In a prior post, I hummed a few bars
of “Ecological Psychology needs to be evaluated within the context of AmericanPhilosophy.” I then started wading into one of the pivotal debates in the
history of Ecological Psychology, the 1981 debate that pitted Fodor and
Pylyshyn against Turvey, Shaw, and Mace. F&P’s criticism was published in Cognition, shortly after Gibson’s death,
and TSM’s reply established the new direction for the field. In the last post,
I summarized F&P’s arguments, and interspersed brief notes about when they
did, or did not, seem to be giving Gibson a fair shake. In this post, I want to
try to avoid nit-picky details about where F&P went wrong. Instead, I want
to outline a broader reply to F&P’s criticism.
The overall problem, it seems to me,
is that Gibson is playing an American Philosophy game, working within the
intellectual lineage of Peirce, James, etc., while F&P want to play a Continental
Philosophy game. I don’t want to go into too much details about the historic
differences between the two approaches, or how they arose. My more meager goal is
to defend ecological psychology in a way that stays true to its roots. American
philosophy, in general, is concerned with earthly particulars, is suspicious
about intellectual distinctions, and does not privilege a first-person point of
view. While F&P want solutions to the traditional problems of perception to
happen on an intellectual level, Gibson proposes that the supposed problems are
typically solved in the grit of everyday interactions.
Perception
Let us begin by defining ‘perception’.
The modern, western, philosophical
tradition has it that questions about perception revolve around situations
where someone can tell you that they perceive something. They privilege the
first-person point of view, and if someone asserts they perceive something,
their claim must generally be taken at face value. But outside of strange
philosophical discussions, that is not what the term means. The most natural
way to use the term is in the third person, to refer to certain types of
matchings between other people’s behavior and their world. “Why did he jump?”
you ask. “Because he saw a snake,” I reply. In so doing, I point to a relationship between the jump and an illuminated reptile. Why do I think this is the most
natural way to use the term? Because when there is a dispute between the first
person and third person, the third person typically wins.
“I saw a ghost,” you say.
“No, you saw the curtain swaying in
the breeze,” I say.
“Oh,” you reply.
At that point, we might agree that
you “imagined” a ghost, “thought” it was a ghost, or even “experienced” a
ghost, but one glance back in the room and you will agree with me that you did
not “see” a ghost. While we might accept as a perceptual question “Why did you
react to the curtain that way?”, we clearly do not want to treat in the same
manner the question “Why did you see a ghost?”. The latter is premised on a
false assumption, because, as we both agreed, you did not see a ghost.
Similarly, if I do an experiment in which I place different plants in the hallway (spiky on one side, soft-leafed on the other), and you walk a foot further from the spiky plant no matter which side I put it on, but only in that part of the hallway, then I have evidence that you saw the plant. (Dick Coss has done manipulations like this using joggers in a arboretum.) If I stop you in the hall, and you claim never to have seen the plants, my third-person observations trump your first person perspective. If I go back and show you the video tapes, where the plants are switched back and forth, and your walking is altered, you will agree that you must have seen the plants, even if you were not aware of having seen them.
Questions about vision are questions about how behavior is
altered by the presence of illuminated objects and events in a person’s
surroundings.
Specification
Ostensibly,
much of F&P’s criticism regards Gibson’s notion of specification. Gibson’s
claim is 1) that certain patterns of energy are specific to certain states of
the world, 2) that for organisms with access to those patterns, the state of
the world would be unambiguous, and 3) that organisms typically have access to
such patterns. Below we will work through a case in which an animal is “wrong”
about what it sees, but for now let us remember that organisms are typically not
wrong. They are not wrong, Gibson asserts, because they have continuous access
to patterns that disambiguate the world. F&P repeatedly assert that animals
do not have access to such patterns. They go so far as to claim that Gibson’s
system seems to require organisms to access “the distribution of the
light across the entire inhabited universe” (p. 170). In this suggestion, they willful
neglect two of Gibson’s important ideas A) higher-order invariants, B) redundancy
in specificity. If Gibson is correct that there are higher-order invariants,
constants in the changing flux of energy patterns, that are specific to the properties of object, then the animal need only have access
to the invariant. Further, if Gibson is correct that there is tremendous
redundancy in the energy, such that the same invariants can be found in several
types of energy, and can be found in many arbitrary segments of that energy,
then the animal’s task is easier still.
I don’t
want to go into detailed response here, except to point out that F&P dismiss
these possibilities out of hand. That is crazy and short-sighted. At the time,
there were only a handful of examples available, but still it was an open
question if many invariants could be identified, if they could be shown to be
highly redundant, and if it could be shown that organisms take advantage of
them. For example, the feedback provided by a wielded rod is specific to its length,
one need only move the rod a small amount to have access to the needed
feedback, and people are quite good at moving the rod in the correct ways when they
are placed in a length-determination task.
Specification
is important to this discussion because, if the world before you is unambiguous,
then it is unclear why you would need to “infer” about it: Today I have walked
through several doorways. In each case, I had access to patterns specific to
the properties of the doorway that allow my successful passage. That is, my movements
permitted access to patterns of energy that made the size, shape, etc. of the
doorway unambiguous. Or at least that is Gibson’s assertion, and F&P never face
the assertion directly. Thus, they avoid the most forceful of Ecological Psychology’s
assertions: If this entire scenario is in place, to say that I “inferred” that
I could walk through the doorway is patently misleading. I perceived that I could walk through the doorway. One might even say
that I knew I could walk through the
doorway.
Direct Perception
Arguments for “direct” perception
are arguments that certain types of
intermediaries are not involved in the perceptual process. While many people
have challenged Gibson with petty irrelevancies, F&P are spot on to focus
their challenge on “inference.” Gibson does not deny that inference happens, but
he is adamant that inference is not required as a component of the perceptual
process: Do people sometimes infer Y based on perceiving X? Yes. Do we need
inference even to perceive X? No. That is, there is no psychological process properly
labeled “inference” which happens in the middle of the psychological process of
“perception.”
F&P have many arguments for why
inference must happen in the course of perception. They are clearly convinced
it must be so, and will not be dissuaded. Rather than address their concerns
individually, we might ask why they are so certain of their position. The best
explanation for their conviction is that they have fallen prey to the Psychologists’
Fallacy. As a reminder, the Psychologists’ Fallacy happens when you mistake the
end of an intellectual inquiry for the beginning.
To be as generous as possible to F&P, let us focus here on a perceptual example in which an organism behaves "incorrectly":
To take a
classic example from ethology, a hen with her brood will panic at the sight of
a cross flying overhead, short-end first. The hen panics exactly as she would
if a hawk flew overhead. There are a lot of interesting implications of the details
of that research (see Heft, 2011), but they are not terribly germane here. The
only facts we need are 1) The hen is acting as if a predator was present, and
2) there is not a predator present.* In the face of that evidence, F&P
would certainly insist that the hen has inferred
a predator is present. They would insist that some dualistically mental
process acts as an intermediary between whatever it is that the hen can see and
the hen’s behavior, because, they would assert, the perception-of-the-moving-shape
cannot possibly explain the hen’s panic on its own. But this is the Psychologists’
Fallacy! They, F&P, know
that the moving cross is not a predator, and therefore they assume that the panicking
hen has made an inference. But that is hogwash. Having studied and thought
about the situation before them, F&P
have inferred about the
relationship between the stick and the panic. Then, mistaking what they do for
what the chicken does, they assert that the hen has similarly inferred.**
The hen does not have an internal
state, from which the hen makes an inference, and from the result of that
inference conclude that it needs to panic. The hen is panicking (doing 'panic'), and this was caused by (among other things) the illuminated object moving overhead; no other mental processes required. That is what it means for
perception to be direct, and F&P’s failure to think clearly about the
problem does not dissuade us.
When Many Things
are One Thing
In
footnote 11, F&P make clear that, in their opinion, it is one thing to
respond selectively to equilateral triangles, and another thing to respond
selectively to equiangular triangles. From a pragmatic perspective, I am not
sure there is a difference, as F&P readily admit that there is not a
situation in which the two response-tendencies would lead to different outcomes. F&P's similarly
attempt to assert that perceiving the morning star is clearly distinct
from seeing the evening star, while admitting both to be the planet Venus. I
suspect that a surprising amount hinges upon this point. Here we might well
apply one of Pierce’s maxims for explaining pragmatism: If two things have all the same consequences, then they are the same thing.
We must
hold our ground by challenging false divisions of the world, especially those
on arbitrary linguistic grounds. For example, one person could say “I see it is
morning” and another say “I see that the sun is now rising in the east.”
Because different words were used, we are sorely tempted to say that different
things were seen by each person, and F&P are convinced that a theory of
perception must here explain two distinct happenings. But are the perceptions as
distinct as the language makes it seem? No,
there is only one thing to explain here: When I see the sun rising in the
east, I see that it is morning, because morning is nothing other than the time during
which the sun is rising in the east. I might or might not be able to tell you
that it is “morning”, depending on my past and current experiences, but to see
one is to see the other; there is no additional process that goes into seeing
that it is morning.
Where does this logic take us if, as Gibson claimed,
the properties of objects or events and the patterns found in ambient energy
are so related that one cannot be found without the other. If property X and
energy pattern Y are so linked, then to respond to pattern Y is to respond to
property X and vice versa. An organism that does one will always do the other.
It does no good to hand wave about possible worlds, nor to give intellectual arguments
about how the two are distinct. If “the organism responded to property X”
and “the organism responded to pattern Y” yield all the same
consequences, then they are the same thing.
And here it is absolutely crucial, as stated in my
last point, that one cannot construct the energy pattern specific to some
property of the world, except by constructing that property. One can go about
all day creating, in a variety of manners, patterns probabilistically related to
properties, but if the pattern is specific
to the property, then you are stuck. If there is a pattern of energy specific to a hole in the wall that I
can fit through, then creating that pattern requires making a hole that I can
fit through.
Initial
Wrap Up
This post is getting long, and there is still more
to do. Hopefully, however, I have started to give a flavor for how I think
Ecological Psychology should have been defended against F&P’s attack.
Saved for the next post: “On Percepts and Concepts”,
“Ambiguity”, and “Belief and Knowledge”.
---------------
*We will skip the cheap shot of asking how we can
know that the hen is wrong, as F&P’s principles would seem to require that
our perception of the world be just as suspect as the hen’s.
**At this point the reader might wonder if my own logic here
is at all consistent with my logic from the prior section. That is, why do I
not privilege F&P’s third person perspective? A very fair challenge. To
avoid larger discussion, I will merely point out that the descriptive use of
the term “inference”, which is what the third-person perspective refers to,
bears little resemblance the internal, mental, dualistic, explanatory process
F&P are trying to assert by using the term. Thus, if we were to apply the
same logic as in the first section, we would admit that the organism “infers”,
in some sense of the word, but absolutely none of F&P’s subsequent
arguments would follow from that.
A couple of wonderings outloud at having skimmed this while writing an exam for my Lifespan class....
ReplyDelete1) "The modern, western, philosophical tradition has it that questions about perception revolve around situations where someone can tell you that they perceive something"--I had always thought that the Western tradition treated questions about perception revolving around the private experience of, as JJG liked to say, having a percept.
2) "Questions about vision are questions about how behavior is altered by the presence of illuminated objects and events in a person’s surroundings" seems dangerously S-R Psychology. EC, I grok the point you're trying to make, but this wording concerns me. Gibson/EP is most surely about taking up the charge that psychology studies behavior, but Gibson/EP ardently rejects the study of behavior as an S-R enterprise.
3) I always thought that the foundation of a charge against F & P has to begin with challenges to the causal theory of perception. Recognizing that was my "a-ha" moment for getting Eco Psych.
-Jim
The above post was mine.
ReplyDeleteJim,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment.
1) The "having a percept" issue is important. Hopefully I will get to that when I next have a moment to breath, and can do the next post. Here I was trying to point out the hyper-intellectualization of the Cartesian system. In that system, if I tell you that I did or did not see something, I always win.... because I know myself perfectly and you don't. F&P seem to want an explanation for the internal world I seem to describe, in poem, when inspired by a sunset... rather than an explanation for how I walk through the world when stumbling for my morning tea.
2) I think is EC is very close to radical behaviorism, though there are many forms of behaviorism, with S-R as one of the lower forms. Surely there is a world we are acting within, and we have little obvious need to use the brain as a way-station in our explanations. Interestingly, TSM, as I understand it, presents an S-R behaviorism (how else can we possibly understand the 'disposition' talk?!?).
3) The ...tion-preception-action-perception-action-perc... loop is really crucial. You are right that there probably should have been a place to emphasize that more.