Perception as Information Detection: Reflection on Gibson's Ecological Approach to Visual Perception is a series of 16 chapters building upon and updating the 16 original chapters in Gibson's 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. In this first chapter, we take a look at Baggs and Chemero's (2019) argument for a finer-grained distinction of the world than what Gibson proposed. They point out some enduring debates within the ecological circle and how they might be resolved with this proposed distinction. The chapter ends with some implications of this on the scope of ecological theory and on practical interventions to real-world problems.
Gibson's original distinction
In his 1979 book, Gibson points out two ways in which the world relates to organisms. On the one hand, we have the physical world as described by physics and geology. The physical world exists independently of animals and can be described at every level of analysis. That is, it can be spatially described anywhere from the atomic level (e.g., quantum physics) all the way to the cosmic levels (e.g., general relativity). Similarly, the physical world can be temporally described at extremely fast speeds (e.g., special relativity) as well as at extremely slow timescales (e.g., carbon decay). Crucially, the physical world has no meaning and yet, perception does. So how do we come to perceive meaning? Traditional theories have appealed to internal structures (i.e., the mind) to construct such meaning. The ecological stance is that this is conceptually intractable. This is where Gibson introduced the second sense of the world to bypass this issue, that is, the meaningful environment.
The environment's existence depends on animals. To talk about an environment is to talk about an animal that is surrounded. Reciprocally, to say anything about an animal is to necessarily imply an environment that surrounds that animal. In other words, there is an inherent, unbreakable mutuality between animal and environment. Environments didn't exist aeons ago when there were no animals. Only the physical world, which consisted of potential environments, existed. Environments are also concerned with an intermediate level of analysis. This is related to the perceptual limits of animals. Animal perception is concerned with the terrestrial objects, not those that are atomic or cosmic in size. Perception is also of intermediate time scales, and not those at the speed of light or at imperceptibly slow timescales.
For the most part, this distinction has served ecological psychologists well. There is one problematic issue, however, one that Gibson observed and tried to resolve. Gibson observed that in one sense, the environment of a single animal was identical to that of all animals, while in another, it was different. He argued that action solved this apparent contradiction. Yes, the environment I am perceiving is, on face value, different from the environment you are perceiving. But it is ultimately the same environment, because you have the potential to adopt my point of observation by moving to where I am, while I have the ability to do the same. Hence, while our current surrounding environments might be different, we still have access to the same surrounding environment because of our ability to move. This apparent contradiction is a feature, not a bug, in the animal-environment system.
Introducing the third sense of environment
Baggs and Chemero argue that Gibson's solution is unsatisfactory. For one, even if we take up the same point of observation as another human, some superficial features will always be different, such as the occlusion due to one's nose at the bottom of one's visual field. For another, Baggs and Chemero argue that Gibson neglects the personal histories, developments, and abilities of the organism. Even if we take up the same point of observation and are exposed to the same environmental information, what is perceived might be different because of what one can do. A pilot perceives meaning that the untrained person doesn't in the buttons of a cockpit. An adult perceives the climbability of the flight of stairs that a child might not.
To resolve this tension, Baggs and Chemero propose a further distinction of the environment, namely between the habitat and the Umwelt. This distinction is a simple matter of different levels of analysis. The habitat is the environment considered from the point of view of an entire species, or a typical, ideal member of a species. The precise system that is studied here is hence the species-habitat system. The Umwelt is the environment considered from the perspective of a unique, individual animal. The appropriate system studied here is then the animal-Umwelt system. The Umwelt depends on a given animal, while the habitat does not. Whereas a corresponding Umwelt ceases to exist, the habitat continues to exist even after a given animal dies. Ultimately, we have now moved from a two-way to a three-way distinction of the world, that is, from a physical world/environment distinction to a physical world/habitat/Umwelt distinction of that which surrounds animals.
Tensions and their resolutions
Baggs and Chemero move on to outlining some outstanding debates in ecological psychology and how they might be resolved with their proposed three-way distinction. For instance, there is an ongoing debate on whether affordances are dispositions or relations. According to the former, affordances can exist out there in the environment independently of the animal. Meanwhile, the latter posits that affordances depend on animals for their existence. Baggs and Chemero suggest that neither view is more true than the other. Rather, they just operate at different levels of the environment. Specifically, affordances are dispositions at the species-level habitat, while they are relations at the animal-level Umwelt.
I am not as familiar with the other tensions outlined by Baggs and Chemero, so I shall describe them in brief. Concerning ecological information, there is information-about and information-for. The former is relevant to the habitat, while the latter is relevant to the Umwelt. When it comes to learning and development, there is learning as a process of differentiation versus enrichment. Once again, the former and latter are the appropriate processes at the level of the habitat and Umwelt, respectively. Finally, with regard to sociocultural influences, Baggs and Chemero suggest that behaviour settings are discovered by species in habitats and enacted by animals in Umwelts. I've obviously done a huge disservice to the arguments Baggs and Chemero make about these tensions and resolutions (in huge part due to my lack of time spent thinking about these issues), but their argument remains -- their three-way distinction of the world isn't just a matter of semantics, but actually has the potential to give us a framework to settle some controversies in ecological psychology.
Theoretical and practical implications
Baggs and Chemero end the chapter by outlining some implications their proposed three-way distinction has on ecological theory and practice. They argue that Gibson's ecological program and the research inspired by it really provide a theory of the structure of the habitat. To account for the Umwelt of given animals, Gibsonian psychology is insufficient. Here, they propose enactivism as a complementary approach to ecological psychology, especially as a framework to explore the neglected animal-Umwelt system. I know about the enactivist program, but my knowledge of it still leaves much to be desired, so this is all I shall say for now. There are some concerns about the necessity of adopting enactivism into ecological psychology, and there are prominent scholars arguing for the positive and negative cases. This is definitely a gap in my knowledge that I'll strive to fill moving forward.
In terms of practical interventions, Baggs and Chemero argue that the habitat-Umwelt distinction gives us actionable ways to implement solutions to real-world problems. The main claim here is that adopting the animal-Umwelt perspective directs us to solutions that reconfigure the animal, while leaving the habitat unchanged. Conversely, adopting the species-habitat perspective directs us to interventions that reconfigure the actual environment, while leaving the animal untouched.
Concluding thoughts
Given that this chapter aims to argue for why we should replace Gibson's original two-way distinction of the world with a finer-grained three-way distinction, I take that an implicit argument made here is that, because the three-way distinction gives us a tangible way to come up with better practical solutions, this strengthens it as a conceptual framework of the world (at least over the previous two-way distinction). Maybe I'm being too critical, but I fail to see how this provides strong justification for their purposes. Sure, the habitat-Umwelt distinction provides a useful way to categorise the different solutions we might come up with, but I feel like the example interventions cited weren't anything that I didn't already know from before. Even without ecological psychology, behaviourist and cognivist programmes could easily have come up with and accounted for the interventions mentioned.
That is not to say that the habitat-Umwelt distinction is a complete moot attempt. What I have written in the previous paragraph is simply a very specific comment on a very specific part of their entire argument. Overall, I think that there's a lot of sense in Baggs and Chemero's proposed distinction, and I agree with their insight on its potential to resolve at least some of the ongoing debates in ecological psychology. At the very least, this chapter has exposed many areas in ecological psychology that I'm aware of, but not necessarily know much about. Excited to hit the books with even more purpose!
References
Baggs, E., & Chemero, A. (2019). The third sense of environment. In J. B. Wagman & J. J. C. Blau (Eds.), Perception as Information Detection: Reflections on Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (pp. 5–20). Routledge.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual Perception. Psychology Press.
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