Perceptual Information of “An Entirely Different Order”: The “Cultural Environment” in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems

ABSTRACT

James Gibson's final book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979/1986) may have had the unintended effect of overshadowing his prior, seminal work, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). This circumstance is unfortunate because in many ways the final book has a narrower focus. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems not only considers other perceptual systems in addition to vision but also it is in this work where Gibson most fully lays out his ecological approach to psychology. In doing so, the book gives more explicit attention to human evolution and sociocultural processes than do his other writings. Although Gibson establishes a framework for considering perception–action commonalities across species, he also examines some of the ways in which perceiving among human and nonhuman animals differ. Among those issues examined are how tool use in the production of pictures and representations has contributed to cultural change, how language can affect perceiving, and how social structures are perceived. The ongoing debate over the conceptual status of affordances is reexamined from the point of view of sociohistorical processes.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Claudia Carello, Eric Charles, Kerry Marsh, and Steve Vogel for their careful reading and incisive comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

¹ Earlier intimations of this approach had already been published (e.g., J. J. Gibson, 1961).

² The terminology that J. J. Gibson employed over his long career shifted. Although in some of his writings being discussed here he employed the term stimulation to refer to what was available to be perceived, by his last book he rarely used that term. Instead, information or stimulus information was preferred. Because I mostly discuss works prior to The Ecological Approach (1979/1986), there are occasional inconsistencies between quoted passages and phrasing in the text of the paper.

³ See Hodges' (2007) insightful treatment of this issue in the context of the J. J. Gibson and Crooks (1938) analysis of driving behavior.

⁴ Thanks to Erin Colbert-White for discussions of this topic.

⁵ James cited the 19th-century philosopher John Grote as having previously drawn this distinction. James employed the phrase “knowledge of acquaintance,” and Bertrand Russell (1912) changed the preposition from “of” to “by.”

⁶ Although there is evidence of localized patterns of actions among some primates being transmitted among conspecifics and over generations, these “traditions” do not approach the complexities to be found in all human societies (Whiten, 2011).

⁷ Ryle (1949) employed this example in his critique of the tendency to use the term mind as if it were a thing in the head (i.e., “the ghost in the machine”).

⁸ The quoted passages within the broader quotation are attributed to Oakeshott (1962).

⁹ This is not the place to rehash these debates (see Chemero, 2009, Chapter 7).

¹⁰ This argument is also reintroduced because it did not receive much attention in the subsequent debates, and I raise it again for consideration.