Ecological Psychology and Naturalism

Abstract

In this paper, Gibson's ecological approach to perception is discussed as belonging to the tradition of naturalist psychology, which focuses on the adaptive role of the perceptual system, and which includes (assumptions about) the structure of the ecological environment in theories of perception. As such, naturalism contrasts with the sensation-based tradition in perception, which is implicitly solipsist in ignoring the distal object, and restricts itself to local causal effects in the senses and subsequent cognitive processing. It is shown that Gibson's work shows traces of his contacts with Heider and Brunswik, and that Marr explicitly picks up (and sometimes criticizes) key elements of Gibson's work. Heider, Gibson and Marr are interpreted as naturalists in their emphasis on the role of the environment as a separate and irreducible level of explanation in theories of perception.

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