Seeing Through the Noise: Where Was This Guy Headed?

Abstract

The complex systems approach to cognition has been challenged by the need to redescribe cognition in a way that avoids traditional commitments to the notion of efficient-cause relationships between perception, isolated computational components, and action. Guy Van Orden met this challenge head-on. Instead of decomposing consecutive reaction times into means and comparing differences in means across conditions to the variability surrounding those means (which was assumed to constitute white noise), he examined the multiscale dynamics entailed in consecutive reaction times. This led him to develop the notion of interaction-dominant versus component-dominant dynamics. Although Guy's empirical and theoretical work clearly addresses ecological psychology's long-standing concern with indirect, mediated perception, it nonetheless begs the question of just how interactive we are willing to go. This article proposes that Guy's work was leading us toward a metaphysics of interaction, all the way down. In such an interaction-dominant, process ontology, “context” becomes metaphysically fundamental (i.e., vs. “things”); stability comes to be seen as a scale-relative, contextually emergent phenomenon; and the notion of “intrinsic” properties becomes meaningless, as all “properties” find themselves contextually grounded. The article examines the implications of these assertions for ecological psychology specifically and cognitive science in general.