Ecological psychology is radical enough: A reply to radical enactivists

Segundo-Ortin, Miguel; Heras–Escribano, Manuel; Raja, Vicente

doi:10.1080/09515089.2019.1668238

“…Following van Dijk, Withagen, and Bongers, we call this view information for action. Moreover, as Segundo-Ortin et al (2019) argue, specification and meaning, which are central notions for ecological psychology, are compatible with the principles of radical enactivism. To say that the information in the ambient array specifies the environment amounts to saying that there is a lawful covariation between patterns of the array and the environment-a point we also stress below.…”

mentioning

confidence: 85%

“…This would be a case of perceptual error. However, the ecological approach to perception is committed to direct perception, which precludes cases of perceptual error as traditionally conceived (Gibson, 1968, p. 287;Heras-Escribano and de Pinedo, 2016, p. 581;Segundo-Ortin et al, 2019, p. 1016. Cases of misperception in the ecological approach are not cases of picking up information that fails to point to its source but cases of failing to pick up information.…”

Section: Ecological Information (Or Information For Action)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Enactive-Ecological Approach to Information and Uncertainty

Carvalho

¹

,

Rolla

²

2020

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Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as a minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent's cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view by showing how direct learning, seen as an instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity.Information is the bread and butter of cognitive science and neuroscience (CSN). Talk about information processing, control, storage, and retrieval is abundant in explanations of how cognitive systems can perform specific tasks and enable agents to interact intelligently with their environment. Accordingly, one of the defining tasks of CSN is to describe the mechanisms through which information is conveyed, an enterprise that, if successful, allows us to understand, predict, simulate, and intervene upon the cognitive capacities of real agents.The groundwork of the way information is understood by CSN today was laid by Shannon's (1948) mathematical account of information, which made possible nothing less than digital communication. Simply put, Shannon's theory defines information as entropy, which is the measure of average uncertainty of the selection of an encoded signal. The core idea of what became known as Shannon-information is that the less uncertain the selection of the encoded signal is at its receiver, the more information the signal carries from its sender. Noise, on the other hand, permanently corrupts the signal, thus increasing entropy and diminishing information. To summarize, information is a matter of minimization of uncertainty. Thus, CSN requires the Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1

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“…Instead, correlations get their information significance because of what they afford to an agent. For more on this difference between actual use and possible use in the characterization of information for, see Segundo-Ortin et al, (2019, 1015-1016. Finally, in thinking of specification as a process and affordances as getting specified along this process, van Dijk and Kiverstein forgo the relevant distinction between the process of perception and the process of learning to perceive.…”

Section: Ecological Information (Or Information For Action)mentioning

confidence: 99%

An enactive-ecological approach to information and uncertainty

Carvalho¹,

Rolla²

2019

Preprint

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Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve her intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view and by showing how direct learning, seen as instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity.

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“…We see an increasing uptake of the use of the affordance framework in recent enactive accounts (see Di Paolo et al 2017, Gallagher 2017. While misunderstandings about both the metaphysical nature of information and what it means to perceive information have kept many enactivists from fully endorsing ecological psychology (see Segundo-Ortin et al 2019), the ecological-enactive framework embraces both approaches (see Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distal engagement: Intentions in perception

Brancazio

¹

,

Segundo-Ortin

²

2020

Consciousness and Cognition

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Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of longterm planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecologicalenactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for "high-level" or "representationhungry" capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a nonrepresentational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating prereflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use.

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Ecological psychology is radical enough: A reply to radical enactivists

Cited by 30 publications

References 45 publications

An Enactive-Ecological Approach to Information and Uncertainty

An Enactive-Ecological Approach to Information and Uncertainty

An enactive-ecological approach to information and uncertainty

Distal engagement: Intentions in perception

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