Chemero (2009) Chapter 7: Affordances, etc (Pt 1)

If you want perception to be direct (no 'mental gymnastics') you must identify where the content of perceptual experience comes from; when I view a chair, for example, I don't see a meaningless or random collection of surfaces or colours, I see an object that I can interact with in some ways and not others. For traditional, indirect theories of perception, this meaning is constructed internally: mental representations perform transformations (perhaps computational ones) on sensory input to infer what the input means. A theory of direct perception requires that meaning is not added to the signal; this 'enrichment' is not permitted. To solve this problem, Gibson proposed that the world, for a perceiving-acting organism, is not comprised of meaningless bits of physics and chemistry. Instead, he proposed that the world presents itself to this organism in terms of affordances, which are intrinsically meaningful for the organism and are about the possibility of behaviour.

So a theory of direct perception requires an ontology, a theory about the make-up of the world  that means it is intrinsically meaningful. Chemero wants RECS to include direct perception, therefore he needs such an ontology. He is happy with affordances; he is not, however, satisfied with the Turvey-Shaw-Mace approach which defines affordances as dispositions. This chapter will defend an extended version of his theory of affordances as relations: Affordances 2.0.

Affordances have cropped up here, er, a couple of times already - namely here, here, here, and most recently and enthusiastically here, as well as some empirical discussions here and here. The idea that affordances, not physics, is the correct ontology for a theory of direct perception also came up here. To jump ahead, I disagree with Chemero about affordances. I don't think the disposition account is flawed in the way he thinks, and I don't think relations solve the problem anyway. While I obviously agree that an affordance-based ontology is the way to go, I am so far satisfied that the dispositional account is the best current analysis, and I think that trying to make affordances relational is to confuse the world with information about the world.

I'm going to take this chapter in two parts, because this post got long; affordances are complicated things. After this chapter, I think a pause for station identification may also be in order, just to lay a few things out in response to Chapters 6 and 7, the real meat of the book. But first, Affordances 1.0 vs Affordances 1.1.

Chemero (2009) Chapter 6: Information and Direct Perception

In the previous chapter, Chemero laid out his first idea as to how a radical embodied cognitive science could be a science; he suggested taking a 'dynamical stance' in which researchers use simple dynamical systems models such as the HKB to drive empirical work. In this chapter, he moves towards his more recent suggestion, namely using Gibson's ecological psychology as a theoretical basis from which to make predictions and run experiments. This is a much more robust idea; sciences need theories or else they wander from phenomenon to phenomenon, which I believe to be a real issue in modern psychology and cognitive science.

Chemero has his own flavour of ecological psychology, however. He believes it stays true to Gibson's essential framework but expands it to cope with new and important issues. The two pillars of ecological psychology, information and affordances, remain. Chapter 6 is Chemero's expanded notion of information, while Chapter 7 is his updated theory of affordances as relations (which I've covered briefly before).

Chemero (2009), Chapter 5: Guides to Discovery

The dynamical stance laid out by Chemero in the previous chapter has a potential flaw (besides being a bit weak-ass) - it's not clear how it can serve as a guide to discovery. How do you do productive science taking this approach? Chemero is going to make two suggestions, only one of which I think works: first, he's going to suggest dynamical models such as the Haken-Kelso-Bunz (HKB) model can serve to stimulate empirical work even when they are entirely phenomenological. This approach is, I think, entirely incorrect, and this chapter is full of serious problems (only some of which are unique to Chemero). Second, he's going to suggest that Gibsonian ecological psychology can actually solve the problem much more robustly anyway, by serving as an underlying theory of behaviour. This will work better, and I would advocate Bingham's model of coordination as an exemplar of this, more promising route.

But first, the HKB model as guide to discovery (this chapter is largely the material from Chemero, 2000; I intend to turn this post into a paper to rebut that paper and point to the Bingham model as an alternative, so comments are especially welcome on this one). Time to get a little critical, I'm afraid.

Chemero (2009), Chapter 4: The Dynamical Stance

The problem with the theory of representation Chemero settles on in the previous chapter, as we shall see, is that it makes representation unavoidable. If there are representations, then RECS fails to get off the ground (remember, the radical bit is anti-representationalism). In this chapter, Chemero identifies a path past this problem (the 'dynamical stance'), explains why it works, but then concludes with a new problem, that of how to guide future discovery.

Chemero (2009), Chapter 3: Theories of Representation

The radical part of 'radical embodied cognitive science' is anti-representationalism. Simply put, the claim is that the brain does not internally represent states of the world in any way, nor are these the basis for our experience. It's radical because to a typical cognitive scientist, the mere suggestion is ludicrous: like suggesting you do biology without genes or particle physics without Large Hadron Colliders. But this indignation is hiding a dirty little secret: mental representations are generally just assumed to exist, because of assumptions about the poverty of stimulus we supposedly face. They are theoretical entities designed to solve a problem which, frankly, might not exist. There has been a lot of theoretical work on what it means to be a representation, but most of this has occurred in philosophy and most modern experimental cognitive psychologists don't ever engage with the issue. Sabrina has talked about this a bit already here and here and here and it's likely to keep cropping up.

Chemero's third chapter lays out some basics about what a theory of representation has to look like. If you're going to be anti-representational you need something to be against that isn't a straw man. This is unfortunately difficult because the concept of representation is a moving target: if I had a dollar for every conversation I've had that included the phrase 'Oh, that's not what I mean by representation' (even when it really is), I wouldn't need to submit the grant I should be working on just now. This chapter is therefore going to look for a 'minimal case' of representation that doesn't bug too many people but that isn't too easy a target.

Strap in, this chapter's busy.