Ecological Psychology in Context (Heft, 2001): Introduction

I'm starting a new blog series! Over the next few weeks (and probably months), I'll be covering Harry Heft's 2001 book "Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism". At least from the title and my reading of the first few chapters, Heft (2001) goes beyond the principles of Ecological Psychology and explicitly attempts to outline the historical context in which Gibson's ecological psychology was formed. Far from being an outright original conception, the first glimpses of an ecological psychology could be seen in William James's writing. One of the main goals of this book, then, is to trace out the historical evolution of ideas (i.e., from William James, to Edwin Holt, and finally to James Gibson) that led to the eventual thesis of ecological psychology. 

In this and subsequent blog posts, I'll briefly cover some key ideas and concepts I find important or interesting. The choice of ideas covered might not be representative of that particular chapter, and it will never be intended to be either! My goal here is simply to find something to write about within each chapter, while not feeling obliged to cover everything in depth. After all, one can always pick up the book themselves for a more detailed discussion of the broad range of arguments presented. Practically, shorter posts should be more digestible for the reader, and it'll also be easier for me to maintain the blog, especially as I'm swamped with work from my final undergraduate year in psychology!

Exploring the animate with the inanimate

With that being said, let's start with the introduction. Heft begins with the observation that while being a science about living, animate beings, psychology really originated as an attempt to study human behaviour via applying approaches and techniques from the physical sciences (or the science of inanimate, inert things). By 'physical sciences', Heft (and many ecologically minded theorists) draws attention to the Newtonian framework of physics, also known as classical mechanics. This is distinct from more contemporary frameworks, such as complex systems theory, which is a largely welcomed addition in many areas of psychology, including ecological psychology. 

What's the issue with studying animate beings from a Newtonian framework? On a superficial level, Heft points out several nontrivial ways in which animate beings and inanimate things differ, including how animate beings are dynamic, selective, exist in relation to an environmental niche, and actively modify and adapt to their surroundings. On a more insidious level, Heft provides 3 examples of how such an approach has implicitly influenced the way we think about psychological processes. Firstly, we tend to think of causality in terms of what Heft calls 'mechanistic antecedent-consequent relations'. In other words, an event's cause must always be something that occurs directly before the fact, like how an 8-ball's movement is attributed to the cue ball's movement immediately before it. In this respect, Heft argues that such a conception of causality is too limited, especially when trying to account for psychological processes.

Next, Heft goes on to highlight 2 dichotomies, or dualisms, promoted by our traditional conception of psychology. The first dualism is between the mind and body. More popularly known as Cartesian dualism, this is the view (conceptualised by René Descartes) arguing that there exist 2 substances (i.e., things) that are separate from one another. Specifically, these are the physical body and the psychical (i.e., nonphysical) mind. My understanding is that, while Cartesian dualism has largely gone out of fashion in more recent discussions about the philosophy of mind, its influence on the mind-body distinction still remains. For example, contemporary philosophers have moved on to property dualisms, or the idea that while there is one physical substance, this substance has separate classes of properties (i.e., physical properties vs. mental properties). 

Finally, the second dualism Heft brings up is the one between the organism and its environment. He argues that psychological explanations tend to distinguish between processes 'inside' an organism as opposed to those 'outside' in the environment. However, an ecological approach questions how tenable this approach is and argues instead that the separation between an animal and its surroundings isn't as obvious as we make it out to be. 

Goals of the book

Having summarised a few problems with the traditional approach to psychology, Heft concludes the introduction by outlining the main goals of his book. Firstly, Heft aims to provide the philosophical and historical context that led to Gibson's ecological psychology. This is what's covered in the first and second parts of the book, where Heft dives into the interconnections between William James's radical empiricism, Edwin Holt's philosophical behaviourism, and James Gibson's ecological psychology.

Secondly, Heft aims to find common ground between separate yet related ecological programmes. In particular, while the main ecological approach endorsed is that of Gibson's, Heft proposes that ecological psychology's theoretical base can be meaningfully expanded when merged with Roger Barker's eco-behavioural program.

Lastly, Heft seeks to examine how ecological psychology fits within the broader field of psychology. In addition to providing an alternative perspective on perceptual and cognitive processes, Heft asserts that ecological psychology can play a leading role in accounting for sociocultural processes as well as the inherently human experience of meaning. The latter 2 goals will be covered in the third part of the book, which focuses on broadening the conceptual scope of ecological psychology.

References

Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Psychology Press.