Situated anticipation van Dijk, Ludger; Rietveld, Erik
Synthese,
01/2021, Letnik:
198, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic ...activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as ‘higher’ cognition in terms of engaging with affordances.
By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by ...contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal’s activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of “affordances,” the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.
The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in ...his
Principles of Gestalt Psychology
that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured for the animal. Koffka made a sharp distinction between the “behavioural environment” and the “geographical environment”. We show how this distinction picks out the difference between the environment as perceived by an individual organism, and the shared publicly available environment. The ecological psychologist James Gibson was later critical of Koffka for inserting a private phenomenal reality in between animals and the shared environment. Gibson tried to make do with just the concept of affordances in his explanation of molar behaviour. We argue however that psychology as a science of molar behaviour will need to make appeal both to the concepts of shared publicly available affordances, and of the multiplicity of
relevant
affordances that invite an individual to act. A version of Koffka’s distinction between the two environments remains alive today in a distinction we have made between the field and landscape of affordances. Having distinguished the two environments, we go on to provide an account of how the two environments are related. Koffka suggested that the behavioural environment forms out of the causal interaction of the individual with a pre-existing, ready-made geographical environment. We argue that such an account of the relation between the two environments fails to do justice to the complex entanglement of the social with the material aspects of the geographical environment. To better account for this sociomaterial reality of the geographical environment, we propose a process-perspective on our distinction between the landscape and field of affordances. While the two environments can be conceptually distinguished, we argue they should also be viewed as standing in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence.
Despite an attempt to break with the hierarchical picture in traditional emergentist thought, non-standard accounts of emergence are often still committed to a premise that ontology is prior to ...epistemology. This paper aims to topple this last remnant of the traditional hierarchy by explicating a pragmatic view of emergence based on John Dewey’s work. Dewey argued that the traditional notion of ontology is premised on a view of existence as complete. Through a discussion of Dewey’s work it is argued that this premise results in a process of reification that unduly excludes from ontology many precarious and indeterminate aspects involved both in everyday life and in philosophic and scientific inquiry. Building on a recent explication of transformational emergence the paper proposes a diachronic and non-hierarchical account of emergence, called
pragmatic emergence
. According to that account the relation between ontology and epistemology is a temporally reciprocal one. This means that ontological and epistemological features co-determine each other over time. Determinacy and continuity become historical features of a multitude of unfinished processes that we view from within.
Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their ...environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of how the direct perception of the organism-environment relation is possible. Central to his account was the notion of a medium for direct perception. However Gibson provided two mutually inconsistent accounts of the medium leading to problems for his radical empiricism. We develop an account of the medium that does justice to ecological psychology’s radical empiricist roots. To complement this account of the medium we detail a usage-based account of information. Together they allow us to propose a novel radical empiricist view of direct perception. We then return to the notion of medium and expand it to include sociomaterial practices. We show how direct perception happens in the midst of social life, and is made possible by an active achieving and maintaining of a pragmatic relation with the environment.
Video games that aim to improve myoelectric control (myogames) are gaining popularity and are often part of the rehabilitation process following an upper limb amputation. However, direct evidence for ...their effect on prosthetic skill is limited. This study aimed to determine whether and how myogaming improves EMG control and whether performance improvements transfer to a prosthesis-simulator task. Able-bodied right-handed participants (N = 28) were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups. The intervention group was trained to control a video game (Breakout-EMG) using the myosignals of wrist flexors and extensors. Controls played a regular Mario computer game. Both groups trained 20 minutes a day for 4 consecutive days. Before and after training, two tests were conducted: one level of the Breakout-EMG game, and grasping objects with a prosthesis-simulator. Results showed a larger increase of in-game accuracy for the Breakout-EMG group than for controls. The Breakout-EMG group moreover showed increased adaptation of the EMG signal to the game. No differences were found in using a prosthesis-simulator. This study demonstrated that myogames lead to task-specific myocontrol skills. Transfer to a prosthesis task is therefore far from easy. We discuss several implications for future myogame designs.
One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive ...to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing and retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as “something we do”, and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid re-shaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC’s lights therefore, the “is” of memory is “oughty” through and through.
•Radical approaches to cognition require a contentless notion of information.•We show that in ecological approaches there need not be content in information.•Information is determined by the use to ...the animal, not by the content it conveys.•Ecological information is not about, but for affordances.
In this article, we aim to strengthen the emerging radical, non-representational, approaches to cognitive science by defusing the worries radical enactivists have with the use of information in the ecological approaches – namely the worry that information carries content. We show that Gibson’s later use of the concept is meant to allow for a content-less notion of information, but that the language surrounding information in ecological psychology has subsequently slipped into a more cognitivistic vocabulary. We argue that by considering ecological information not to be information about, but information for affordances, the notion of information can be fruitfully applied without invoking notions of content. Gibson’s later notion of information for perception, stresses the insight that in ecological theory there is no information in content, but only in use. It is suggested that radical cognition should embrace this notion of information without content, as doing so can help to situate the enactivist’s “basic mind” into large and complex scales of coordination.
As plastics circulate the oceans and animals lose their place in the world, the fragile and indeterminate aspects of the shared world become palpable. The concept of affordances, central to ...ecological psychology, means to capture the possibilities for action that the world offers. It suggests a pragmatic conceptualization of the world for human and non-human animals alike. As such it is perfectly positioned to foreground the fragility of a “multispecies entanglement,” a world shared with multiple species across generations. These indeterminate aspects of the world have so far however received little attention. By bringing together evolutionary thinking in ecological psychology and ethnographical work on animal extinction, this article explores one way for affordances to bring out the messy aspects of the shared world. On this view affordances help to achieve and maintain our shared world by inviting animals to participate in that world. Affordances are unfinished, perpetually in a process of co-becoming as world and animals take shape across multiple timescales. The article ends with two concrete examples that show the fragility that this view of affordances highlights, and the responsibility it requires of human life in a multispecies entanglement.
Many scientific psychologists (implicitly) adopt a vertical worldview. This worldview assumes a layered supervening ontology and thereby invites a reductionist stance on explanation. In the present ...article we direct attention to an alternative attitude towards reality, the horizontal worldview. We draw on Wittgenstein as an example of this alternative attitude. In his later writings Wittgenstein showed his readers how to resist the urge to derive underlying principles about reality by tirelessly reorienting inquiry “sideways,” to the surrounding circumstances that were excluded from consideration. We go on to identify similar horizontal thinking in scientific psychology and demonstrate its merits by discussing Gibson’s approach to visual perception, a Heideggerian approach to skill acquisition, and by discussing psychological traits and the use of concepts. By clarifying the particular surrounding circumstances that a vertical view neglects to consider, a horizontal attitude can render a vertical analysis superfluous.
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