers clear of the myth (De Santis, 2019; Hopp, 2023; Soffer, 2003; Williams, 2021), others stress that the earlier Husserl in particular is potentially susceptible to the myth (Sachs, 2020; Williams, 2021). Williams (2021), who takes the myth of the given to target concept-free knowing rather than non-inferential knowing, argues that the later Husserl does not assume concept-free sense perception and thus does not commit the myth of the given. Sachs, like Williams, targets Husserl’s earlier phenomenology for scrutiny, and argues that Husserl’s earlier static phenomenology falls afoul of the myth, particularly in Logical Investigations and Ideas I (Sachs, 2020, p. 292).

According to Sachs, Husserl does not take acts (noeses) and objects (noemata) of consciousness as given; instead, the myth lies in how each of these connect through the subject (2020, p. 291). Husserl’s epoche and phenomenological reduction are the culprits. In the splitting of the ego away (epoche) from immediate experience to establish itself as a third-party observer, Husserl posits a static reduction of the moment of perception which cannot be completed without capitulating to the myth of the given (Sachs, 2020, p. 293). This is because Husserl is essentially trying to distill out of phenomenological experience a transcendental knower capable of reporting the objects as they appear in such a way as to provide an epistemic foundation or ground of knowing (cf. Husserl, 1977, p. 35). This does in fact put the Husserlian version of the given into the unwarranted role of both bare sense-data and epistemic ground. And as Sachs notes, the illegitimate bootstrapping instant is not the world supposedly imprinting its epistemically relevant structure on the mind, but rather the assumption that the mind is in a position to imprint its structure onto sense perception (Sachs, 2020, p. 294).Footnote 3

3 Are Gibson’s affordances given?

In An ecological approach to visual perception (1979), Gibson defines affordances as opportunities for behavior in the environment. There has been some controversy about how to make this definition more precise (see Heras-Escribano, 2019 or Segundo-Ortin & Raja, 2024 for an overview). We have argued that affordances are best understood as relations between an organism’s abilities and structures in the environment (Chemero, 2003; Wilkinson & Chemero, 2024). More important than the precise definition of affordances is Gibson’s contention that affordances are perceived directly, which is to say without intervening images, mental representations, inferences, or other processes. Gibson justifies this claim by arguing for a tight connection between perception and action. Organisms perceive the world in order to act in it, and acting is typically part of the process of perceiving. To see what is around us, we move our eyes, turn our heads, crane our necks, and walk over to get a better look. This movement is part of the seeing; it also creates information for seeing in the form of flows, occlusions, and parallaxes. At first glance, Gibson’s direct perception appears to be about the given. Gibsonian affordances are features of the organism-environment system and are directly perceived possibilities for action. Does this mean affordances are given in Sellars’ sense? To show that affordances are not given in a way that perpetuates the myth, we must not only show that Gibson rejects concept-free perceptual knowing but also show that he relies on neither mind nor world to imprint its structure onto experience in such a way as to ground sense perception as a form of knowing.

Let’s start with the role of concepts in perception. It may appear to some that Gibson does endorse perception as a form of concept-free knowing. In Gibson’s discussion of child development, he rejects the idea that children are little empirical scientists who first learn about qualities and concepts by which to specify phenomenal objects:

Phenomenal objects are not built up of qualities; it is the other way around. The affordance of an object is what the infant begins by noticing. The meaning is observed before the substance and surface, the color and form, are seen as such. (Gibson, 2015, p. 126)

Gibson emphatically asserts that perception of affordances is not an act of classification. Developmentally speaking, we are exposed to many objects long before we can classify them. Further, classification is not necessary to perceive what an object affords. For instance, I do not have to classify a hollowed-out coconut shell half as a cup or a bowl to perceive that it affords collecting water and drinking from. By placing perception prior to the kinds of categories one might use to classify empirical facts, it appears that Gibson is neglecting Sellars’ third thesis in favor of the first and second. Namely, Gibson appears to be affirming a non-inferential knowing that an object in the world affords this or that action on my part and that perception is unlearned and direct. At the same time, he is discounting the idea that infants learn how to classify objects before they learn to perceive affordances. If read in this light, then the Gibsonian notion of affordance risks falling into the given’s quagmire of inconsistency.

Sellars’ critique thus seems like it would be a problem for phenomenology and direct perception, but as we will argue, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is not susceptible to this critique and neither is Gibson’s notion of affordance. Sellars is right that you cannot have an immediately given sense-datum and simultaneously have it do all kinds of epistemic work for the perceiver. As we will argue, when Gibson is considered in relation to his pragmatist roots and his late career debt to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body, it becomes clear that he is not trying to get the two-for one deal that Sellars rightly shows to be incoherent.

4 Gibson, Merleau-Ponty and the lived body

While earlier Husserl may be susceptible to the myth of the given, we argue here that Merleau-Ponty avoids committing himself to the myth of the given, precisely by locating perception with the lived body. And it is this strand of phenomenology that informs Gibson’s own views of perception, not the idealism of Husserl. Building on Sachs’ (2020) suggestion that Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical method between intellectualism and empiricism is what saves him from the myth, we argue that the Merleau-Ponty’s lived body is what allows him to avoid the myth. This section first briefly summarizes Sachs’ view and then goes on to introduce our own case expanding on Sachs’ view.

4.1 Sachs’ case for dialectics

Importantly for Sachs, unlike early Husserl who aimed to complete the phenomenological reduction, Merleau-Ponty makes use of the epoche qua rupture with familiarity but turns instead to the body: “Merleau-Ponty displaces the originally given noesis-noema correlation with a more basic account of intentionality, pre-reflective or motor intentionality” (2020, p. 295).Footnote 4 Rather than a strong idealist or realist correlationism between what is perceived and the act of perceiving, Sachs identifies what he calls a “weak and incarnate correlationism” between body and world in Merleau-Ponty, one that does not amount to the given, because the correlation is not given, it is grasped, effortfully, and only ever in part and only ever from a particular and embodied vantage (ibid, p. 296). A perceiver can never reduce an object’s horizons to a state of fully articulated perceptions (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 311). As such, there is no outside observer in the act of perception, and my being wrapped up in my own perceiving is precisely the condition of possibility of my perceiving at all (ibid., p. 317). Sachs argues that Merleau-Ponty “makes room” for the grip of the given in his dialectics between phenomenology and the sciences (Sachs, 2020, p. 299).

4.2 Lived body between charybdis and scylla of idealism and realism

We argue that this dialectic extends beyond a dialectic method between phenomenology and the sciences, or idealism and realism, and finds itself embodied in the “lived body.” It is precisely this embodied nature of perception that dances between realist and idealist versions of the myth that finds a way to talk about sense perceptions without placing upon them the onerous burden of serving as their own epistemic ground.

Merleau-Ponty, similar to Sellars after him, points to the incoherence and ambiguities inherent in treating qualities of sensations as objective analytic categories. In his Phenomenology of Perception he writes:

The classical notion of sensation was not itself a concept derived from reflection, but rather a recently developed product of thought turned toward objects; it was the final term in the representation of the world, the furthest removed from the constitutive source, and thereby the least clear. (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 10)

Here his target is Wundtian psychology. Wundtian talk of pure sensation mistakenly sets aside phenomenal experience and attends only to the object of perception (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 4). Echoing Sellars’ realist version of the myth of the given, Merleau-Ponty holds that it is not possible to bracket phenomenal experience as Wundtians propose. That is, it is incoherent to think we can strip perception down to some more basic, uniform sensation, because sensations at all levels of analysis are already changed with meaning or “sense” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 4). For Merleau-Ponty the idea of pure sensation artificially abstracts something decisive from perceptual experience: the field, context, or relation in which the act of perception occurred. For Merleau-Ponty, context is constitutive of perceptual experience, and therefore cannot be abstracted away. For this reason, and again in agreement with Sellars, Merleau-Ponty rejects the constancy hypothesis, i.e. that there is a stable match between stimulus and sensation, and the entailed assumption that stimuli and sensations share some kind of one-to-one correspondence relation.

Importantly Merleau-Ponty, like John Dewey in “The Reflex Arc Concept” (1896) does not think we can separate the processes of receiving and interpreting stimulus. In Phenomenology of Perception, he writes that there can be “no physiological definition of sensation” and “no autonomous physiological psychology” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 9). In The Structure of Behavior, he stresses that behavior is not atomic and not reducible to its parts (Merleau-Ponty, 1983). Physical sensations cannot be separated out from the complex process of pre-objective experience, because sensations are not copies of something out in the world but rather are constituted by the perceptual experience itself. He turns to the notion of gestalt to argue that our perceptual experience cannot be explained in terms of the constancy hypothesis but should instead be understood in terms of the primitive structure of conscious experience (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p.9).

Because behavior is so integral to perceiving, perceiving is neither a matter of impressions from without, nor is it an immediate consequence of stimulation. As Merleau-Ponty writes in the Phenomenology of Perception, perceiving cannot be a mere impression because the objects of perceptions always belong to a wider field in such a way as to preclude moments of pure impressions—“A visual field is not made up of isolated visions” (2012, p. 3). Since perception is not made up of determinate bytes of data, our experience of the indeterminate in the act of perceiving is not an error of attention but an integral part of sense-perception. Once we accept the necessarily indeterminate nature of perceiving, it becomes clear that perceptual objects cannot be the immediate consequences of stimulation, and taking such a route would obscure the role behavior plays in perceiving. Thus, to understand the lived body, we must view the world of perceptual objects not as a seal that presses into the passive wax of human experience, but as a space for the active and embodied side of perceiving. In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty designates the world of perceptual objects as the place where behavior happens. The world of perception is not primarily a material source of stimuli, nor the product of intellectual judgments, but the place in which we act.

For its part, a gestalt is more than what is given by the sensory stimuli. They are real objects that we experience directly and are not the product of association or judgment. Gestalts are neither physical nor mental entities, since there is no material object producing the stimuli, on the one hand, and we perceive them directly, on the other. Perceptual gestalts, then, are not constituted by stimuli or thoughts, but by a role they play in governing our comportment.

For Merleau-Ponty, the non-trivial locus of perception is the “lived body.” German has two words for the human body, Körper and Leib. Husserl used these terms to draw a philosophical distinction, which Merleau-Ponty develops in more detail. Husserl reserves Körper to mean our body as a physical entity that shares objective features with inanimate physical bodies. Physics studies bodies in this sense, as in “solid body” or “heavenly body.” Merleau-Ponty usually refers to our body in this sense as the “objective body.” By contrast, Leib means the specifically human body as we experience it first-personally, with which we touch and feel and move. Husserl’s usage of Leib is usually translated as “lived body.” Merleau-Ponty’s claim that we perceive with our bodies and are conscious with our bodies refers specifically to this notion of a lived body. While this concept is central to Merleau-Ponty’s views on perception, the concept of the lived body was vulnerable to ambiguities and imprecision. Much of his work focuses on trying to analyze the relevant phenomena and make the notion more precise. Here we focus on the importance of temporality when it comes to the relationship between an active, lived body and the world it perceives. One way to understand the lived body in Merleau-Ponty as a response to Sellars’ myth of the given is to locate the structure of perception, neither in the perceiver or the world perceived, but in the structural coupling between perceiver and perceived qua system and environment, a coupling that only ever instantiates across a temporal dimension.

In Gibson’s work, this same point is put in a focus on the tight coupling between acting and perceiving, and between the animal and the environment. In “The Myth of Passive Perception” Gibson notes how traditional theories of perception make action supplemental to perceiving (1982a, 1982b, 398; originally published in 1976). First, the stimulus stimulates the senses; then perhaps the organism adjusts in response. However, Gibson clarifies that according to his theory of information-based perception it is action that comes first. For visual perception this could mean, shifting the eyes, narrowing the gaze, etc.. Information here is not to be confused with Shannon’s information theory. The brain is not a receiver. Stimulation of the nerves is not analogous to receiving a telegraph. In the Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Gibson (2015; originally published in 1979) clarifies what he means by information by making a distinction between stimulation of sensory cells and information for perception. The former is not sufficient to explain perception. Imagine being in a thoroughly lit but fog-filled room. In that situation, the retinal cells are stimulated, but because the light is scattered, the environment is not perceivable. To understand visual perception we need to begin with the information available in the light. Crucially, this information is not static. The active animal in its movements creates information for perception by moving. Moving the eyes, craning the neck, and walking over to get closer to something all create structure–information–in the light available at the animal’s point of view.

This insistence that explaining perception requires focus on the active organism in the environment has important consequences for understanding the relationship between Gibson’s views and the myth of the given. The insistence that sensory cell stimulation, i.e., the generation of sense data, is not sufficient for explaining perception removes any privileged role for sense data in explaining our perception and knowledge of the world. Action, perception, and knowledge all need to be explained in terms of the retinal cells in moving eyes on a moving head on a torso on a locomotive body surrounded by an information-rich environment. Sensations do not explain our experience or knowledge of the world. Gibson’s theory of perception is direct, but what is perceived is in no sense given. Understanding perception in terms of a coupling between organism and environment across time allows Gibson to offload the epistemological burden, away from sensations or sense data, to the temporal feedback loop or ongoing process of interaction between the organism and its environment. As we will argue next, this is a feature of Gibson’s own pragmatist roots.

5 Gibson as pragmatist

Recall that according to the myth the naïve realist attempts in vain to strip the mind away from the perceived objects of the world, whereas idealism like that found in early Husserl attempts to strip away the world from mind in a phenomenological reduction. Each error is like a node that in itself results in contradiction, but reframed as part of a single temporal process that moves between these nodes, resting at neither, the epistemological burden falls neither to the structure of the mind, nor the structure of the environment, but to the dynamic structure of their coupling through lived and embodied experience. This active and temporal dynamic of perceiving is integral to Gibson’s views of perception, and it is also a hallmark of some early pragmatist thinkers. Before treating the Gibsonian action-perception cycle as the key to avoiding the myth of the given, we will first take a moment to situate Gibson in relation to his pragmatist roots. We argue that the temporal element of experience as well as its emphasis on the centrality of behavior is crucial for understanding the relation between knowledge and experience. This section first looks at radical empiricism in light of the myth of the given, turns to Holt and the importance of behavior, and then offers a brief interlude on the historical difficulties in viewing Gibson’s pragmatist roots in alignment with Sellarsian concerns.

5.1 William James and radical empiricism

Gibson referred to himself as a “radical empiricist”Footnote 5 (Gibson, 1982a, 1982b, 10), a term borrowed from William James’ later pragmatism. Cheryl Misak credits Gibson with popularizing a “Jamesian” version of pragmatism (2013). Gibson, like Holt before him, was committed to a Jamesian nondualism, often referred to as “neutral monism.” With regards to James’ posthumous Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), Alexis Diandra notes that “if we are to point to a place in James’ corpus where he is most vulnerable to the charges of immediacy, foundationalism, and irrationalism, it would be here” (2023, p. 171–172). While possibly another target for Sellars’ myth, its emphasis on the temporality could also be taken as a potential response.

Like Sellars and Merleau-Ponty, radical empiricism entails a rejection of atomic sense-data. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of the erstwhile sense-data theorists seem to prefigure O’Shea’s (2021) formulation of the “Categorical Myth of the Given.” However, instead of targeting the idealized structure of the world or the idealized structure of the mind as the guarantor of epistemic unity, he targets the mentalist structure of relations. Jamesian radical empiricism criticizes rationalist tendencies to posit relations as mental entities that stand over and above the particularity and flux of sensations. In A Pluralistic Universe, James stresses the overlap of sensations over time. The overlap of sensations is as immediately given as the distinctions and ruptures of sensation:

Every examiner of the sensible life in concreto must see that relations of every sort, of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are, and that conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as disjunctive relations are. Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that sensations are disjoined only. Radical empiricism insists that conjunctions between them are just as immediately given as disjunctions are, and that relations, whether disjunctive or conjunctive, are in their original sensible givenness just as fleeting and momentary […], and just as ‘particular,’ as terms are. (1987, p. 757)

What might appear to be a vulnerability to the myth of the given, turns out to be closer to Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the foundational importance of indeterminacy. Though, rather than stressing the open horizons of the object of perception in relation to a lived body, he situates perceiving squarely within the temporal.

Yes, per James, the richness of experience is in the immediate, where it is largely yet unnamed. Does this mean James is arguing for a concept-free or presuppositionless view of direct sense perception? James does not deny that perception involves concepts, but he also does not think it is limited to the concepts we already have (ibid., p. 758). Yet what is unnamed should not be confused with the atomic or removed from temporal flow—it is always and ever bound up in a larger temporal process, which prevents any part of the experience to be atomically given to consciousness: “The tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comes with an earlier and a later part and with a sense of their continuous procession” (ibid., p. 758).

James rejects the idea that we experience a present that is not already felt in distinction to past experience(s). “If we do not feel both past and present in one field of feeling, we feel them not at all” (ibid. 759). This means that experience by definition cannot be atomistic. Experience is continuous: “All real units of experience overlap” (ibid., p. 761). There is both diachronic overlap and synchronic overlap of units of experience (ibid., p. 761). Experience is molar, experienced as a whole, always in and through the temporal.

In A World of Pure Experience, James explains that, according to radical empiricism, not only do experiences drive the use of terms, but also of relations. Relations must be real experiences of relations. For instance, consider the example of walking into a room to find a half-drunk forgotten coffee now tepid, as an example of experiencing a real temporal relationship between the once fresh coffee and the less appealing mug. Radical empiricism does not prioritize conceptual unity over difference. James criticizes the intellectualist discounting of relations between moments of experience as producing an infinite regress (ibid., 1164). For James, however, the problem is in treating subject and object as “discontinuous entities” (ibid., 1164). As far as James is concerned, knower and known comprise one experience seen from different contexts (ibid., 1165). The union of the two arises through temporal conjunction in the embodied world. Knowledge arises out of experience through time: “Knowledge…lives inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time” (ibid., 1167). And this is precisely where Gibson follows James. Gibson, as we will discuss below, posits the action-perception cycle as relations in a structurally coupled system that generate knowledge for the organism over time.

To claim that interaction over time between organism and environment bridges the rationalistic gap between knower and known is not a new target for more rationalist critiques. James anticipates just such a criticism and decides to stab with an empiricist consideration: we don’t have any more substantiated concept of union than what James is already claiming for both subject and object under radical empiricism. In “A World of Pure Experience,” James writes, “unions by continuous transition are the only ones we know of” (ibid., p. 1168), so that denying the unity of knower and known, or in Gibson’s case organism and environment within the cycle of action and perception, they are essentially denying that there is unity in experience at all. For the kind of provisional or functional unity between and within experiences, including all empirical association, is all the certainty we glean from the world, once stripped of idealist pursuits.Footnote 6

To note, Gibson is one historical degree of separation from William James, via his adviser and mentor psychologist Edwin B. Holt (1873–1946). If Jamesian radical empiricism stressed temporality in perception, Holt may be said to stress the importance of context in perception, particularly the kind of context we associate with the social. In Holt’s famous example, if I perceive someone walking past my window, I might have just as well perceived that person walking towards a specific location for a specific purpose depending on my, the perceiver’s, focus (Holt, 1915). Although Holt’s theory makes more space for the role of complex behavior in perception, Gibson ultimately discarded Holt’s motor theory of consciousness,Footnote 7 for a view of perception as distinct observational activity, writing in his autobiography “Awareness seems to me now an activity but not a motor activity, a form of adjustment that enhances the pickup of information but not a kind of behavior that alters the world” (Gibson, 1982a, 1982b, 9). It is this active adjustment and contact with the world that drives perception. Or as Ludger Van Dijk and Erik Myin put it, in Gibon’s mature thoughtFootnote 8 pragmatic contact precedes and drives epistemic contact (2018).

5.2 Organism and environment in Dewey

As Pearce notes, early Pragmatists were largely drawn to biological considerations and placed heavy emphasis on the interaction between organism and environment (2020, p. 18). Dewey is one such example, and his own views on the relationship between organism and environment were integral to his theory of perception. Although not as direct an influence on Gibson as James, we note here the important affinities between Gibsonian treatment of the organism-environment coupling and Dewey’s views on perception in light of the organism-environment relationship. Those relevant to Gibson’s case against the myth of the given are the active relationship of the organism with its environment and ways in which that relationship precludes the possibility of atomic sense-data.

So far, we have stressed the importance of temporality and action as key to escaping the myth of the given. Committing to such a view of perception, as Dewey notes, precludes the kind of atomic sense-data that both phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Sellars reject. In other words, to say that perception is a function of action (and vice versa) is to reject the notion of atomic sensations. The organism qua system possesses memory that shapes its individual action and perception cycle. As Dewey remarks in Reconstruction in Philosophy:

Even an amoeba must have some continuity in time in its activity and some adaptation to its environment in space. Its life and experience cannot possibly consist in momentary, atomic, and self-enclosed sensations. Its activity has reference to its surroundings and to what goes before and what comes after. This organization intrinsic to life…affords the basis and material for a positive evolution of intelligence as an organizing factor within experience. (1957, p. 91).

When action and perception are seen as adjustments in a temporal process, the pragmatist position—whether Gibson or Dewey’s—claims that traditional conundrums that arise from connecting supposed raw sense-data given to experience with concepts and categories learned from experience become moot. As Dewey puts it, “When experience is aligned with the life-process and sensations are seen to be points of readjustment, the alleged atomism of sensations totally disappears” (1957, p. 90). There is no atomic raw sense-data. Instead, perception itself is always a process of active learning, attuning to relevant adjustments in the environment. This same process of attunement is also what shapes the categories we use to perceive. Epistemic categories are not separate from sensory perception. They are co-determining and co-evolving features of one singular process. From this vantage, sensory experiences are not a “non-inferential knowledge that,” to borrow Sellars’ term; rather, in Dewey’s words, they are “provocations, incitements, challenges” meant to fuel the process of epistemic inquiry (1957, p. 89).

5.3 Pragmatism in later context

This section is for those tempted to fault Gibson with the myth of the given by dint of his perceived alignment with pragmatism over and against the kind of analytic concerns expressed by Sellars. The reception of Gibson’s relationship with the pragmatist tradition has been shaped by a narrative that pits pragmatist and analytic traditions in incommensurable opposition. Such an oppositional view of the two traditions might incline one to assume that Gibson, along with the pragmatist view, has been and should be marginalized. We argue that this is not so, neither conceptually nor historically speaking.

The dominant narrative holds that pragmatism was and is incompatible with positivist concerns and was ultimately “eclipsed” by the analytic tradition (Talisse, 2007). However, this narrative has been challenged in recent decades (Misak, 2013; Talisse, 2007). As Misak has shown, pragmatists and logical positivists shared many concerns and even collaborated. Rather than an eclipse of pragmatism, some strands of pragmatism were absorbed into the process of logical positivism’ transition to North America (2013). As such, logical empiricism did not eclipse pragmatism, there were important synergies between the two camps: for instance, Carnap, admitted to being influenced by pragmatist thought, while John Dewey considered Neurath the most pragmatist of the logical empiricists, even agreeing to write a volume in their project, entitled “Theory of Valuation” (Misak, 2013, p. 374–5). Neurath, echoing pragmatist concerns and prefiguring Sellars’ rejection of content-free sense-data, remarked:

There is no way to establish fully secured, neat protocol statements as starting points of the sciences. There is no tabula rasa. We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components.” (1983, p. 92; as cited in Misak, 2013, p. 375)

So despite confusing and disparate terminologies that render comparisons at this scale either unwieldy or insufficiently precise, suffice it to say that the pragmatist rejection of atomistic sense-data and emphasis on perception as always and already embedded in presuppositions is one shared with the precursors of the analytic tradition.

6 Conclusion: Gibsonian direct perception is not given

As we have endeavored to show, Gibson’s theory of direct perception does not involve a commitment to any problematic sense of the given. Perception is the active product and grasping of an organism structurally coupled with its environment. There is nothing passive about the process of perception in ecological psychology. It takes work to perceive directly; directly perceived affordances are “processed” by action in the environment. We do bodily work rather than mentalistic work to have direct perceptions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Gibsonian action-perception cycle, the historical precedents are to be found both in the phenomenological tradition and the pragmatist tradition to which Sellars also belonged.