Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Science of the Future

Abstract

The central goal of ecological psychology is to develop a theory of how humans cope successfully with everyday tasks such as navigating safely through the environment. Achieving this seemingly simple goal has proved to be exceedingly difficult. The authors suggest that one of the reasons for the difficulty comes from a perhaps surprising source: the tension between two radically different ways of knowing, artistic (aesthetic) and scientific (empirical-theoretical). James J. Gibson utilized both ways of knowing throughout his career. His creativity cannot be denied, as evidenced by his many novel and intuitive ideas (e.g., the field of safe travel, perceptual systems, affordances); and he often sought to learn from artists. Nevertheless, Gibson never gave up on empirical research, consistently applying rigorous scientific methodology in his experimental work. Robert E. Shaw too utilized both ways of knowing, often seeking insights from art and applying these in his theory building and empirical research. In this article, the authors argue that reconciling these two seemingly disparate ways of knowing is a difficult, but nonetheless worthwhile, task that could benefit the field. As a basis for this claim, they first use a phenomenological and hermeneutic critique of science to argue that ecological scientists need to assess critically the representationalist tradition in experimental science, focusing particularly on key assumptions of geometry and logic. The authors then propose that, if it is to achieve its goals, ecological psychology must find novel ways to understand how humans cope with everyday tasks. Finally, they argue that lessons from modern and postmodern artists' rejection of formal logic and the representationalist tradition, as well as their search for novel techniques, can be instructive and informative for the students of ecological psychology.

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: Perceptually-Guided Action vs. Sensation-Based Enaction1

“…Both Enactivism and Ecological Psychology are developing enterprises that still need to give elaborate answers to questions regarding brain level processes, knowing and feeling, consciousness, and phenomenological experience. Ecological Psychology has a coherent account of contact with the environment, however, the role of experience in perceiving/acting, or even the importance of experience, has not been developed in ecological work to date (see related points in Kadar and Effken, 1994 , 2006 ). This even though Gibson drew on experiences (that anyone with a functioning perceptual system can share) to develop his theory of how the structure of the surround is detected 3 .…”

“… 3 For example, the decisive test of reality is whether one can discover new details by scrutiny (1979, p. 257). See Kadar and Effken ( 1994 , 2006 ), and Glotzbach and Heft ( 1982 ), for accounts of some aspects of phenomenology in relation to Ecological Psychology. …”

“…Resonance is an active process, a single dynamic process of seeking invariants and performing goals (cf. Kadar and Effken, 2006 , p. 357). Note that Oyama ( 2012 ) sees “information” in biology as a metaphor for whatever “controls” or guides the development of form in living organisms (cf.…”