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  1. Jan Alm (2008). Affordances and the Nature of Perceptual Content. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (2):161 – 177.
    According to John McDowell, representational perceptual content is conceptual through and through. This paper criticizes this view by claiming that there is a certain kind of representational and non-conceptual perceptual content that is sensitive to bodily skills. After a brief introduction to McDowell's position, Merleau-Ponty's notion of body schema and Gibson's notion of affordance are presented. It is argued that affordances are constitutive of representational perceptual content, and that at least some affordances, the (...)
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  2. Adrian Alsmith (2012). The Concept of a Structural Affordance. Avant 3 (2):94-107.
    I provide an analysis of the concept of an “affordance” that enables one to conceive of “structural affordance” as a kind of affordance relation that might hold between an agent and its body. I then review research in the science of humanoid bodily movement to indicate the empirical reality of structural affordance.
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  3. Berm (1998). Ecological Perception and the Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View. In The Body and the Self. Cambridge: Mit Press.
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  4. Berm (1998). The Body and the Self. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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  5. Mark H. Bickhard & D. Michael Richie (1983). On The Nature Of Representation: A Case Study Of James Gibson's Theory Of Perception. Ny: Praeger.
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  6. David M. Boynton (1993). Relativism in Gibson's Theory of Picture Perception. Journal of Mind and Behavior 14 (1):51-69.
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  7. Michael Braund (2008). The Structures of Perception: An Ecological Perspective. Kritike 2 (1).
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  8. Robert Briscoe (2010). Perceiving the Present: Systematization of Illusions or Illusion of Systematization? Cognitive Science 34 (8):1530-1542.
    Mark Changizi et al. (2008) claim that it is possible systematically to organize more than 50 kinds of illusions in a 7 × 4 matrix of 28 classes. This systematization, they further maintain, can be explained by the operation of a single visual processing latency correction mechanism that they call “perceiving the present” (PTP). This brief report raises some concerns about the way a number of illusions are classified by the proposed systematization. It also poses two general problems—one empirical and (...)
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  9. Robert Briscoe (2008). Vision, Action, and Make-Perceive. Mind and Language 23 (4):457-497.
    In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by Alva Noë (2004). I argue inter alia that the enactive account falsely identifies an object’s apparent shape with its 2D perspectival shape; that it mistakenly assimilates visual shape perception and volumetric object recognition; and that it seriously misrepresents the constitutive role of bodily action in visual awareness. I argue further that noticing an object’s perspectival shape involves a hybrid experience combining both perceptual and imaginative elements (...)
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  10. Vicki Bruce & Patrick Green (1985). Visual Perception: Physiology, Psychology, and Ecology. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  11. Anthony Chemero (2003). An Outline of a Theory of Affordances. Ecological Psychology 15 (2):181-195.
    The primary difference between direct and inferential theories of perception concerns the location of perceptual content, the meaning of our perceptions. In inferential theories of perception, these meanings arise inside animals, based upon their interactions with the physical environment. Light, for example, bumps into receptors causing a sensation. The animal (or its brain) performs inferences on the sensation, yielding a meaningful perception. In direct theories of perception, on the other hand, meaning is in the environment, and perception does not depend (...)
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  12. Anthony Chemero & Michael T. Turvey, Gibsonian Affordances for Roboticists.
    Using hypersets as an analytic tool, we compare traditionally Gibsonian (Chemero 2003; Turvey 1992) and representationalist (Sahin et al. this issue) understandings of the notion ‘affordance’. We show that representationalist understandings are incompatible with direct perception and erect barriers between animal and environment. They are, therefore, scarcely recognizable as understandings of ‘affordance’. In contrast, Gibsonian understandings are shown to treat animal-environment systems as unified complex systems and to be compatible with direct perception. We discuss the fruitful connections between Gibsonian affordances (...)
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  13. Tony Chemero (forthcoming). Information and Direct Perception: A New Approach. In Priscila Farias & Jo (eds.), Advanced Issues in Cognitive Science and Semiotics.
    Since the 1970s, Michael Turvey, Robert Shaw, and William Mace have worked on the formulation of a philosophically-sound and empirically-tractable version of James Gibson.
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  14. Tony Chemero (2003). Review of Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James' Radical Empiricism. [REVIEW] Contemporary Psychology.
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  15. Tony Chemero (2001). What We Perceive When We Perceive Affordances: Commentary on Michaels (2000), Information, Perception and Action. Ecological Psychology 13 (2):111-116.
    In her essay --?Information, Perception and Action--, Claire Michaels reaches two conclusions that run very much against the grain of ecological psychology. First, she claims that affordances are not perceived, but simply acted upon; second, because of this, perception and action ought to be conceived separately. These conclusions are based upon a misinterpretation of empirical evidence which is, in turn, based upon a conflation of two proper objects of perception: objectively with properties and affordances.
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  16. Alan Costall (2012). Canonical Affordances in Context. Avant 3 (2):85-93.
    James Gibson’s concept of affordances was an attempt to undermine the traditional dualism of the objective and subjective. Gibson himself insisted on the continuity of “affordances in general” and those attached to human artifacts. However, a crucial distinction needs to be drawn between “affordances in general” and the “canonical affordances” that are connected primarily to artifacts. Canonical affordances are conventional and normative. It is only in such cases that it makes sense to talk of the affordance of the object. Chairs, (...)
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  17. Adrian Cussins (2012). Environmental Representation of the Body. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (1):15-32.
  18. John Dilworth (2006). A Reflexive Dispositional Analysis of Mechanistic Perception. Minds and Machines 16 (4):479-493.
    The field of machine perception is based on standard informational and computational approaches to perception. But naturalistic informational theories are widely regarded as being inadequate, while purely syntactic computational approaches give no account of perceptual content. Thus there is a significant need for a novel, purely naturalistic perceptual theory not based on informational or computational concepts, which could provide a new paradigm for mechanistic perception. Now specifically evolutionary naturalistic approaches to perception have been—perhaps surprisingly—almost completely neglected for this purpose. Arguably (...)
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  19. John Dilworth (2005). A Naturalistic, Reflexive Dispositional Approach to Perception. Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (4):583-601.
    This paper will investigate the basic question of the nature of perception, as theoretically approached from a purely naturalistic standpoint. An adequate theory must not only have clear application to a world full of pre-existing biological examples of perception of all kinds, from unicellular perception to conscious human perception, but it must also satisfy a series of theoretical or philosophical constraints, as enumerated and discussed in Section 1 below. A perceptual theory invoking _reflexive dispositions_--that is, dispositions directed toward the very (...)
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  20. John Dilworth (2005). The Reflexive Theory of Perception. Behavior and Philosophy 33:17-40.
    ABSTRACT: The Reflexive Theory of Perception (RTP) claims that perception of an object or property X by an organism Z consists in Z being caused by X to acquire some disposition D toward X itself. This broadly behavioral perceptual theory explains perceptual intentionality and correct versus incorrect, plus successful versus unsuccessful, perception in a plausible evolutionary framework. The theory also undermines cognitive and perceptual modularity assumptions, including informational or purely epistemic views of perception in that, according to the RTP, any (...)
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  21. John Dilworth (2004). Naturalized Perception Without Information. Journal Of Mind And Behavior 25 (4):349-368.
    The outlines of a novel, fully naturalistic theory of perception are provided, that can explain perception of an object X by organism Z in terms of reflexive causality. On the reflexive view proposed, organism Z perceives object or property X just in case X causes Z to acquire causal dispositions reflexively directed back upon X itself. This broadly functionalist theory is potentially capable of explaining both perceptual representation and perceptual content in purely causal terms, making no use of informational concepts. (...)
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  22. Priscila Farias & Jo (eds.) (forthcoming). Advanced Issues in Cognitive Science and Semiotics.
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  23. Jerry A. Fodor & Zenon W. Pylyshyn (1981). How Direct is Visual Perception? Some Reflections on Gibson's 'Ecological Approach'. Cognition 9:139-96.
  24. James J. Gibson (1976). The Myth of Passive Perception: A Reply to Richards. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 37 (December):234-238.
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  25. James J. Gibson (1968). The Senses Considered As Perceptual Systems. Allen & Unwin.
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  26. James J. Gibson (1950). The Perception Of The Visual World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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  27. David A. Givner (1982). Concepts, Percepts and Perceptal Systems: The Relevance of Psychology to Epistemology. Metaphilosophy 13 (July-October):209-216.
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  28. David A. Givner (1982). Direct Perception, Misperception and Perceptual Systems: J. J. Gibson and the Problem of Illusion. Nature and System 4 (September):131-142.
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  29. Philip A. Glotzbach (1992). Determining the Primary Problem of Visual Perception: A Gibsonian Response to the Correlation' Objection. Philosophical Psychology 5 (1):69-94.
    Fodor & Pylyshyn (1981) criticize J. J. Gibson's ecological account of perception for failing to address what I call the 'correlation problem' in visual perception. That is, they charge that Gibson cannot explain how perceivers learn to correlate detectable properties of the light with perceptible properties of the environment. Furthermore, they identify the correlation problem as a crucial issue for any theory of visual perception, what I call a 'primary problem'—i.e. a problem which plays a definitive role in establishing the (...)
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  30. Philip A. Glotzbach & Harry Heff (1982). Ecological and Phenomenological Contributions to the Psychology of Perception. Noûs 16 (March):108-121.
  31. Gary Hatfield (1990). Gibsonian Representations and Connectionist Symbol-Processing: Prospects for Unification. Psychological Research 52:243-52.
  32. John Heil (1981). Gibsonian Sins of Omission. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 11 (3):307–311.
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  33. John Heil (1979). What Gibson's Missing. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 9 (3):265–269.
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  34. Julian Kiverstein & Michael Wheeler (eds.) (2012). Heidegger and Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan.
  35. Pim Klaassen, Erik Rietveld & Julien Topal (2010). Inviting Complementary Perspectives on Situated Normativity in Everyday Life. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (1):53-73.
    In everyday life, situations in which we act adequately yet entirely without deliberation are ubiquitous. We use the term “situated normativity” for the normative aspect of embodied cognition in skillful action. Wittgenstein’s notion of “directed discontent” refers to a context-sensitive reaction of appreciation in skillful action. Extending this notion from the domain of expertise to that of adequate everyday action, we examine phenomenologically the question of what happens when skilled individuals act correctly with instinctive ease. This question invites exploratory contributions (...)
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  36. Pat A. Manfredi (1986). Processing or Pickup: Conflicting Approaches to Perception. Mind and Language 1 (3):181-200.
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  37. Mohan Matthen (forthcoming). Active Perception and the Representation of Space. In Dustin Stokes, Stephen Biggs & Mohan Matthen (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities. Oxford University Press.
    Kant argued that the perceptual representations of space and time were templates for the perceived spatiotemporal ordering of objects, and common to all modalities. His idea is that these perceptual representations were specific to no modality, but prior to all—they are pre-modal, so to speak. In this paper, it is argued that active perception—purposeful interactive exploration of the environment by the senses—demands premodal representations of time and space.
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  38. Thomas Natsoulas (2004). To See Things is to Perceive What They Afford: James J. Gibson's Concept of Affordance. Journal of Mind and Behavior 25 (4):323-347.
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  39. Thomas Natsoulas (1999). Virtual Objects. Journal of Mind and Behavior 20 (4):357-377.
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  40. Thomas Natsoulas (1991). Why Do Things Look as They Do? Some Gibsonian Answers to Koffka's Question. Philosophical Psychology 4 (2):183-202.
    This article contributes to understanding the relation within Gibson's perception theory between two questions that Gibson raised in the introductory paragraph of his final book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: (a) how we see how to do things and (b) why things look to us as they do (Koffka's question). Although Gibson considered Koffka's question to be a crucial test for any psychological theory of visual perceiving, Gibson did not explicitly defend his ecological approach with reference to Koffka's question. (...)
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  41. Thomas Natsoulas (1984). Towards the Improvement of Gibsonian Perception Theory. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 14 (2):231–258.
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  42. Wiliam G. Noble (1981). Gibsonian Theory and the Pragmatist Perspective. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 11 (1):65–85.
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  43. Jörgen Pind (1998). Merits of a Gibsonian Approach to Speech Perception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (2):279-280.
    Neurobiologically inspired theories of speech perception such as that proposed by Sussman et al. are useful to the extent that they are able to constrain such theories. If they are simply intended as suggestive analogies, their usefulness is questionable. In such cases it is better to stick with the Gibsonian approach of attempting to isolate invariants in speech and to demonstrate their role for the perceiver in perceptual experiments.
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  44. Edward S. Reed (1988). James J. Gibson And The Psychology Of Perception. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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  45. Robert J. Richards (1976). James Gibson's Passive Theory of Perception: A Rejection of the Doctrine of Specific Nerve Energies. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 37 (December):218-233.
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  46. Erik Rietveld (forthcoming). Context-Switching and Responsiveness to Real Relevance. In Julian Kiverstein & Michael Wheeler (eds.), Heidegger and Cognitive Science. Palgrave.
    Our everyday activities unfold in situations that offer a multiplicity of possibilities for action. While typing this text, the apple on the right side of my laptop affords eating, my e-mail checking, and the glass of water drinking from it. Every now and then I unreflectively switch from typing to eating or drinking and back to typing again. A relevant possibility for action is embedded in a field of other soliciting possibilities for action (Rietveld, 2008). Michael Wheeler and Hubert Dreyfus (...)
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  47. Erik Rietveld (2012). Bodily Intentionality and Social Affordances in Context. In Fabio Paglieri (ed.), Consciousness in Interaction. !e role of the natural and social context in shaping consciousness. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
    There are important structural similarities in the way that animals and humans engage in unreflective activities, including unreflective social interactions in the case of higher animals. Firstly, it is a form of unreflective embodied intelligence that is ‘motivated’ by the situation. Secondly, both humans and non-human animals are responsive to ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979); to possibilities for action offered by an environment. Thirdly, both humans and animals are selectively responsive to one affordance rather than another. Social affordances are a subcategory of (...)
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  48. Erik Rietveld (2010). McDowell and Dreyfus on Unreflective Action. Inquiry 53 (2):183-207.
    Within philosophy there is not yet an integrative account of unreflective skillful action. As a starting point, contributions would be required from philosophers from both the analytic and continental traditions. Starting from the McDowell-Dreyfus debate, shared Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian common ground is identified. McDowell and Dreyfus agree about the importance of embodied skills, situation-specific discernment and responsiveness to relevant affordances. This sheds light on the embodied and situated nature of adequate unreflective action and provides a starting point for the development of an (...)
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  49. Erik Rietveld (2008). Situated Normativity: The Normative Aspect of Embodied Cognition in Unreflective Action. Mind 117 (468):973-1001.
    In everyday life we often act adequately, yet without deliberation. For instance, we immediately obtain and maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator. The notion of normativity implied here is a very basic one, namely distinguishing adequate from inadequate, correct from incorrect, or better from worse in the context of a particular situation. In the first part of this paper I investigate such ‘situated normativity’ by focusing on unreflective expert action. More particularly, I use Wittgenstein’s examples of craftsmen (...)
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  50. Erik Rietveld (2008). The Skillful Body as a Concernful System of Possible Actions: Phenomena and Neurodynamics. Theory & Psychology 18 (3):341-361.
    For Merleau-Ponty,consciousness in skillful coping is a matter of prereflective ‘I can’ and not explicit ‘I think that.’ The body unifies many domain-specific capacities. There exists a direct link between the perceived possibilities for action in the situation (‘affordances’) and the organism’s capacities. From Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions it is clear that in a flow of skillful actions, the leading ‘I can’ may change from moment to moment without explicit deliberation. How these transitions occur, however, is less clear. Given that Merleau-Ponty suggested (...)
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  51. Erik Rietveld & Julien Kiverstein (2012). Dealing with Context Through Action-Oriented Predictive Processing. Frontiers in Psychology 3 (October 2012):1-2.
    A commentary on "Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science" by Clark, A. (in press). Behav. Brain Sci. -/- We will argue that the context sensitivity of action-oriented processing is not adequately recognized in Clark’s target article. The ecological notion of a niche(e.g., Gibson, 1979) is for instance central in Friston (2011) account of embodied cognition, but we find it curiously absent in the account Clark gives of action.
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  52. Erik Rietveld & Ronald Rietveld (2011). The Paradox of Spontaneity and Design: Designing Spontaneous Interactions. Oase 2011 (85):33-41.
    This paper illustrates how affordance-based design can contribute to solutions for the grand challenges that society faces. The design methodology of ‘strategic interventions’ is explained.
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  53. Ronald Rietveld & Erik Rietveld (2010). Vacant NL, Where Architecture Meets Ideas: Curatorial Statement 12th Venice Architecture Biennale. In Jurgen Bey, Joost Grootens, Erik Rietveld, Ronald Rietveld, Saskia Van Stein & Barbara Visser (eds.), Vacant NL, Where Architecture Meets Ideas. NAI.
    For the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010, curator Rietveld Landscape has been invited by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) to make a statement about the potential of landscape architecture to contribute to resolving the complex challenges that our society faces today. These challenges call for innovation; for a culture centred on design skills and cooperation between scientists and creative pioneers. The installation ‘Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas’ calls upon the Dutch government to make use of the enormous potential of inspiring, (...)
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  54. Phyllis Rooney (2008). Epistemic Responsibility and Ecological Thinking. Hypatia 23 (1):170-176.
  55. John T. Sanders, Philosophical Foundations for the Ecological Approach.
    Harry Heft's Ecological Psychology in Context is an important book in many ways. For one thing, it adds considerably to our understanding of the historical background of J.J. Gibson's thought. But more than that, Heft aims to place ecological psychology not just historically, but philosophically. He says "This volume shows that radical empiricism stands at the heart of Gibson's ecological program, and it can usefully be employed as the conceptual centerpiece for ecological psychology more broadly construed" (p. xvi). While I (...)
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  56. John T. Sanders, Cuteness as a Product of Natural Selection.
    This is a more detailed version of my "On 'Cuteness'", which appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics in April 1992. For John Morreall, cuteness is an abstract general attribute of infants that causes adults to want to care for them (or which is the reason, or at least important reason, for such solicitousness). I shall try to show, in what follows, that this is, if not an altogether fallacious way of explaining the matter, at least an extremely misleading one. (...)
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  57. John T. Sanders, From Perception to Metaphysics: Reflections on Berkeley and Merleau-Ponty.
    George Berkeley's apparently strange view – that nothing exists without a mind except for minds themselves – is notorious. Also well known, and equally perplexing at a superficial level, is his insistence that his doctrine is no more than what is consistent with common sense. It was every bit as crucial for Berkeley that it be demonstrated that the colors are really in the tulip, as that there is nothing that is neither a mind nor something perceived by a mind. (...)
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  58. John T. Sanders (2004). Retinae Don't See. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (6):890-891.
    Sensation should be understood globally: some infant behaviors do not make sense on the model of separate senses; neonates of all species lack time to learn about the world by triangulating among different senses. Considerations of natural selection favor a global understanding; and the global interpretation is not as opposed to traditional work on sensation as might seem.
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  59. John T. Sanders (1999). Affordances: An Ecological Approach to First Philosophy. In Gail Weiss & Honi Fern Haber (eds.), Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture. Routledge.
    Interest in "embodiment", and over how one may best express the implications of embodiment, is no parochial question, of interest only to a small number of effete philosophers. It confronts perceptual psychologists, developmental psychologists, and psychotherapists, of course. It may not be surprising, either, that it has become an important issue to some students of history and sociology, and to linguists, literary theorists and aestheticians. But that's not all. As physicists -- working within the very bastion of "objective" analysis -- (...)
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  60. John T. Sanders (1998). Knowledge and Description: Bohr's Epistemology. In Jan Such & Malgorzata Szczesniak (eds.), Z epistemologii wiedzy naukowej. Wydawnictwo Naukowe Instytutu Filozofii.
    In this paper, I try to explain the philosophical problems that Niels Bohr felt had been exposed by the discovery of the "quantum of action," and by the emergence of the quantum theory that arose in large part as a result of his efforts. I won't have space to make the case adequately here, but my own view is that we have not yet fully digested the message brought to us by Bohr's "Copenhagen Interpretation" of Quantum Mechanics, and I suspect (...)
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  61. John T. Sanders (1997). An Ontology of Affordances. Ecological Psychology 9 (1):97-112.
    I argue that the most promising approach to understanding J.J. Gibson's "affordances" takes affordances themselves as ontological primitives, instead of treating them as dispositional properties of more primitive things, events, surfaces, or substances. These latter are best treated as coalescences of affordances present in the environment (or "coalescences of use-potential," as in Sanders (1994) and Hilditch (1995)). On this view, even the ecological approach's stress on the complementary organism/environment pair is seen as expressing a particular affordance relation between the world (...)
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  62. John T. Sanders (1996). An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Science. Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 1996 (Spring).
    Cognitive science is ready for a major reconceptualization. This is not at all because efforts by its practitioners have failed, but rather because so much progress has been made. The need for reconceptualization arises from the fact that this progress has come at greater cost than necessary, largely because of more or less philosophical (at least metatheoretical) straightjackets still worn - whether wittingly or not - by those doing the work. These bonds are extremely hard to break. Even some of (...)
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  63. John T. Sanders (1994). Merleau-Ponty on Meaning, Materiality, and Structure. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 25 (1):96-100.
    Against David Schenck's interpretation, I argue that it is not absolutely clear that Merleau-Ponty ever meant to replace what Schenck refers to as the "unity of meanings" interpretation of "structure" with a "material meanings" interpretation. A particular problem-setting -- for example, an attempt to understand the "truth in naturalism" or the "truth in dualism" -- may very well require a particular mode of expression. I argue that the mode of expression chosen by Merleau-Ponty for these purposes, while unfortunate in some (...)
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  64. John T. Sanders (1993). Merleau-Ponty, Gibson and the Materiality of Meaning. Man and World 26 (3):287-302.
    While there are numerous differences between the approaches taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James J. Gibson, the basic motivation of the two thinkers, as well as the internal logic of their respective views, is extraordinarily close. Both were guided throughout their lives by an attempt to overcome the dualism of subject and object, and both devoted considerable attention to their "Gestaltist" predecessors. There can be no doubt but that it is largely because of this common cause that the subsequent development (...)
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  65. John T. Sanders (1985). Experience, Memory and Intelligence. The Monist 68 (4):507-521.
    What characterizes most technical or theoretical accounts of memory is their reliance upon an internal storage model. Psychologists and neurophysiologists have suggested neural traces (either dynamic or static) as the mechanism for this storage, and designers of artificial intelligence have relied upon the same general model, instantiated magnetically or electronically instead of neurally, to do the same job. Both psychology and artificial intelligence design have heretofore relied, without much question, upon the idea that memory is to be understood as a (...)
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  66. Andrea Scarantino (2003). Affordances Explained. Philosophy of Science 70 (5):949-961.
    I examine the central theoretical construct of ecological psychology, the concept of an affordance. In the first part of the paper, I illustrate the role affordances play in Gibson's theory of perception. In the second part, I argue that affordances are to be understood as dispositional properties, and explain what I take to be their characteristic background circumstances, triggering circumstances and manifestations. The main purpose of my analysis is to give affordances a theoretical identity enriched by Gibson's visionary insight, but (...)
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  67. Barry Smith (2001). Objects and Their Environments: From Aristotle to Ecological Ontology. In The Life and Motion of Socio-Economic Units. Taylor and Francis.
    What follows is a contribution to the theory of space and of spatial objects. It takes as its starting point the philosophical subfield of ontology, which can be defined as the science of what is: of the various types and categories of objects and relations in all realms of being. More specifically, it begins with ideas set forth by Aristotle in his Categories and Metaphysics, two works which constitute the first great contributions to ontological science. Because Aristotle’s ontological ideas were (...)
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  68. Avrum Stroll (1986). The Role of Surfaces in an Ecological Theory of Perception. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (March):437-453.
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  69. Nigel J. T. Thomas (2001). Perceptual Systems: Five+, One, or Many? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2):241-242.
    Commentary on "On Specification and the Senses," by Thomas A. Stoffregen and Benoît G. Bardy: Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 195-261 (2001).
    The target article's value lies not in its defence of specification, or the "global array" concept, but in its challenge to the paradigm of 5+ senses, and its examples of multiple receptor types cooperatively participating in specific information pick-up tasks. Rather than analysing our perceptual endowment into 5+ senses, it is more revealing to type perceptual systems according to task.
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  70. Nigel J. T. Thomas (1999). Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content. Cognitive Science 23 (2):207-245.
    Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi-pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the "traditional" symbolic computational view of mental contents, but is compatible with recent (...)
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  71. Michael T. Turvey, R. E. Shaw, Edward S. Reed & William M. Mace (1981). Ecological Laws of Perceiving and Acting: In Reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn. Cognition 9:237-304.
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  72. S. Ullman (1980). Against Direct Perception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3:333-81.
  73. Cees van Leeuwen & John Stins (1994). Perceivable Information Or: The Happy Marriage Between Ecological Psychology and Gestalt. Philosophical Psychology 7 (2):267-285.
    The ecological realist concept of information as environmental specification is discussed. It is argued that affordances in ecological realism could, in principle, rest on a notion of partial specification of environmental circumstances. For this aim, a notion of Gestalt quality as a hierarchical structure of affordances would have to be adopted. It is claimed that such an account could provide a promising way to deal with problems of intentionality in perception and action, awareness and problem solving.
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  74. Wayne Wu (2008). Visual Attention, Conceptual Content, and Doing It Right. Mind 117 (468):1003-1033.
    Reflection on the fine-grained information required for visual guidance of action has suggested that visual content is non-conceptual. I argue that in a common type of visually guided action, namely the use of manipulable artefacts, vision has conceptual content. Specifically, I show that these actions require visual attention and that concepts are involved in directing attention. In acting with artefacts, there is a way of doing it right as determined by the artefact’s conventional use. Attention must reflect our understanding of (...)
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  75. Garry Young (2005). Ecological Perception Affords an Explanation of Object Permanence. Philosophical Explorations 8 (2):189-208.
    In this paper I aim to present an explanation of object permanence that is derived from an ecological account of perceptually based action. In understanding why children below a certain age do not search for occluded objects, one must first understand the process by which these children perform certain intentional actions on non-occluded items; and to do this one must understand the role affordances play in eliciting retrieval behaviour. My affordance-based explanation is contrasted with Shinskey and Munakata's graded representation account; (...)
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  76. Silvano Zipoli Caiani (forthcoming). Extending the Notion of Affordance. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
    Post-Gibson attempts to set out a definition of affordance generally agree that this notion can be understood as a property of the environment with salience for an organism’s behavior. According to this view, some scholars advocate the idea that affordances are dispositional properties of physical objects that, given suitable circumstances, necessarily actualize related actions. This paper aims at assessing this statement in light of a theory of affordance perception. After years of discontinuity between strands of empirical and theoretical research, the (...)
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