1966 and All That: James Gibson and Bottom-Down Theory

ABSTRACT

The “later” James Gibson is widely misrepresented as an extreme stimulus–response theorist. In fact, Gibson's 1966 book presents a radical alternative to stimulus–response theory. “Perceptual systems” are not passive and receptive but “organs of active attention” (1966/1968, p. 58). Perceivers “reach out” into the world. This commentary examines some of the implications of Gibson's systems-cum-functionalist-cum-ecological approach, including the relations between the senses; the concept of “sensationless” perception; and most fundamentally, the nature of perceptual systems as extending beyond the body. I conclude that an adequate understanding of perception cannot be limited to the already severely limited domain of psychology. If Gibson is right, “ecological psychology” is a contradiction in terms.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Endre Kadar, Ann Richards, and the reviewers for very helpful comments.

Notes

¹ Crombie, an historian of science, celebrates this awkward juxtaposition of mechanism and mentalism as a scientific breakthrough.

² Endre Kadar (personal communication, 2016).

³ Gibson nevertheless still characterized vision as “the queen of the senses” (Gibson, 1966/1968, p. 163).

⁴ The term amodal, which is now widely used in this context, is potentially misleading given that Michotte long ago coined it to mean something completely different (Thinès, Costall, & Butterworth, 2014).

⁵ Both Sternberg and Gregory knew James and Eleanor Gibson well, so it is puzzling that they could get things so badly wrong and, in the case of Sternberg, even the date of Gibson's death.

⁶ Mainstream cognitive psychology is widely misunderstood to be a radical alternative to stimulus–response psychology. As the textbooks shamelessly boast (while at the same time touting cognitive theory's radical credentials), it is a variant—an attempt to explain “what goes on” between the stimulus and response (Hamlyn, 1981, p. 115; Reed, 1997, pp. 266–7).

⁷ This is how Gibson (1979/1986) himself put this point: “Psychology is plagued with efforts to find answers to the wrong questions!” (p. 116).

⁸ As the late Steinar Kvale put it to me, a prescient critic.

⁹ Although Gibson described himself as a psychologist (1966, p. 22), he makes surprisingly few explicit references to psychology at all, and these are generally negative. See Gibson (1966/1968), pp. vii, 3, 28, 39, 106, 204, 222, 263, 266–267, 276, 277, 283, 300, 311; Gibson (1979/1986), pp. 2, 39, 42, 56, 96, 134, 135, 138, 139, 147, 220, 234, 255, 268, 293.