Heft, Ecological Psychology in Context

Heft, Harry. Ecological Psychology in Context. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001.

Heft undertakes an ambitious project: to account broadly for the formation of ecological psychology as a viable and distinctive area of inquiry in the human sciences generally and in psychology more specifically. He reads the formation of ecological psychology through several figures: William James, James Gibson and Roger Barker are most notable and included in the subtitle. Basically, Heft sees James' radical empiricism as a suitable bridge to connect Gibson's work on ecological optics and affordances with more recent and pocketed uptakes of "ecological psychology" in various disciplines. According to Heft, this is needed work because it begins to resolve experimental psychology's scientific compulsions, ironing out some of the core suppositions that lead to "theoretical conflict."

Heft frames the motivation for ecological psychology in terms of three tenets: an overhaul of cause (not simply taken as "mechanistic antecedent-consequence relations" (xxiv)), revision of the mind/matter split, and repairing the dichotomy between organism and environment. From a stream of perceptual abundance, selectivity is a key in understanding the relationship between experience and knowledge in EP. Also, there is a clear--if not excessive--emphasis on functional relationships, rather than critical or rhetorical relationships (to adopt Selber's troika).

There's a lot here, and I've focused mainly on Hefts explanation of concept and percept, his expansion of affordances by explaining them in terms of James, and his distinction between tool and artifact (let the record select this selectivity). Gibson explains that affordances paradoxically are both subjective and objective. Heft sorts out Gibson's ambiguity by using James' idea of the "double-barreled nature of conscious experience," which eliminates the thought-object split. Also, to explain the relativism of affordances, Heft uses an anecdote about a child in a daycare for whom the door does not afford passage like it does for an adult (132). Tools, for Heft, are distinct from artifacts:

It will be more fruitful to employ a distinction offered by Ingold (1993) between tools and artifacts: "A tool, in the most general sense, is an object that extends the capacity of an agent to operate within a given environment; an artefact is an object shaped to some pre-existent conception of form." (p. 433). Ingold was proposing here a distinction between materials (tools) that have not been designed by an individual for a particular purpose, but instead have been selected for the purpose of extending action possibilities, and designed materials (artifacts) that have been explicitly fashioned with their role in carrying our some task in mind" (341).

Revisit chapter 9, "Ecological Knowledge and Sociocultural Processes" for exam.

Key terms: sciences of the inanimate (physical) (xxii), mechanistic foundations (xxii), adaptive agents (xxiii), knowing and selectivity (28), James' radical empiricism (37), percepts and concepts (38), optical flow (119), occluding edge (122), affordance (123), affordances as percepts (129), affectional experiences (129), ecological optics (147), cognitive maps (186), ecological knowledge, dilated bodies, networks (356).

"At the level of human experience, animate beings, unlike inanimate things, are (a) ceaselessly active and b) continually in the process of engaging their surroundings in a selective manner. Environmental conditions are in flux, and animate beings monitor these ongoing conditions, make functional adjustments with respect to them, and engage environmental features in relation to their own goals and interests. For these reasons, (c) animate beings exist in relation to a flow of events, and their functioning is best understood as that of dynamic, organismic processes in context. Animate beings selectively engage environmental features and selectively enter places in order to benefit from the functional opportunities things and places offer. And more than this, (d) animate beings participate in the modification of many of these very features and places. In these respects, (e) animate beings are adaptive agents" (xxiii).

"From the outset, experimental psychology has been caught between, on the one hand, following successful paths established in the physical sciences and, on the other hand, recognizing the necessity of grounding its concepts in evolutionary theory" (xxix).

"Significantly, ecological psychology suggests an approach to meaning from a third-person perspective, thereby offering a way of making this issue amenable to experimental study" (xxiii). How to reconcile this with the discussion of objective/subjective and affordances? (James' double-barrel experience)?

"To back up for a moment, in radical empiricism, knowing refers most fundamentally to a functional relation in experience between a knower and an object known" (37). ^Heavy emph. on functional.

"Perceiving, then, is a direct, unmediated, selective discovery of structure in immediate experience. And it is a selective process that transpires continuously over time: Percepts 'are singulars that change incessantly and never return exactly as they were before' (p. 253)" (39).

"Thinking or conceiving entails, in turn, selecting and fixing particular parts of this perceptual flow. Through this process concepts are carved out of immediate perceptual experience at a remove from action and are abstracted from it" (40). This happens without a relation to language? Is this "carving" a symbolic process? Iconic? A blend?

"What is the relation between percepts and concepts? For the most part, conceptual orders to not replace or override the intrinsic structure of perceptual experience. Instead, percepts and concepts imperceptibly merge together. The experience of our mental life is largely an interweaving of the immediate structure of perceiving and the abstracted systems of concepts" (49). Absent an account of the role of language, it's difficult to follow how percepts trump concepts.

"An affordance is the perceived functional significance of an object, event, or place for an individual" (123). Event? Also, no collective affordances.

"Affordances are claimed to possess two distinctive and seemingly contradictory characteristics: First, they are relational properties, and second, they are properties of environmental features existing independently of a perceiver" (124).

"One last point concerning James' analysis of the double-barreled nature of experience: For James, the kinds of experiences that most clearly reveal this double-barreled quality are what he called 'affectional experiences.' Whereas in most cases through the selective process of knowing, an experience is readily classified as 'objective or subjective' in terms of its relations to one or another context, this possibility is much more difficult with experiences that have a particularly strong evaluative character" (129).

"The objects and events of the environment are embedded in a rich web of relations. Critically, these relations can be perceived by the knower; they are 'in' the environment and not imposed on it" (143).

"As independent objects, tools reside potentially within an individual-environment relation. They are environmental features that can become appropriated into the goal-directed action of the individual; and in doing so, they extend or amplify actions, and they alter the body's phenomenal boundary during their use" (342). Never before or after their use? This definition of tool precludes language, no?

Related sources:

Heider, F. (1959a). Thing and medium. On perception and event structure, and the psychological environment, Psychological issues, 1, Monograph 3, 1034. (Original work published 1926).