On the Distinctive Features of Ecological Laws

Abstract

Ecological psychology is grounded in the assumption of the availability of lawlike regularities in the world as the basis of reliable information for perceiving-acting systems. This article aims to articulate some of the necessary conditions for an account of lawfulness that accommodates ecological theories of perceiving and acting. This attempt considers historically influential accounts of laws but offers modifications of the notions of law and especially of cause that are of greater relevance to the practice of an ecological science. A guiding assumption is that the laws of the animate are the most general. The authors advocate understanding laws in reference to reliable regularities, causes as not being strictly Newtonian in character, and flexibility with respect to certain formal and philosophical commitments.

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Erratum

Notes

¹There are in fact accounts that describe biological laws as holding over certain ranges of conditions (Mitchell, 2000), which make use of different criteria for lawfulness than those we discuss here as being more historically common.

²For a more thorough treatment of the insufficiency of both this and other construals of law not discussed here, see Laws and Symmetry (van Fraassen, 1989).

³The term sympatry is most commonly discussed in terms of sympatric speciation (Gavrilets, 2003) rather than the coexistence of sympatric species. But the issue of the differential affordances of the shared environment is implicit in the speciation literature, finding expression in the idea of “fitness landscapes” that contain multiple regions of roughly equal fitness (Gavrilets, 2003; Wilkins, 2007) and in discussions of the role of learning (as distinct from genetic factors) in speciation (Beltman, Haccou, & Ten Cate, 2004; Beltman & Metz, 2005). The latter idea can also be situated within a Gottliebian account (Rosenblatt, 2007).

⁴With a nod to Kripke (1980), Turvey and Shaw (1979) deployed the term complex particular for the following purpose: Animals always perceive particular things (as opposed to abstract, nonparticular things). They suggested, “Some of these particulars may, as a matter of convenience, be deserving of the label complex in comparison with other particulars, but they are, nevertheless, particulars and thus ought not to be conceived as reducible in the way that abstract amorphous entities might arguably be reduced to concrete particular entities” (p. 188).

⁵This claim is related, but not identical, to Woodward's (2003) manipulationist account of cause. The Gibsonian view of animal exploration also holds that an animal's actions reveal invariants in the world, but it is the claim that those explorations are constitutive of the revealed information that is the focus here.

⁶Our understanding of “cause” as “that which bears responsibility” is influenced by the analysis of Heidegger (1977).

⁷For what we mean by “cause” and “constraint,” see Petrusz (2008).