Cheiron 2012 - Post Conference Report

Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral & Social Sciences is a great group of people who have been meeting since 1968. There is a lot of overlap with the American Psychological Association's Division 24, but there is a more international and a more interdisciplinary emphasis. To whit, this year's meeting in Montreal, was co-hosted by the European Society for the History of the Social Sciences. There are three reasons that Cheiron has become one of my annual go-to conferences: 1) There is an amazing mix of people interested in history for the sake of history, for the sake of the field, and for the sake of our discipline's future. 2) There is a tremendous breadth of interest, making it one of the few decent conferences with representation across the entire discipline of psychology. 3) The people are amazingly supportive. For most of the time Cheiron has two simultaneous sessions, and occasionally one gets waylaid in great conversation. Of the sessions I attended, and the conversations I had, the highlights included:

Note regarding Eco Psych and Epistemology

Continuing the theme of propping Ecological Psychology against its detractors through reference to American Philosophy. One challenge holds that Eco Psych has no implications for epistemology and no relevance in understanding phenomenon such as "thinking". But the philosophical lineage descended from pragmatism breaks down divisions commonly assumed in the Continental traditions. In that context, the relevance of Eco Psych is clear....

A Reply to Fodor and Phylshyn - Part 2

Continuing the reply that I think should have been made to Fodor and Pylyshyn's 1981 attack on Ecological Psychology. In F&P's article, the key elements of which are summarized here. They assert a very traditional, dualistic view of perception - as a process requiring sensory information to be supplemented by other cognitive processes in order to create an representational mental model of the world. They then point out (rightly) that some of Gibson's insights can be integrated into the traditional view and further assert (wrongly) that Gibson is thus offering nothing new. In so doing, I want to avoid as much as possible taking any bait offered by F&P which risk reeling us into to covert dualistic assumptions. I suggest that the best way to avoid such missteps is to stay firmly rooted in the line of thinking descended from pragmatism. Part 1 of my reply covered the meaning of "perception", "specification", and "direct perception", and the importance of remembering that if two things have all the same consequences, then they are the same thing (one crucial way of avoiding false distinctions). In this part I will continue to explain Gibson's approach by elucidating problems in F&P's critique.

A New Blog (sort of)

By the way, Gregg (mentioned in the last post) has been encouraging me for a while to try a Psychology Today blog. Now Andrew and Sabrina are doing one as well. Sigh. Maybe I am more suceptable to peer pressure than I thought. At any rate, there is now a first post!


I will probably post at Psychology Today no more than once a month, and only when I have something much more accessible to lay audiences. This will remain my primary blog, where any "real work" gets done.

New Unified Theory of Psychology

I blogged a bit ago about Gregg Henriques's "New Unified Theory of Psychology", which had seen several in-press discussions, and a book. Gregg also blogs over at Psychology Today.

I mention this because my practice of reviewing one book a year for PsychCritiques provided me with a copy of Gregg's recent book, and the review has just released. As in the past, I don't want to provide too much of the review, for fear of violating copyright, but, as I liked the book, something should be said here.

A Reply to Fodor and Phylshyn - Part 1

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.

Specification and Perception - Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981)

After doing a mediocre job suggesting a that Gibson's needs to be defended from within the Pragmatism-lineage (as opposed to, say Descartes's lineage or Kant's), something more blunt and obvious might be in order. I have argued that much confusion was created in the past debates over ecological psychology because its critics were not treating it as part of the pragmatic lineage, and its defenders met the attack on the critics’ terms. This lead, I think, to the defenders formalizing ecological psychology in a way that loses some of the unique potential of the approach. The trouble seems to have originated, largely, in the 1981 criticism by Fodor and Pylyshyn, which was replied to in the same year by Turvey, Shaw, and Mace. While the resulting "TSM" model of ecological psychology has led to much success, I won't deny that for a minute, I think that much of the current confusion within the field of ecological psychology traces back to this exchange. Below I will go back through Fodor and Pylyshyn's paper, to point out where I think they unfairly set out their challenge, i.e., where they tried to judge ecological psychology based on premises the pragmatic tradition rejects. In the next post, I will sketch what I think the reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn should have been. In a later post, I will go through Turvey, Shaw, and Mace's paper, to show how the acceptance of Fodor and Pylyshyn's premises lead them to conclusions at the heart of current debates in the field.