4.1 Article

Ecological psychology is radical enough: A reply to radical enactivists

Journal

PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 32, Issue 7, Pages 1001-1023

Publisher

ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2019.1668238

Keywords

Ecological psychology; radical enactivism; information; affordances; meaning; specificity

Funding

  1. Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellowship - Spanish Ministry of Science
  2. Spanish Ministry of Science
  3. BBVA Foundation [FFI2016-80088-P]
  4. Universidad de Granada, Spain

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Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its 'pick up' in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be RECtified so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified.

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