Direct Perception Requires an Animal-Dependent Concept of Specificity and of Information

Abstract

Specificity and information are at center stage in ecological psychology. Nevertheless, the usual theorizing on these concepts may have made the problem of accounting for perception and action more difficult by so far underestimating the role of animals as both meaning-detectors and meaning-determiners. The usual understanding of information and specificity in ecological psychology seems neither necessary nor even compatible with ecological premises and empirical findings. I argue that a reframing of these concepts to fully take animals into account is necessary to explain perception of action-specific meanings. The reframing proposed converges on ideas from developmental systems theory and in no way concedes to inputs-followed-by-processing-followed-by-representation models. Fully acknowledging the animal for properly defining information over the animal-environment system poses no threat lawfulness, realism, or direct perception. It also invites serious consideration of self-organization and interactivism as sources for further development of ecological science. Specificity and information are central concepts for ecological psychology. They underwrite the relationship of animals and their environments; they provide a lawful basis for perception and action determining each other and being functionally adequate. Nevertheless, widely shared views on information and

Direct perception in context: radical empiricist reflections on the medium

“…The tension relates to whether the environment should be understood as made up of ready-made structure, or whether activity always has a constitutive role to play in structuring the environment. It has consequences for thinking about the role of social life, language, and the commitment to realism in an ecological account of perception (Heft 1989;2017;Ingold 2011;Costall 1995;Turvey 1992;Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014;Vaz 2015; Van Dijk and Myin 2018; Baggs and Chemero 2018;Heras-Escribano 2019). This tension, we'll show, also comes into sharp relief in Gibson's notion of the medium.…”

“…For such correspondences to provide information for an animal, the triad must have already been taking shape in activity. Only then can correspondences be taken up in coordination and used by the animal to make a difference to its practical activity (Bateson 1972;Oyama 2000;see Johnston 1997;Van Dijk et al 2015;Vaz 2015; Withagen and van der Kamp 2010). On the radical empiricist view we're developing in this paper, coordination consists in the bodily adjustments of achieving and maintaining an organism-environment fit.…”

Affordance-based practice: An ecological-enactive approach to chronic musculoskeletal pain management

“…Specifically, the relational nature of affordances makes it impossible to only focus on one of the three domains (biological, psychological, or social) or to consider them in isolation from each other, because it is not possible to coherently use the concept of affordances without consideration of both the individual and their environmental context. 85,93,94 Centralizing affordances in pain care theory and practice can provide safeguards against the fragmentation and the biomedical dualism and reductionism commonly seen in misapplications and misinterpretations of the BPS model.…”