J. J. Gibson spent most of his career developing his own theory of perception. The culmination of his work was the ecological approach to visual perception, but during more than three decades he had challenged many of the central concepts of psychology and his own convictions regarding the foundations of perception. In this article I argue that the driving force of the development of ecological psychology was Gibson’s most radical idea: that psychology needs a law-based explanatory strategy at its own scale to be successful. According to Gibson, instead of pursuing explanations based on the patching up of simple stimulus-response events with the postulation of more or less lawful sub-personal mechanisms, psychology needs its own laws at a proper scale to provide legitimate explanations for perception and action.
BechtelW. (1998). Representations and cognitive explanations: Assessing the dynamicist’s challenge in cognitive science. Cognitive Science, 22(3), 295–318.
2.
BungeM.ArdilaR. (2012). Philosophy of psychology. New York, NY: Springer Science & Business Media.
3.
CalvoP.GomilaT. (2008). Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach. San Diego, CA: Elsevier.
4.
CharlesE. P. (2010). Ecological psychology and social psychology: It’s Holt or nothing!Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 45(1), 132–153.
5.
CharlesE. P. (2012). A new look at new realism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
6.
ChemeroA. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
7.
ClarkA. (1997). The dynamical challenge. Cognitive Science, 21(4), 461–481.
8.
ClarkA. (2015). Surfing uncertainty. London, UK: Oxford University Press.
9.
CohenH. F. (1994). The scientific revolution: A historiographical inquiry. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
10.
CostallA.MorrisP. (2015). The “textbook Gibson”: The assimilation of dissidence. History of Psychology, 18(1), 1–14.
11.
CraverC. (2007). Explaining the brain. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
12.
DeweyJ. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370.
13.
DijksterhuisE. J. (1961). The mechanization of the world picture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
14.
Di PaoloE. A.BuhrmannT.BarandiaranX. E. (2017). Sensorimotor life: An enactive proposal. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
15.
EstesW. K. (1950). Toward a statistical theory of learning. Psychological Review, 57, 94–107.
16.
FodorJ. A.PylyshynZ. W. (1981). How direct is visual perception: Some reflections on Gibson’s “ecological approach”. Cognition, 9, 139–196.
17.
GibsonE. J. (2001). Perceiving the affordances: A portrait of two psychologists. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
18.
GibsonJ. J. (1933). Adaptation, after-effect and contrast in the perception of curved lines. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 16, 1–31.
19.
GibsonJ. J. (1937). Adaptation, after-effect, and contrast in the perception of tilted lines: II. Simultaneous contrast and the areal restriction of the after-effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 553–559.
20.
GibsonJ. J. (1950). The perception of the visual world. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press.
21.
GibsonJ. J. (1957). Survival in a world of probable objects. Contemporary Psychology, 2, 33–35.
22.
GibsonJ. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
23.
GibsonJ. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
24.
GibsonJ. J. (1982a). Autobiography. In ReedE. S.JonesR. (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 7–22). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1967)
25.
GibsonJ. J. (1982b). Optical motions and transformations as stimuli for visual perception. In ReedE. S.JonesR. (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 44–52), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1957)
26.
GibsonJ. J. (1982c). The information contained in light. In ReedE. S.JonesR. (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 53–60). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1960)
27.
GibsonJ. J. (1982d). Ecological optics. In ReedE. S.JonesR. (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 61–75). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1961)
28.
GibsonJ. J. (1982e). On theories for visual space perception. In ReedE. S.JonesR. (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 76–89). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1970)
29.
GibsonJ. J. (1982f). A history of the ideas behind ecological optics: Introductory remarks at the workshop on ecological optics. In ReedE. S.JonesR. (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 90–101). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1970)
30.
GibsonJ. J. (1982g). What is involved in surface perception? In ReedE. S.JonesR. (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 106–112), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1979)
31.
GibsonJ. J. (1982h). Visually controlled locomotion and visual orientation in animals. In ReedE. S.JonesR. (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 148–163). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1958)
32.
GibsonJ. J.CrooksL. E. (1938). A theoretical field analysis of automobile driving. American Journal of Psychology, 51, 453–471.
33.
GibsonJ. J.OlumP.RosenblattF. (1955). Parallax and perspective during aircraft landings. American Journal of Psychology, 68, 372–385.
34.
GibsonJ. J.PurdyJ.LawrenceL. (1955). A method of controlling stimulation for the study of space perception: The optical tunnel. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 50, 1–14.
35.
GoldsteinB. (2001). Cross-talk between psychophysics and physiology in the study of perception. In GoldsteinB. (Ed.), Blackwell handbook of sensation & perception (pp. 1–23), Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
36.
HakenH.KelsoJ. A. S.BunzH. (1985). A theoretical model of phase transitions in human hand movements. Biological Cybernetics, 51, 347–356.
37.
HeftH. (2001). Ecological psychology in context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of Williams James’s radical empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
38.
HoltE. B. (1915a). The Freudian wish and its place in ethics. New York, NY: H. Holt & Company.
39.
HoltE. B. (1915b). Response and cognition I: The specific response relation. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 12, 365–373.
40.
HullC. L. (1943). Principles of behavior: An introduction to behavior theory. New York, NY: Appleton.
41.
KaplanD. M.CraverC. (2011). The explanatory force of dynamical and mathematical models in neuroscience: A mechanistic perspective. Philosophy of Science, 78(4), 601–627.
42.
KäuferS.ChemeroA. (2015). Phenomenology: An introduction. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
43.
LeeD. N. (2009). General tau theory: Evolution to date. Perception, 38, 837–858.
44.
LombardoT. J. (1987). The reciprocity of perceiver and environment: The evolution of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
45.
MachE. (1893). The science of mechanics: A critical and historical account of its development (McCormackT. J., Trans.). Chicago, IL: Open Court. (Original work published 1883)
46.
MarrD. (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. New York, NY: Freeman.
47.
MatthenM. (2009). Teleology in living things. In AnagnostopoulosG. (Ed.), A companion to Aristotle (pp. 335–347), Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
48.
Merleau-PontyM. (1963). The structure of behavior (FisherA. L., Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquense University Press. (Original work published 1942)
49.
Merleau-PontyM. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (LandesD., Trans.). Oxford, UK: Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
50.
MichaelsC.CarelloC. (1981). Direct perception. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
51.
MyinE. (2016). Perception as something we do. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(5–6), 80–104.
52.
NeisserU. (1976). Cognition and reality: Principles and implications of cognitive psychology. New York, NY: Freeman.
53.
NeisserU. (1993). The perceived self: Ecological and interpersonal sources of self-knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
54.
NormanD. (1988). The design of everyday things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
55.
RajaV.BienerZ.ChemeroA. (2017). From Kepler to Gibson. Ecological Psychology, 29(2), 1–15.
56.
ReedE. S. (1986). James Gibson’s revolution in psychology: A case study in the transformation of scientific ideas. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 17, 65–99.
57.
ReedE. S. (1988). James J. Gibson and the psychology of perception. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
58.
ReedE. S.JonesR. (1982). Reasons for realism: Selected essays of James J. Gibson. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
59.
RomeE.HertzbergJ.DorffnerG. (2006). Towards affordance-based robot control. New York, NY: Springer.
60.
ShapiroL. (2014). The Routledge handbook of embodied cognition. New York, NY: Routledge.
61.
TurveyM. T. (1992). Ecological foundations of cognition: Invariants of perception and action. In HerbertH. L.van der BroekP. W.KnillD. C. (Eds.), Cognition: Conceptual and methodological issues (pp. 85–117), Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
62.
TurveyM.ShawR.ReedE. S.MaceW. (1981). Ecological laws for perceiving and acting: A reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn. Cognition, 10, 237–304.
63.
van GelderT.PortR. (1995). It’s about time: An overview of the dynamical approach to cognition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
64.
VarelaF. J.ThompsonE.RoschE. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
65.
WagenmakersE.-J.van der MaasH. L. J.FarrellS. (2012). Abstract concepts require concrete models: Why cognitive scientists have not yet embraced nonlinearly coupled, dynamical, self-organized critical, synergistic, scale-free, exquisitely context-sensitive, interaction-dominant, multifractal, interdependent brain-body-niche systems. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4, 87–93.
66.
WarrenW. H. (2006). The dynamics of perception and action. Psychological Review, 113(2), 358–389.
67.
WestenD. (1996). Psychology: Mind, brain and culture. New York, NY: Wiley.
