Heft (2001): 3.2, Affordances & Self-Perception

In the next half of Chapter 3, Heft discusses some ideas related to Gibson's notion of affordances, including how it connects with James's radical empiricism and affordances as a prima facie contradictory notion. I've discussed some of my initial thoughts on affordances in this blog, so it'll be interesting to see how these line up with how Heft describes them. The final bit in Chapter 3 touches on the experience of the body in perception, where I'll focus on how the body, like the world, can be directly perceived.

Heft (2001): 3.1, Animal-Environment Mutuality & Phenomenology

We've finally reached Gibson! In Chapter 3, Heft explores some broad ideas about animal-environment relations that are shared between James, Holt, and Gibson. These include the mutuality between animal and environment, phenomenological experience, affordances, and self-perception. This post focuses on the first two ideas, while the latter two will be covered in a future post.

Animal-environment mutuality

Ecological psychology was formally introduced in James Gibson's The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), where Gibson emphasised the importance of the mutual and reciprocal relationship between animal and environment. Rather than viewing the physical environment and within-organism psychological processes as separate (like in traditional Descartes-rooted psychology), Gibson argued that no animal could exist without a surrounding environment, while no environment could exist without an animal to surround. In other words, the animal and the environment make an inseparable and reciprocal pair, with each existing in relation to the other.