The third sense of environment
PsyArXiv Preprints May 18, 2018 preprint DOI: osf:sxmrz_v1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Affordances Animal-environment system Ecological psychology Enactivism Umwelt |
| Key points | Argues that Gibson's notion of the "animal environment" is ambiguous between a species-typical "habitat" and an individual organism's "Umwelt," and that separating these two senses resolves persistent conceptual tensions in ecological psychology concerning affordances, information, learning, and the social. |
Abstract
At the start of his final book, James Gibson makes a distinction between two different senses in which there is a world outside the animal. First, there is a physical world consisting of matter which is structured prior to any animal's experiencing it. Second, there is the animal environment, where the "environment" is what surrounds a living animal, the two terms making up a complementary and indecomposable animal–environment system. A problem with this is that what Gibson termed the "animal environment" remains ambiguous: in talking of the environment here, are we referring to the typical surroundings that are shared by all members of a species, or are we referring to the specific surroundings of a particular individual organism, where those surroundings are meaningful relative to that organism's personal abilities and history? Call the first sense the “habitat” of a species and the second the "Umwelt" of a given animal. We argue that it is necessary to keep these two senses of environment separate, and that doing so allows us to resolve several long-standing areas of tension in the field, namely over the concepts of: affordances, information, learning, and the social.