Ecological Psychology in Context : James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism

by Heft, Harry

• ISBN13: 9780805856927
• ISBN10: 0805856927
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-25
• Publisher: Lawrence Erlbau

Summary

In this book Harry Heft examines the historical and theoretical foundations of James J. Gibson's ecological psychology in 20th century thought, and in turn, integrates ecological psychology and analyses of sociocultural processes. A thesis of the book is that knowing is rooted in the direct experience of meaningful environmental objects and events present in individual-environment processes and at the level of collective, social settings. Ecological Psychology in Context: *traces the primary lineage of Gibson's ecological approach to William James's philosophy of radical empiricism; *illuminates how the work of James's student and Gibson's mentor, E.B. Holt, served as a catalyst for the development of Gibson's framework and as a bridge to James's work; *reveals how ecological psychology reciprocally can advance Jamesian studies by resolving some of the theoretical difficulties that kept James from fully realizing a realist philosophy; *broadens the scope of Gibson's framework by proposing a synthesis between it and the ecological program of Roger Barker, who discovered complex systems operating at the level of collective, social processes; *demonstrates ways in which the psychological domain can be extended to properties of the environment rendering its features meaningful, publicly accessible, and distributed across person-environment processes; and *shows how Gibson's work points the way toward overcoming the gap between experimental psychology and the humanities. Intended for scholars and students in the areas of ecological and environmental psychology, theoretical and historical psychology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, anthropology, and philosophy.

Author Biography

Harry Heft is Professor of Psychology at Denison University in Granville, Ohio

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xiii
Preface	p. xv
Introduction	p. xxi
Ecological Theory and Philosophical Realism
Prologue: Intimations of an Ecological Psychology	p. 3
William James's Radical Empiricism: A Foundation for Ecological Psychology	p. 13
A Psychology of Adaptation	p. 15
A World of Experience	p. 25
The Historical Context for Radical Empiricism	p. 31
Cognition from a Radical Empiricist Perspective	p. 37
Experience and Activity	p. 52
Edwin B. Holt and Philosophical Behaviorism	p. 59
Edwin B. Holt: A Brief Biography	p. 61
A Universe of Neutral Being	p. 68
The Program of the New Realists	p. 73
Cognition and the Environment	p. 82
Holt's Psychology of Learning and Development	p. 90
A Return to Philosophical Psychology	p. 99
A Forgotten Psychologist of "The Old Days"	p. 100
The Ecological Approach and Radical Empiricism
Prologue: Three Generations of Psychologists	p. 105
Perceiver-Environment Relations	p. 109
Animal-Environment Mutuality and Levels of Analysis	p. 109
Phenomenology and Ecological Psychology	p. 114
Perceiving Affordances	p. 123
The Experience of the Body in Perception	p. 135
Relations and Direct Perception	p. 143
Relations in Pure Experience and in the Ambient Array	p. 144
Direct Perception	p. 154
An Ecological Solution to James's "Two Minds" Problem	p. 162
The Stream of Experience and Possible Knowledge	p. 173
Perceptual Systems and the Detection of Information Over Time	p. 174
An Ecological Approach to the Problem of Possible Knowledge	p. 193
Ecological Psychology and the Psychological Field
Prologue: Field Theory and Collective Social Processes	p. 203
Gestalt Psychology and the Ecological Approach	p. 209
William James, Gestalt Psychology, and the Origins of Ecological Psychology	p. 210
Gibson's Early Excursion into Field Theory	p. 211
The Geographical and the Behavioral Environment	p. 214
Perceived Meaning	p. 219
Thing and Medium	p. 225
Conclusion: Gestalt Psychology and Ecological Psychology	p. 232
Ecobehavioral Science: The Ecological Approach of Roger Barker	p. 235
Levels of Organization Among Natural Processes	p. 237
The Need for an Ecobehavioral Science	p. 245
Behavior Settings: Higher Order Ecological Units	p. 252
The Realization of Ecobehavioral Science	p. 261
Environmental Structure or Scripts?	p. 269
Ecological Psychology and Ecobehavioral Science: Toward a Synthesis	p. 273
Causality and the Ecological Approach	p. 274
Environmental Meaning and Ecological Theory	p. 282
Affordances in Places and Affordances of Places	p. 292
The Foundational Role of Ecological Psychology in Ecobehavioral Science	p. 301
The Structure of the Environment and Dynamic Systems	p. 309
Coda: The Intersecting Career Paths of Gibson, Barker, and Heider	p. 324
Ecological Knowledge and Sociocultural Processes	p. 327
Ecological Knowledge	p. 328
The Ecology of Culture	p. 330
Tools, Artifacts, and Representations	p. 339
Distributed Cognition	p. 352
Summary and Conclusion	p. 369
Conclusion
The Scope of Ecological Psychology	p. 373
The Reciprocal and Nested Focus of Ecological Psychology	p. 373
Radical Empiricism and Ecological Psychology	p. 378
Ecological Psychology as an Essential Part of a Human Science	p. 386
Ecological Psychology and Its Prospects	p. 394
References	p. 397
Author Index	p. 417
Subject Index	p. 423
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