Psychology in an Indeterminate World

Abstract

By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal’s activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of “affordances,” the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.

Sport scientistsin-becoming: from fulfilling one’s potential to finding our way along

“…In reality, there is only one world (Ingold, 2018), and all organisms inhabit it (Gibson, 1979, p. 130 ff.). This is a world codetermined by actions of inhabitants, which from an ecologically dynamic rationale, are reciprocally shaped by those of others (Heft, 2007;Lave, 1990;van Dijk, 2021). Indeed, we are not denying that humans inhabit a world with signs, pictures, words and systems of classification.…”

Fulfilling the Regenerative Potential of Higher Education: A Collaborative Auto-Ethnography

“…is a nested question that can be answered by a person just as much as by a collective. Notably, as we know from complexity theory [34,35], the answer to the collective question of vocation is not simply the accumulation of individual answers; through self-organization, a collective (project) can truly emerge with an identity, purpose, and function of its own.…”

“…As Rosa convincingly shows [13], the tendency to simplify, predict, and control-both intellectually and in terms of organization-still dominates contemporary culture and institutional logic. In an educational context, this analysis has been repeatedly echoed, e.g., [24,29,35,38]. The logic communicated with the master thesis course guides we work with at our university is no exception to Rosa's analysis; students are instructed to submit a detailed research proposal with a precise description of research questions, relevance, step-by-step research plans, and expected outcomes before starting their actual empirical research.…”

“…An emergent narrative, in contrast, would emphasize how deep engagement within a research context leads to co-creation and ongoing refinement of research plans and activities. Although we care to emphasize that numerous contemporary educational approaches are "shaking up the tree" in this regard, such as Crowell and Reid-Marr's seminal work on emergent teaching [35], the approach of living labs [39], and a rhizomatic view of sustainability education [40,41], our impression is that we have a long way to go. If we care to co-create more regenerative educational experiences, resisting the control impulse and opening up space for encountering and embracing emergence might, indeed, be a good place to start.…”

Animals in Sociomaterial Processes: An Alternative to Inferential Processes in Animals’ Heads

“…In addition, the importance of learning to attend to relevant aspects of situations that constrain action was highlighted. This section argues for the importance of recognizing the environment as consisting of nested processes for understanding how affordances organize animals’ social interactions, rendering inference unnecessary (see Van Dijk and Rietveld, 2021; Van Dijk, 2021b; Van Dijk & Withagen, 2016; Gastelum, 2020; Palatinus & Michaels, 2014). Note that I talk here about responsiveness to affordances, not the ‘ontology’ of affordances.…”