We're now onto Chapter 2! If Chapter 1 focused on William James, the Chapter 2 spotlight is firmly placed on Edwin B. Holt. Being James' student and James J. Gibson's eventual supervisor, Holt plays an important role in connecting James' philosophies of radical empiricism and pragmatism to Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception. According to Heft, Gibson never directly cited the work of James, making it all the more surprising how closely their works align. Heft hence suggests that this connection was likely mediated by Holt, who served as the historical and intellectual linkage between the two. In this post, I'll explore the first half of Chapter 2, focusing on Holt's defence of realism through the work of the New Realists, before diving into how he conceptualised perception and cognition with a pretty cool searchlight analogy!
The program of the New Realists
Including Holt, the New Realists were a group of six philosophers who worked together to defend and extend James's radical empiricism. Despite some ideological differences, they were primarily united against the view that what is directly known to a knower is a mental state or representation of some kind. That is, the New Realists rejected the idea of subjectivism, which suggests that the existence of the world is dependent on it being perceived or known. In contrast, Holt and the New Realists argued for realism, that is, the perspective that the world exists independent of the act of knowing, or the existence of knowers.
To give an example (for my musical-loving readers), consider the bridge lyrics in the song "Waving through the Window" from the musical Dear Evan Hansen. At this part, Evan (the main character) sings, "When you're falling in a forest and there's nobody around, do you ever really crash or even make a sound?", paying homage to the philosophical thought experiment asking whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in a spot where no one is present to hear it. Notwithstanding nontrivial arguments on the distinction between air vibrations and sounds, the whole point here is that, if you were a subjectivist, your answer to Evan would be a 'no'. After all, if the existence of an event depends on it being perceived, then if no one perceives Evan's fall, Evan didn't actually fall. However, the New Realists would argue that, independent of the existence of other knowers or the act of knowing, Evan did actually fall, because the truth value of that event does not depend on any act of knowing. I will note here some differences between Evan and the original tree thought experiment. One might argue that Evan is himself a knower who can perceive his fall, and on a subjectivist account, he did actually fall. No matter, I think you get my point, and this marks the end of my digression, where my sole and stubborn purpose was to bring in an example from one of my favourite musicals (oops).
Let's get back to the book. Rather than viewing knowing as a process happening inside the mind, the New Realists saw knowing processes as a relation between knower and known. If this sounds familiar, it's because this is exactly how James conceptualised the selective process of knowing! Accordingly, this realist approach is in direct (pun intended) opposition to indirect approaches of knowing, including that of British empiricism (i.e., where individuals perceive mental representations constructed from current sensation and past experience) and Kantian idealism (i.e., where mental representations are transformed by a priori structures in the mind). Heft argues that while these approaches lay claim to realism, they unfortunately fall short in certain aspects. For example, in both approaches, individuals seem to exist within their own private worlds. But if this were the case, how then could shared knowledge emerge, where different knowers come to know the same world? This issue is circumvented by theories of direct realism. By arguing that knowing is a relation, and not a mental construction, the New Realists argued that meaning in the world is simply uncovered and detected through knowing processes, thereby providing empirical grounds for shared knowledge of the world.
Holt's approach to perception
My favourite part of this chapter, by far, is Holt's searchlight analogy of how perception can be conceived as a relation between the "two functionally independent domains" of the knower and the known world. The above is directly quoted from Heft, and I've added quotation marks because I'm wary of the description of the individual and the environment as "independent" or separate. After all, didn't we just spend a lot of time in Chapter 1 arguing that there are no two separate substances (between physical and mental), and that everything boils down to the neutral substance of pure experience? Then again, the previous section on realism argues that the existence of one domain (i.e., the known world) is independent of the other (i.e., the knower). Without going into too much detail, I think what Heft means here is not independence in substance. Rather, he is pointing to how, in the actualisation of the perceptual knowing process, the knower and the known world play different roles. That is, they are *functionally* independent. This will be made clear as we dive into Holt's searchlight analogy.
Holt's searchlight analogy is as follows: Imagine a boat with a searchlight, with this searchlight illuminating successive portions of a shoreline. Here, what is illuminated depends on the interaction between two things: the shoreline itself and the movement of the boat with its searchlight. In other words, that which is illuminated is a relation between the shoreline and the boat. Crucially, the shoreline itself exists whether or not the boat shines its searchlight onto it; that is, the shoreline exists independently of the boat. If you've not already figured it out, the shoreline represents the world, the boat with its spotlight represents the knower, and the illuminated patch of the shoreline represents what is being known at a particular point in time.
I think this is a really neat analogy because it captures some key features of the knowing process as conceptualised by the radical empiricist. For one, it shows how the act of knowing is a relation between knower and known, rather than being something that happens within the mind (it doesn't make sense to say that the illuminated patch of shoreline exists *in* the boat, does it?). Secondly, it captures the selective process of knowing. If the whole of the shoreline is viewed as James's neutral substance of pure experience, then the movement of the boat and searchlight is akin to the selective function that gives rise to percepts, which James saw as the first product of knowing. Finally, we can see that what is illuminated (i.e., what is perceived) is a function of the possibilities of the shoreline and the capabilities of the boat and searchlight. Heft doesn't draw the connection here, but I see this as directly analogous to Turvey's dispositional view of affordances (Turvey, 1992). Put another way, what is perceived is a function between the action possibilities in the environment (i.e., the affordances) and the physical capabilities of the actor (i.e., their effectivities). I think this is the most direct link to my above interpretation of what Heft meant by functional independence. The environment and the actor play different functional roles in the process of perception. While the environment provides the affordances, the actor provides the effectivities, which, once entered into a relation with the affordances, lead to the actualisation of the perceiving process!
A final note on cognition
Holt also provided an account of how memory processes might occur without the need for mental representations. Being mindful of the word count, I'll describe this briefly, but also because how cognition manifests in an ecological approach still eludes me due to my lack of understanding. Here, I think what Holt is arguing is that, because perception is not static (think about how the searchlight continuously moves along the shoreline with time), what is also directly perceived is the temporal ordering of experiences. Hence, rather than seeing memory as a process of storage and subsequent retrieval, it can be conceived as simply being aware that something occurred earlier (from directly perceiving the temporal ordering). I might be wrong here, so it'll definitely be worth revisiting in the future.
References
Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Psychology Press.
Turvey, M. (1992). Affordances and Prospective Control: An outline of the Ontology. Ecological Psychology, 4(3), 173–187. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326969eco0403_3
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