James J. Gibson

COVID-19 infects cities, here grasped as quasi-living functioning systems, and the changes inflicted can poetically open us to certain things. Drawing on ecological psychology, we maintain that this brings people into contact with different realities depending on their overall wellbeing, arguing that the aesthetic experience of cities accordingly varies. We then consider iterations of these ideas in dystopian cinema, which portrays global threats altering human relations with technology, art, and the world.

COVID-19 infects cities, here grasped as quasi-living functioning systems, and the changes inflicted can poetically open us to certain things. Drawing on ecological psychology, we maintain that this brings people into contact with different realities depending on their overall wellbeing, arguing that the aesthetic experience of cities accordingly varies. We then consider iterations of these ideas in dystopian cinema, which portrays global threats altering human relations with technology, art, and the world.

Something has meaning when it has the property of "information about" some part of the world with respect to an end or ends of some intentional system or agent.  Intentional systems are end-directed systems, but not all end-directed systems are intentional.  Not all end-directed systems require information about or meaning to determine their actions towards their ends. We need not invoke intenionality or meaning, for example, to explain the flow of a river down a slope, or the flow of heat down a temperature gradient from a hotter to a cooler region because these processes are explicable in terms of local physical potentials and laws.  MORE...

Design Affordances.
What is an Affordance in design?

Affordances are clues about how an object should be used, typically provided by the object itself or its context. For example, even if you've never seen a coffee mug before, its use is fairly natural. The handle is shaped for easy grasping and the vessel has a large opening at the top with an empty well inside. “The most important design tool is that of coherence and understandability which comes through an explicit, perceivable conceptual model. Affordances specify the range of possible activities, but affordances are of little use if they are not visible to the users. Hence, the art of the designer is to ensure that the desired, relevant actions are readily perceivable” (Norman, D. A. (1990). The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Doubleday).

This workshop explores the possibilities of finding affordances in objects or topics. The main focus of this exercise is to increse the perception of what "things" can afford, and with the help of narrative and fiction create new objects with new uses, or new lands with new scenarios. Envisioning Affordances help us to comeback to fantasy but with a different approach and analysing what possibilities we can develop with this "Affordable" design methodology.

The “hard problem,” stated as it is only in terms of accounting for the origin of “qualia,” has been misleading.  The more general problem is explaining the origin of the image of the external world.  Bergson had a unique solution to this problem, unrecognized yet today because it was a  holographic solution formulated fifty years before the invention of holography.  Gibson is Bergson’s natural complement, critical to understanding the information that modulates the brain as a reconstructive wave passing through the external holographic field.  The problem becomes, in actuality, an optical problem in physics, with another critical piece requiring a revision in physics’ current model of time.

Gibson developed the affordance concept to complement his theory of direct perception that stands in sharp contrast with the prevalent inferential theories of perception. A comparison of the two approaches shows that the distinction between them also has an ontological aspect. We trace the history and newer formalizations of the notion of affordance and discuss some competing opinions on its scope. Next, empirical work on the affordance concept is reviewed in brief and the relevance of dynamical systems theory to affordance research is demonstrated. Finally, the striking but often neglected convergence of the ideas of Gibson and those of certain Continental philosophers is discussed.

Gibson argued that illusory pictorial displays contain "inadequate" information (1966, p. 288) but also that a "very special kind of selective attention" (p. 313) can dispel the illusion—suggesting that adequate perceptual information could in fact be potentially available to observers. The present paper describes Gibson's treatment of geometrical illusions and reviews pertinent empirical evidence. Interestingly, Gibson's insights have been corroborated by recent findings of inter- and intra-observer variability in susceptibility to visual illusions as a function of culture, learning and task. It is argued that these findings require a modification of the general Gibsonian principle of perception as the detection of specifying information. Withagen and Chemero's (2009) evolutionary motivated reconceptualization of perception predicts observers' use of both specifying and non-specifying information and inter- and intra-observer variability therein. Based on this reconceptualization we develop an ecological approach to visual illusions that explains differential illusion effects in terms of the optical variable(s) detected.

Texto introdutório à abordagem ecológica da percepção que será publicado na coletânea Escritos de Filosofia V: Linguagem e Cognição, Grupo Linguagem e Cognição (UFAL/CNPq).

Neste texto, apresento e examino as principais ideias que animam a abordagem ecológica da percepção. Primeiro, na Seção 2, apresento a visão instantânea da percepção, contra a qual Gibson articula e propõe a abordagem ecológica. Em seguida, não Seção 3, apresento e discuto a noção de informação ecológica. Nas seções 4 e 5 articulo a teoria das affordances e discuto a aprendizagem perceptiva. Por fim, na Seção 6, exponho e discuto a possibilidade de estender a teoria das affordances para explicar a cognição social.

Weblink to full paper: https://tinyurl.com/yc9r6kys 

Abstract:

Ever since Einstein’s arrival at the forefront of science, mainstream physicists have tended to think of nature as a giant 4-dimensional spacetime continuum in which all of eternity exists all at once in one timeless block universe. Accordingly, much to the dismay of more process-minded researchers, the experience of an ongoing present moment is typically branded as illusory.
      Mainstream physics is having a hard time, however, providing a well-founded defense of this alleged illusoriness of time. This is because physics, as an empirical science, is itself utterly dependent on experience to begin with. Moreover, if nature were indeed purely physical -- as contemporary mainstream physics wants us to believe -- it is quite difficult to see how it could ever be able to give rise to something so explicitly non-physical like conscious experience. On top of this, the argument of time's illusoriness becomes even more doubtful in view of the extraordinary level of sophistication that would be required for our conscious experience to achieve such an utterly convincing, but -- physically speaking -- pointless illusion.
      It is because of problems like these that process thought has persistently objected to the “eternalism” of mainstream physics. Recently physicist Lee Smolin has brought up some other major arguments against this timeless picture in his controversial 2013 book Time Reborn. Although he passionately argues that physics should take an entirely different direction, he admits that he has no readily available roadmap to success.
      Fortunately, however, over the last 15 years or so, a neo- Whiteheadian, biocentric way of doing foundational physics, namely Reg Cahill's process physics, has made its appearance. According to process physics, nature is a routine-driven or habit-based process, rather than a changeless world whose observable phenomena are governed by eternally fixed and highly deterministic physical laws. Although, in the currently prevailing view, the universe is seen as a law-abiding natural world whose entire history -- past, present, and future -- must have been "called forth by law" in one go at the big bang, process physics suggests that the universe has come into actuality from an initially undifferentiated, orderless background of dispositional activity patterns which was driven by a habit-establishing, iterative update routine.
      In the process physics model, all such habit-establishing activity patterns are "mutually informative" as they are actively making a meaningful difference to (i.e., in-forming) each other. This mutual informativeness among activity patterns will thus actively give shape to ongoing structure formation within nature as a whole, thereby renewing it through stochastic (hence, novelty-infusing) update iterations. In this way, the process of nature starts to evolve from its initial featurelessness to then branch out to higher and higher levels of complexity, thus eventually even leading to neural network-like structure formation on the universe’s supra-galactic level of organization.
      Because of this noise-driven branching behavior, the natural universe can be thought of as habit-bound with a potential for creative novelty and open-ended evolution. Furthermore, three-dimensionality, gravitational and relativistic effects, nonlocality, and near-classical behavior are spontaneously emergent within the process physics model. Also, the models constantly renewing activity patterns bring along an inherent present moment effect, thereby reintroducing time in terms of the system’s ongoing change as it goes through its cyclic iterations. As a final point, subjectivity -- in the form of mutual informativeness -- is a naturally evolving, innate feature, not a coincidental, later-arriving side-effect.

The psychologist J. J. Gibson, and later the enactivists, espoused a view of perception that emphasized active sensory exploration, and the biological functions perception serves.  They tended to neglect the internal complexity of perceptual systems.  Neuroscientists and computer vision researchers, on the other hand, focus on the complex structure and inner workings of perceptual systems, to the neglect of biological and behavioral context.  Here I will formulate a version of ecological realism which reconciles and critiques these seemingly disparate approaches.

I argue that the objects of perception are relational invariant structures preserved within the changing flux of perceptual input.  The function of perception is to enable appropriate behavior with respect to affordances, which are objective three-way relations between worldly features, animal abilities, and animal needs.  The invariant relationships perceived tend to be those which signify affordance relationships for the species and individual in question.

The perception-action cycle is but one example of the circular dynamics of perceptual systems.  The neural portions of such systems are also in a state of constant feed-forward and feedback dynamical interaction with one another.  These dynamics confer an active autonomy on perceptual systems as manifested by phenomena like dreams, hallucinations, and perceptual illusions.  Metaphorically, such systems may function to constantly formulate and test hypotheses about affordances based on perceptual evidence and prior categorical experience.  Hierarchical predictive models of perception, in which perceptual systems consist of a hierarchy of Bayesian statistical predictors, represent a possible means by which this metaphor might be crafted into a testable scientific hypothesis.  Perception, even if it involves actively autonomous perceptual systems coping with ambiguous input, is epistemically reliable most of the time, because it is constantly tested by action.  Perceptual states are true or valid if they bear an appropriate relationship to objective affordance relationships, and false or invalid if they do not.  These views require a reformulation of the venerable distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ perception.  Perception is ontologically direct in the sense of dealing in objective relationships in the world, but justificationally indirect in the sense of requiring an argument that perceptual beliefs are generally epistemically reliable.

The importance of the elk (Alces alces) in the Stone Age societies of northern Sweden constitutes the major focus of this thesis. The point of departure is a simple but crucial observation: this animal is the common denominator between the three stationary types of remains known in this region from the period 4000-1800 BC. Here, I refer to the pit falls, the rock art sites, and the mounds of burnt stone. Pit falls have been used for trapping elks, and can be found on the migration trails that have been used by these animals for thousands of years. On the rock art sites, the elk constitutes the most frequently depicted motif, and the mounds of burnt stones contain extremely large quantities of elk bones.
If the elk had not held a central position in the life world of prehistoric people in the northern Swedish region of Norrland, these archaeological materials would certainly have had a different appearance. I claim that it is the significance of this animal that has led to, and shaped, the emergence of these material remains.
In this study the overall importance of the elk is investigated. My main question is how the elk’s significance affected the prehistoric societies of Norrland. I found that the elk’s material remains led to a range of consequences. The pit falls, rock art sites and mounds of burnt stone tied the prehistoric people to certain areas in the landscape. However, at the same time, these remains required to be constantly in transformation to be usable. Pit falls, for example, have to be re-digged in order to at all function as traps for big game.
The conceptual dichotomy between permanence and change can be traced in the ways in which the elk motif at the rock art site at Nämforsen was altered. The elk figures are depicted with either straight or angled legs. I interpret this variation as an indication of the fact that the elk motif functioned as a key symbol – a motif that is able to express a range of meanings when it becomes altered and varied.
The emergence of depicting the opposition between mobility and permanence tells us that the Stone Age societies had problems uniting these two concepts. I interpret this as signifying that these hunter-gatherers became aware of the “Neolithic aspects” of their own social structure.

An argument is developed to show that the origin and evolution of the perceptual guidance of movements and the movement enhancement of opportunities to perceive, that is, perception-action cycles, have a direct and deep connection with thermodynamic principles.  The cornerstones of the argument are: (a) maximum entropy production as a physical selection principle (thermodynamic fields will behave in such a fashion as to get to the final state- minimize the field potential or maximize the entropy- at the fastest possible rate given the constraints; (b) the inexorability of order production (order produces entropy is inexorable because order produces entropy faster than disorder); (c) evolution as a global phenomenon (the Earth system at its highest level evolves as a single global entity): and (d) information in Gibson's law-based, specificational sense (invariant relations exist between higher order properties of structured energy distributions and their environmental sources). The progressive emergence of perception-action cycles in the evolution of Earth as a global entity is the lawful product of opportunistic physics: There was no other way to produce the collective order (ordered) states that would engender these higher levels of dissipation.  Perception-action cycles express higher order symmetries of the world itself in its own becoming.  Perception-action is the physics at these higher levels.

The built environment implicitly regulates bodily movement, whether through decorative curbs marking areas as private or lighting accentuating pimples to drive youths away. Drawing on my own observational research and empirical studies, I argue tacit boundaries such as these are harsher for people under the weather in the threefold sense of suffering from inclement conditions, ill-health and oppressive social climates. Inasmuch as design filters people in these ways, space is “selectively permeable.” I pursue these lines through Shusterman’s somaesthetics and Gibson’s affordance theory. A tenet in somaesthetics is that culture, mind, body and values are codependent. Gibson’s framework likewise holds that body, values and environment are codefined. An icy stairway, for example, may afford falling to the infirmed and look threatening to them more than it does to the healthy, who therefore value it differently. The same pattern occurs in cultural-political environments: a woman may see an urban setting as more threatening than a man because it places her at greater bodily risk, just as citizens in an authoritarian society may face more danger than tourists, experiencing things accordingly. That agents face objectively different obstacles in the same environment allows for selectively permeable design and it makes affordances political.

Interdisciplinary interest in affordances is increasing. This paper is a philosophical contribution. The question is: Do persons offer affordances? Analysis of the concepts ‘person’ and ‘affordance’ supports an affirmative answer. On a widely accepted understanding of what persons are, persons exhibit many of the features typical of socionormative affordances. However, to understand persons as offering affordances requires, on the face of it, stretching traditional understandings of the concept of affordance: persons, in contrast to the organisms that partially constitute persons, do not seem to be available to perception. This and similar worries are responded to.

Ecological psychology is built on a perception-oriented ontology. The primary focus has been on explaining the perception and action behavior of individual animals. To accommodate social phenomena within the ecological approach, it is necessary to expand the ontology, however theorists have been unclear about how to do this. The paper presents a negative argument and a positive programmatic outline. The negative argument is against the use of the term 'social affordance', a term that confuses the perspective of the researcher with that of the animal. Instead, it is advocated that we adopt, as a working hypothesis, the claim that all affordances are social; that is, all affordances are public and are, in principle, observable by a third party. The programmatic outline then shows that affordances alone are insufficient for describing social meaning. An ecological social ontology requires new tools for describing interaction processes, symbolic meaning, and material culture as structures occurring within the populated environment.

IF YOU WANT TO RECEIVE A COPY, PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO INFO@VINCENTBLOK.NL. Because the status of nature is ambiguous in Being and Time, we explore an ecological perspective on Heidegger’s early main work in this article. Our hypothesis is that the affordance theoryof James Gibson enables us to a) to understand being-in-the-world as being-in-nature, b) reconnect man and nature and c) understand the twofold sense of nature in Being and Time. After exploring Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world and Gibson’s concept of being-in-nature, we confront Heidegger’s and Gibson’s conception of being-in-the-world and being-in-nature. It will become clear that Gibson’s affordance theory enables an ecological reading of Being and Time, in which the relational character of being-in-the-world is stressed and the exceptional position of human being-in-the-world has to be rejected. Moreover, it becomes clear that an ecological reading of Being and Time enables us to reconnect being-in-the world with being-in-nature (unconcealment), which is rooted in “primordial” nature as its infinite origin (concealment).

In this paper I will advance and defend a minimal conception of self- consciousness, which I shall call nonconceptual self-awareness (henceforth, NCSA). As a contrastive term, the central idea behind NCSA is that the possession of a “self- concept” is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for representing oneself as an embodied agent in the ecological and social environments. To be sure, concept- possession is needed for activities such as mastering the grammar of the first-person pronoun, constructing autobiographical narratives, and formulating long term plans. It has its place in theoretical specifications of the contents of representational states, and as John McDowell points out, it allows us to “coherently credit experiences with rational relations to judgment and belief.” However, I will argue that these “higher-order” cognitive achievements are parasitic on a more primitive and already-existing form of self-awareness that operates independently of concepts. This primitive capacity is built into the very structure of perceptual experience and manifests as co-perception of the embodied self and the environment. In what follows, I will elaborate the thesis that this co-perception constitutes the foundations for full-fledged self-conscious activities (such as the capacity to maintain some form of detached perspective on oneself as the enduring subject of oneʼs own actions and mental states) precisely because these activities are experientially grounded in a unified, albeit nonconceptual, form of perspectivity. While my approach draws broadly on recent developments in ecological psychology, the debate on conceptual/nonconceptual mental content provides a convenient starting point for discussion.

Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon contributed a wealth of philosophical insights to the problems of cognition, noetics, and epistemology. Their developments of Thomism and the philosophia perennis were achieved through their erudite dialogue with ancient, medieval, and contemporary approaches to the nature of being. Maritain and Simon both defended sophisticated Thomist accounts of critical realism. Simon, in particular, dedicated a number of studies to the Thomist doctrine of sensation, and it is within these detailed studies that he took up the problem of intentions in the medium. This paper aims to develop further Maritain's and Simon's accounts of Thomist realism by placing their treatments of sensation and intentional beings in the medium, i.e., species in medio, within Aquinas's robust metaphysical account of the transcendentals thing and truth.

I shall begin with a brief introduction to the problem of sensation and the medium. Next, I turn to Thomas Aquinas's approach to the nature ofintentional beings in the medium and the distinction between natural being and intentional being. I will then summarize Yves Simon's development of Aquinas's theory of sensation before addressing the central problem of species in the medium. Simon will be our guide through various medieval attempts to understand the peculiar kind of participated causality exhibited in the medium's capacity to communicate intentional beings apsychically from the sensible reality to the sense powers of the animal. Simon's treatment of the transitive intentional acts of sensible things will uncover for us the vocation of species in medio. As we will see, the doctrine of transitive intentional acts elucidates the manner in which all sensible things communicate species into the medium, not for the sake of themselves, but for the sake of potential knowers. Finally, in the last section we will address the unusual sort of participation in separate substances that Aquinas attributes to species in the medium. But instead of supporting this doctrine's more mysterious elements by appealing to the empirical physics of medieval cosmology, we will avail ourselves of Aquinas's doctrine of the transcendentals thing and truth to explain the intentional vocation of species in medio.

This paper does not promise to offer a complete solution to this recondite difficulty, but instead aims to set the contours of the problem in relief, to take note of the theoretical advances of Aquinas and Simon, and finally, to propose that a robust metaphysics of the transcendentals provides an insightful way to understand the vocation of species in media.

This paper reviews current approaches to designing virtual environments and investigates aspects of influence in designing auditory spaces to support novel forms of interaction in virtual places. Initial research on human imagined sounds from places has identified ‘expectation’ as an important psychological construct, which must be considered when designing sounds for virtual places. The research work continues to provide evidence that there are differences between sounds people expect to hear in places and sounds recorded in real life places. Instead of designing realistic virtual spaces, the paper suggests a user’s sense of presence as a measure of the user’s experience in virtual environment. The results indicate that using highly expected sounds increases users’ sense of presence. As such, it is to propose that designing auditory spaces using expectations as perceived affordance is perhaps a minimal way to design auditory spaces that support sense of place, hence provoke the emergence of virtual communities.
Future work of the project is discussed.

James J. Gibson is one of the best known and perhaps most controversial visual theorists of the twentieth century. Writing in the vein of the American functionalists, and immersed in their profound sense of pragmatism, Gibson sought to establish a more rigorous foundation for the study of vision by reworking its most fundamental concepts. Over the five decades of his distinguished career, Gibson brought new clarity to the old problems of the tradition. He offered an alternative theory of perception – one that could accommodate the experimental insights of contemporary research programs. He characterized this new theory as a version of direct perception in order to distinguish it from the traditional indirect approach of Rene Descartes. On Descartes’ account, our perceptual awareness of reality comes through the representations we have formed of it within ourselves. In contrast, Gibson’s theory of direct perception states that the environment contains all of the information needed to specify its properties. Hence, perceiving these properties is a matter of detecting the information available in the environment. This theory avoids the difficulty of explaining how the mind organizes holistic perceptions from atomic sensations. In what follows, I will attempt to make good these claims by situating the concept of “structure” at the heart of the ecological program. I will argue that this concept is significant precisely because it allows Gibson to locate the moving, perceiving body at the heart of meaningful perceptual experience; an experience which emerges in the dynamical structures that cut across the body and the world.

The relation between Martin Heidegger and radical environmentalism has been subject of discussion for several years now. On the one hand, Heidegger is portrayed as a forerunner of the deep ecology movement, providing an alternative for the technological age we live in. On the other, commentators contend that the basic thrust of Heidegger’s thought cannot be found in such an ecological ethos. In this article, this debate is revisited in order to answer the question whether it is possible to conceive human dwelling on earth in a way which is consistent with the technological world we live in and heralds another beginning at the same time. Our point of departure in this article is not the work of Heidegger but the affordance theory of James Gibson, which will prove to be highly compatible with the radical environmentalist concept of nature as well as Heidegger’s concept of the challenging of nature.

PRZERÓŻNE SPOSOBY [PACYFISTYCZNEGO] ORGANIZOWANIA, w: "Kody i Afordancje", wystawa sztuki współczesnej, kurator Marek Rogulski, współpraca Dorota Grubba, Bartosz Nowak, teksty, M. Rogulski, D. Grubba, Instytut Cybernetyki Sztuki Gdańsk 2021 Artystki/ Artyści: Roman Bromboszcz, Jowan Czerkas, Michał Gary Garnowski + Beata Oryl, Emilia Grubba/ Katarzyna Anna Jarnuszkiewicz + Krystian Jarnuszkiewicz, Łukasz Jeleniewski, Katarzyna Józefowicz, Andrzej Karolewicz, Magdalena Kieszniewska, Monika Krygier+ Stefan Krygier+ Władysław Strzemiński + Włodzimierz Pietrzyk "Christo", Przemek Kryszk, Michał Mazur, Maciek Możdżyński, Kasia Nawrocka, Andrzej Pater, Dorota Nieznalska, Bartosz Nowak, Bartłomiej Otocki, Pracownia EpiFiPiPsi, Marek Rogulski, Zuzanna Sadowa, Wojtek Sosnowski, Marek Wodzisławski, Andrzej Wojciechowski, Marek Zygmunt, Sofi Żezmer. Projekt wydawnictwa: Tomek Pawluczuk. Teksty: Marek Rogulski, Dorota Grubba, Współpraca z Artystkami, Artystami, Specjalne Podziękowania dla Osób współtworzących "K&A", + za wieloaspektowe Wsparcie: Pani Jadwiga Charzynska Dyrektor CSW Laznia 1/2 oraz Uczelnie AEH wŁodzi, ASP w Gdańsku, jak i Krzysztof Topolski, Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska, Paweł Możdżyński, Mi MiAestas, Janek Grubba, Wojtek Lesiecki, Adam Neuman, Państwowa Galeria Sztuki w Sopocie, wszystkie Osoby i instytucje kt. wsparly Projekt.27XI2021 Otwarcie, Perfo, Koncerty w ICS Instytut Cybernetyki Sztuki w Gdańsku Osowie

Critique is directed against lingering philosophical Idealism and its counterpart; rationalistic physicalism. The remarkable discoveries of quantum physics invalidate them both, findings that have largely been ignored. The objective world constitutes of both mind and matter, and so does the subject. There exists no metaphysical barrier. Rather, subject and object are interactive and partake of the very same substance of reality. This has complementary nature, that is, manifests either as mind or matter.

Keywords: philosophy of color, theory of mind, ontology, epistemology, Idealism, Orch OR, qualia, reprentationism, artificial intelligence, AI, machine-human, physicalism, rationalism, complementarity, wave-particle duality, Kant, Descartes, Roger Penrose, James J. Gibson.

В  статье исследование Бруно Латура AIME («An inquiry into modes of existence») анализируется как проект метафизического эмпиризма. Латур [1993] рассматривает AIME как продолжение работы «We have never been Modern» и ставит вопрос: «Кем же были Нововременные, если они не принадлежали Модерну?». Поиски ответа на этот вопрос уводят Латура от эмпиризма в область метафизики и идеального материализма, не позволяя реализовать цель проекта: объединение природного и социального, идеального и материального. Одной из причин, в силу которых в проекте AIME эмпиризм был заменен метафизикой, стала аналитическая интерпретация Латуром концепта препозиции, взятая им из «радикального эмпиризма» Уильяма Джеймса. Чтобы решить эту проблему, автор предлагает заменить аналитический концепт препозиции, который у Латура описывает ситуацию как принадлежащую модусу существования, концептом аффордансов Джеймса Гибсона. Аффордансы, как они определяются Гибсоном, структурируют взаимодействия между животным и его экологической нишей. Феноменологическое определение аффордансов как возможностей среды, которые могут быть использованы только при наличии необходимого телесного опыта, в понимании Мерло-Понти, позволяет Глотзбаху и Хефту связать их с эмпирическим уровнем познания. Таким образом, аффордансы становятся необходимым элементом в системе концептов AIME, поскольку позволяют установить связь между эмпирическим и метафизическим уровнем, снимая разделение на идеальное и материальное. Объединение природного и социального станет возможным благодаря положительной интерпретации бифуркации как перехода между идеальным и материальным, метафизическим и эмпирическим.

Ключевые слова: аффордансы, AIME, модусы существования, телесный опыт, траектория, нерефлексивность

The metatheory in current " 4-E "-embodied, embedded, enacted and extended-approaches to cognition is ecological, which implies a relational, mutualist ontology and epistemology of the organism – environment system: the organism can only be conceived in terms of its ecological environment, and the environment in relation to the organism whose environment (world) it is. There is a basic compatibility and meaningfulness involved: the world offers opportunities to know and the organism is equipped to exploit these opportunities. In order to build an ecological understanding of what metaphor is we need to clarify how this metaphysical ground plays out in acts of knowing that involve metaphor. Embodied approaches typically focus on conceptual metaphors in adult language use. However, it is equally important to understand the ontogenesis of novel insightful metaphors, and the role of perception and perceptual learning. In my talk I will present an ecological realist approach to the emergence and development of metaphor, based on the theory of direct ecological perception. This approach assumes that infants are able to perceive meta-modal invariants that specify persistence of qualities (e.g. perceiving rigidness when sucking on a rigid substance and seeing a rigid object moving). And early metaphors (e.g., when a 3 year old says that a mother dog feeding her puppies " is a feeding bottle ") are consequences of this unfolding process in which invariants over naturally occurring kinds are perceived. Thus, metaphor production is an act of situated and experience-dependent perceiving and acting, in the ecological world of socially shared meanings. Analysis of naturally occurring early metaphors, and an analysis of a dialogical situation in which adult – child, and child-child dyads are looking at and conversing about pictured visual metaphors will serve to illustrate and support the theoretical framework.

This paper aims to identify elements of Peircean Pragmatism that contribute to the study of direct perception present in the Ecological approach. To do so, we develop a discussion of possible approximations between such accounts in relation to the study of perception. First, we will present the Peircean approach of perception, which involves three elements: percept, percipuum and perceptual  judgment. Next, we will show the Ecological approach of perception, which is based on the notions of affordance and reciprocity. In a final moment, we make a review of  the possibility of approximation between Ecological and Pragmatist accounts and to what extent Peircean Pragmatism contributes to the study of perception of organisms in a direct way.

This article relays the findings of a small corpus study of pictograms for public toilets conducted in collaboration with a group of students at International Business Communications at the University of Southern Denmark, Slagelse. The corpus consists of 97 images of public toilet pictograms collected by the students with mobile phone cameras during September and October 2012. The article presents a tentative approach to corpus-based studies of graphic form and, to that end, proposes a descriptive scheme with two formal systems, SHAPE and ENSHAPENING, which in concert with a fractal-derived principle of self-similarity adequately accounts for graphic form in public toilet signs.

The extended mind thesis claims that at least some cognitive processes extend beyond the organism’s brain in that they are constituted by the organism’s actions on its surrounding environment. A more radical move would be to claim that social actions performed by the organism could at least constitute some of its mental processes. This can be called the socially extended mind thesis. Based on the notion of affordance as developed in the ecological psychology tradition, I defend the view that perception extends to the environment. Then I will expand the notion of affordance to encompass social affordances. Thus, perception can in some situations also be socially extended.

(Deutsch)

Ein Flüchtlingscamp als Raum konstituierter Sichtbarkeit: Shatila. 1949 für Vertriebene der nördlichen Palästinensergebiete erbaut, in den südlichen Vororten der libanesischen Hauptstadt Beirut angesiedelt, Ort eines Genozids in den 80er Jahren und, in der Syrienkrise, Symbol von nationalem und internationalem gesellschaftlich-politischen Versagens, visualisiert es den tatsächlichen, aber auch mentalen Kampf der Bewohner mit der oktroyierten und begrenzten Sphäre. Die territoriale, politische und gesellschaftliche Limitierung der (mittlerweile nicht nur) palästinensischen Bevölkerung in Beirut führen zur Grundidee einer kritischen Raumforschung: Der Mikrokosmos des Camps wird als fragiler aber beständiger Ausnahmezustand wahrgenommen und dient als Untersuchungsgegenstand, um gesellschaftliche und kulturelle Prozesse in diskursive Raumbeziehungen zu setzen.  Die Grundlage der Untersuchung bildet die von Foucault stark beeinflusste ‚Neue Kulturgeographie‘ und deren zweite Phase der Hinwendung zur Sichtbarkeit und Re-Materialisierung. Es wird dann ein Verbleichen von Strukturen und kartesischen Rastern zugelassen, um den geographischen Raum in unterschiedliche Systeme zu übersetzten, die sich differenzierten wissenschaftlichen Ansätzen bedienen, um so schlussendlich individuelle und kollektive Rückschlüsse über die Bedeutung von Raum in einer anthropogenen Katastrophe zu generieren.
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(English)
A refugee camp as a space of constituted visibility: Shatila. Built in 1949 for displaced people from the northern Palestinian territories, located in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital Beirut, the place of a genocide in the 1980s and, in the Syrian crisis, a symbol of national and international socio-political failure, visualizes the actual but also mental struggle the inhabitants are facing with the imposed and limited sphere. The territorial, political and social limitations of the (now not only) Palestinian population in Beirut lead to the basic idea of ​​a critical spatial research: The microcosm of the camp is perceived as a fragile but constant state of emergency and serves as a subject of investigation to set social and cultural processes in discursive spatial relations. The basis of the investigation is Foucault's strongly influenced 'New Cultural Geography' and its second phase of turning to visibility and re-materialization. It then allows a blurring of structures and Cartesian grids to translate the geographical space into different systems that use differentiated scientific approaches to ultimately generate individual and collective conclusions about the importance of space in an anthropogenic catastrophe.

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: P. polycephalum, a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process, with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism, nor generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms versus the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism, and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value.

This article relays the findings of a small corpus study of pictograms for public toilets conducted in collaboration with a group of students at international business communications at the university of southern denmark, slagelse. The corpus consists of 97 images of public toilet pictograms collected by the students with mobile phone cameras during september and october 2012. The article presents a tentative approach to corpus-based studies of graphic form and, to that end, proposes a descriptive scheme with two formal systems, shApe and enshApening, which in concert with a fractal-derived principle of self-similarity adequately accounts for graphic form in public toilet signs.

Na presente dissertação propomos uma abordagem filosófico-interdisciplinar para examinar aspectos de relações constitutivas dos sistemas sociais. Especial ênfase é dada à seguinte indagação: Qual é o papel da informação ecológica nos padrões socioculturais constitutivos de redes sociais na contemporaneidade? Tal questionamento é realizado a partir de uma análise dos sistemas sociais inspirada na concepção de sociedade elaborada por Norbert Elias. Concordamos com a concepção elisiana de constituição de teias de interdependência que operam de forma auto-organizada e sistêmica, além da investigação histórico-sociológica que propõe a ideia de processo na organização de padrões socioculturais. Nessa perspectiva, nos inspiramos nas abordagens do Paradigma da Complexidade, Filosofia Ecológica e da Sistêmica Qualitativa da Comunicação para investigar hipóteses epistemológicas sobre a natureza comunicativa das relações sociais. Discutimos o conceito de comunicação, argumentando que a percepção de informação ecológica pode efetivar a comunicação social ambientalmente situada e incorporada. Em consonância com pressupostos da Filosofia Ecológica, caracterizamos informação ecológica como possibilidades de ação, para organismos incorporados e situados em seus nichos, que emergem de relações de mutualidade organismo-ambiente. Discutimos pressupostos da Filosofia Ecológica, analisando os conceitos de reciprocidade, affordance e nicho. Objetivamos também investigar o papel desempenhado pela percepção direta em padrões de conduta observados na sociedade contemporânea – notadamente influenciada pela presença de tecnologias informacionais de comunicação.

This article contemplates symbols and values inscribed on Cairo’s landscape during the 2011 revolution and the period since, focusing on Tahrir Square and the role of the Egyptian flag in street discourses there. I start by briefly pondering how intertwined popular narratives readied the square and flag as emblems of dissent.  Next I examine how these appropriations shaped protests in the square, and how military authorities who retook control in 2013 re-coopted the square and flag, with the reabsorption of each critical to that of the other and executed in the same place: Tahrir.  Pro-military factions have created the pretense that they were for the revolution by altering the square and structures around it. Furthermore, the square has remained open to the public, but ceased to be inviting. This relates to post-revolutionary alterations that psychologically repel entry.  I consider these changes in light of affordance theory, value sensitive design research and especially the defensible space model, arguing that Tahrir Square has been symbolically cordoned and closed.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of possibility, and not merely that of actuality, for an inquiry into the bodily constitution of experience. The paper will study how the possibilities of action that may (or may not) be available to the subject help to shape the meaning attributed to perceived objects and to the situation occupied by the subject within her environment. This view will be supported by reference to empirical evidence provided by recent and current research on the perceptual estimation of distances and the effects brought about by the use of a tool on the organisation of our perceived immediate space.

In this paper I claim that perceptual discriminatory skills rely on a suitable type of environment as an enabling condition for their exercise. This is because of the constitutive connection between environment and perceptual discriminatory skills, inasmuch as such connection is construed from an ecological approach. The exercise of a discriminatory skill yields knowledge of affordances of objects, properties, or events in the surrounding environment. This is practical knowledge in the first-person perspective. An organism learns to perceive an object by becoming sensitized to its affordances. I call this position ecological disjunctivism. A corollary of this position is that a case of perception and its corresponding case of hallucination-which is similar to the former only in some respects-are different in nature. I show then how the distinguishability problem is addressed by ecological disjunctivism.

In the present times of global environmental change, there is growing need for qualitative methods that would describe the meanings and significance of living environments. This paper proposes ecological repertoire analysis as a qualitative observation-based method for the environmental humanities. The method proceeds from theories relevant for ecosemiotics-ecofield analysis (A. Farina), umwelt theory (J. v. Uexküll), and perceptual affordance (J. Gibson)-and takes the event to be a basic unit of study. Interaction events are defined as any observable significant interactions between participants and understood as having symptomatic qualities with regards to the broader ecosystem. The temporal and spatial pattern of the events allows for bringing forth the meaning motifs and general theme of the given environment. By interpreting activities of various animals in the framework of umwelt theory as well as the affordances that they use to relate with the environment, the method integrates the knowledge and competences of non-human species. The method is exemplified by a small study done on the shores of the river Emajõgi, conducted in August 2019 in Tartu, Estonia. Based on this study, ecological repertoire analysis appears to be a useful research method for analyzing conflicts and aggregations of different species in hybrid environments.

In this article, I integrate pragmatic and contemporary literature to advance a valuative understanding of mind. That is, I argue valuations—taken to include emotions, interests and aesthetics—undergird cognition and perception.  In making this case, I focus on James’s view that selective interests bring coherence to thought and experience. I further argue that interests are emotion-like. Though substantiated on conceptual, experiential and neurobiological grounds, this gets next to no attention, even among those who claim pragmatic influences and suggest emotion intertwines with cognition, such as Damasio and Schulkin. Extending this from cognition to perception, I go on to offer a valuative account of the latter that merges James and Dewey’s positions with Gestalt notions and findings from experimental research, along with Gibson’s ideas, which have pragmatic bases. By pushing pragmatism a little beyond what its original authors intended, placing it next to some of its intellectual offspring and highlighting underappreciated aspects, I hope to nudge thinking on mind in new directions, while simultaneously clarifying and rendering a fuller appreciation of classical pragmatism.