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 briefly summarises the key points from Gibson (1979); perception is direct (no inference), perception is for action, perception is therefore of affordances. These have simple implications for the information for perception: it must be ubiquitous, it must be unambiguous, and it must be about affordances. How this might be possible was most rigorously laid out by Michael Turvey, Robert Shaw and William Mace, most notably in the 'ecological laws' paper in response to Foder & Pylyshyn (1981). Information can come to specify properties in the environment by virtue of the local, ecological laws that govern the structuring of energy (say, light) into patterns which the organism can detect.
Chemero worries that the Turvey-Shaw-Mace (TSM) reliance on natural law is too restrictive and means that there won't be enough information available for perception. He's concerned that there are things we need to be able to perceive and understand (and that we clearly do perceive and understand) that are not underpinned by any natural law. If this is the case, then either a) we do not perceive these directly, or b) there is information available which we use that is not covered by the 'laws' account. Only (b) is an option for RECS.
Problem 1: On Individuals
Within their scope, ecological laws provide direct and correct information about properties of the world. These properties will be shared by numerous objects: Chemero gives the example of the optical pattern O which specifies a particular type of tree, the silver maple, for a squirrel. He then notes that of the maples in the squirrel's environment, some will have particular relevance: that one is where the squirrel's nest is, for instance. Chemero claims that if information requires an ecological law, there is no information for these trees as individuals.
An Initial Rebuttal
This point seems trivial to dismiss, which makes me worry about the rebuttal. Information gains its structure from the underlying dynamical structure of an object or event. For instance, there is a class of events, 'fly balls', which occur in baseball and are an example of a projectile motion dynamic. This physical category then has instances; fly balls that can be caught vs. fly balls that are heading out of the field for a home run, for instance. The dynamics are the same, and the information is therefore of the same type, but each is distinguished by different parameters (different velocity, perhaps, or a different initial angle of ascent). Each instance of the event type is different, the exact value of the information variable is different, and to the extent a perceiver can perceive the difference, behaviour can be different (a skilled fielder will not bother chasing a home run, for example). In the literature, this is referred to as the kinematic specification of dynamics, and like many good things comes from Sverker Runeson (e.g. Runeson & Frykholm, 1983). Another good although dense and technical exposition is Bingham's chapter in the book 'Mind as Motion' (Bingham, 1995). Some of these issues cropped up in the comments here, too.
There seems, therefore, to be information about individual instances of types which is still grounded in natural law. Even more usefully, a given object or event will produce more than one information variable. Each individual can be identified as a unique set of information with specific values; and if they cannot be identified as such, it's because the differences aren't perceptible. This process, of increasing differentiation of particulars from the flux of experience, is precisely what the Gibsons suggested perceptual learning was doing.
Problem 2: On Social & Linguistic Information
Turvey-Shaw-Mace rely on natural law for a very good reason: direct perception requires that there is a non-accidental relationship between the properties of the world and the information it produces. Conventions aren't sufficient, because they can be violated. Chemero's second concern is with events who carry meaning by virtue of convention, e.g. language. While the perception of the spoken word is presumably governed by lawful relations, the meaning of that word is merely conventional. For TSM, you would therefore have information about which word had been spoken, but no information about what that word meant.
An Initial Note on Language
I actually think this is a fair description of the facts. I have yet to hear anything resembling a plausible ecological theory of language (speech perception and production, yes; language and the meaning of words, no). It does indeed seem to be the case that language is a system where the acts of speaking and listening can occur via Gibsonian information, but where the content is conventionally determined. I think language is a real challenge to ecological psychology that has yet to be met. I actually think Chemero's suggestion (situation semantics - see below) is not a crazy idea for this, although it has it's problems as well.
Chemero will take this challenge (of dealing non-representationally with conventional content) and use it to motivate a broader conception of information which spans both natural law and conventional cases. The motive is good: he wants a notion of information that allows direct perception of all these things, so that a RECS grounded in ecological psychology can remain non-representational at all levels. I remain unconvinced that the solution works in the way Chemero wants, however.
Chemero will take this challenge (of dealing non-representationally with conventional content) and use it to motivate a broader conception of information which spans both natural law and conventional cases. The motive is good: he wants a notion of information that allows direct perception of all these things, so that a RECS grounded in ecological psychology can remain non-representational at all levels. I remain unconvinced that the solution works in the way Chemero wants, however.
Barwise, Perry and situation semantics
Chemero suggests that the situation semantics of Barwise & Perry is both broad enough and Gibsonian enough to do the trick (these authors were, in fact, directly influenced by Gibson's work). I don't know a great deal about this work; what follows is derived from Chemero (p.116-122). I do know Barwise's name from my time at IU where he was universally respected and considered a very clever man. Perry also has a good reputation, as I understand it; so the source is good.
Barwise and Perry proposed that there is information for organisms within situations; a given situation will be an instance (token) of a type of situation, and situations can be connected by constraints. If two types of situation, S1 and S2, are connected via a constraint, then a token s1 is informative about a token s2 by virtue of that constraint. There are two features of this setup:
Why make this move? Chemero feels that there are things which we know that aren't underpinned by laws. His example is that the presence of a beer can is informative about the presence of beer, even though there is no lawful connection between the can and it's contents - through error or foul play the can may merely contain water, but this is sufficiently unlikely that it's a safe bet there's beer inside. It seems to be the case that the presence of the beer can is, in fact, informative about the (likely) presence of beer. If information requires laws this process must be indirect, which is of no use to RECS. If information merely requires a constraint, then the presence of a beer can is directly perceivable information about the presence of beer.
Chemero suggests that the situation semantics of Barwise & Perry is both broad enough and Gibsonian enough to do the trick (these authors were, in fact, directly influenced by Gibson's work). I don't know a great deal about this work; what follows is derived from Chemero (p.116-122). I do know Barwise's name from my time at IU where he was universally respected and considered a very clever man. Perry also has a good reputation, as I understand it; so the source is good.
Barwise and Perry proposed that there is information for organisms within situations; a given situation will be an instance (token) of a type of situation, and situations can be connected by constraints. If two types of situation, S1 and S2, are connected via a constraint, then a token s1 is informative about a token s2 by virtue of that constraint. There are two features of this setup:
- An organism has access to the information if it has access to one of the situations and the constraint.
- The constraint can be a law (as before) or a custom or convention. Smoke can convey information about fire (via a law) or about a message (via the conventions of smoke signals).
Why make this move? Chemero feels that there are things which we know that aren't underpinned by laws. His example is that the presence of a beer can is informative about the presence of beer, even though there is no lawful connection between the can and it's contents - through error or foul play the can may merely contain water, but this is sufficiently unlikely that it's a safe bet there's beer inside. It seems to be the case that the presence of the beer can is, in fact, informative about the (likely) presence of beer. If information requires laws this process must be indirect, which is of no use to RECS. If information merely requires a constraint, then the presence of a beer can is directly perceivable information about the presence of beer.
Consequences of expanding beyond laws
As I said above, the reason TSRM framed everything in terms of laws is that they wanted a way in which the structuring of light by affordances was non-accidental; this allows perception to be direct, because no inference is required to cope with the possibility of mere correlation. Specifically, this directness is underpinned by a specific consequence of lawfulness, the 'symmetry principle' (Shaw & McIntyre, 1974):
Chemero correctly notes that the major objection to his account of information from ecological psychologists is losing this symmetry. Situation semantics is quite specifically not symmetrical: "information flows about tokens in virtue of constraints among types" (p. 122) and so the link from perceiver to the world (via tokens of the situation types) is not equivalent to to the link between the world and the perceiver (situation types; see the diagram on p. 121).
Ecological information processing
Chemero concludes the chapter with a discussion of two examples of how organisms use action to 'process' information (i.e. make it available for direct perception, etc). Weirdly, neither of these entail his situation semantics version; both are law-based. What they have in common is reliance on higher-order variables.
The first example is the variable tau (τ) which David Lee proposed could serve to specify 'time-to-contact' and thus allow the direct control of numerous interception tasks. τ is a higher order variable (mathematically defined as the ratio of image size and image expansion rate), but this ratio does not need to be computed by the visual system because it actually describes a structure in optic flow that occurs when a surface is approaching a point of contact at a fixed velocity. Detecting that structure is to directly perceive the time-to-contact.
τ has a mixed history; Lee's original studies with gannets, etc are a little suspect, τ itself only specifies time-to-contact over an ecologically uninteresting scope (motion along the line of sight with constant velocity), and there is a long modern literature on interceptive action that suggests τ is not actually used anyway (James Tresilian from the University of Warwick has spent a lot of time on this problem; see Tresilian (1999) for an excellent review). This is an interesting topic in and of itself (including the historical footnote that Lee found τ in Fred Hoyle's book The Black Cloud but never tells anyone this), but for now let me just say that a) τ is indeed a good simple example of ecological information processing (visual information for time-to-contact does require action to become available) but that b) it turns out not to be an actual thing that gets used, so while it can serve as a useful, simple example, it's not anything I'd want to rely on too heavily.
The second example is analogical reasoning (making inferences about one situation on the basis of your knowledge of a similar situation). This is part of Chemero's offence, where he takes not only the straight-forward perception/action case (τ) but also a 'representation-hungry' task, and shows how it can be understood using ecological/radical methods. He describes (p. 129) experiments by Wasserman and colleagues that show pigeons and baboons can effectively do analogical reasoning by directly perceiving the higher order variable entropy. This variable is effectively a measure of disorder, and ranges from 0 (every element in an array is identical) to 'at least 1 element is different' and up to 'every element is different'. The exact values depend on the size of the array. Wasserman showed a pattern of behaviour in their animals that was best explained by the perception of entropy, and Chemero has produced a two-layer neural network that replicates this qualitative pattern. The lack of hidden layers in the neural network is a proof of concept that entropy can be discriminated without an intervening representational layer (i.e. directly). It's not clear what the information for entropy is, but this is certainly an interesting first cut at the problem and these assaults on 'representation-hungry' problems is a feature I admire of Chemero's approach.
Some thoughts
There are interesting elements in this chapter. The summary of the TSM formalism of Gibson's system is an excellent and readable resource that captures all the key points. Given how opaque Turvey can get when left to his own devices, this is no small thing. The discussion of situation semantics is also clear, and I assume a fair description, and the final section on what information processing might look like to an ecological psychologist is great (although τ is not as strong an example as he makes out, and the entropy story, while interesting, is in it's infancy).
However, Chemero's proposal for a theory of ecological information which includes meaning from conventions (via constraints) falls flat for me - I simply don't think the motivations for it work. I don't think his concerns about perceiving individuals matter, and it's not clear to me why I need to directly perceive beer presence from beer can presence. Squirrels famously don't remember where they bury nuts; they just look in places where, if they were a squirrel, they would have buried nuts. and use smell to hone in. I think beer-presence might not be what we perceive; perhaps the opportunity for beer hunting behaviour? I don't want to get too caught up on the specific example, but Chemero has not made it clear here what we do, in fact, know about beer-presence from beer-can presence, and these are, as ever, empirical questions.
I think the loss of the symmetry principle is a disaster for a theory of direct perception, which is why TSM make it such a central feature of the laws account. Directness is entirely underwritten by symmetry, and Chemero is simply too glib in his dismissal of this as a problem. Effectively, he defines 'direct perception' as 'not involving representation', which permits him to invoke the explicitly non-representational situation semantics of Barwise & Perry; but convention simply isn't enough to underwrite directness. I also don't share Chemero's pessimism about law based accounts: I think lawful information is going to be entirely ubiquitous enough.
Worse, though, I feel like there's another real problem for a theory of direct perception lurking in situation semantics. Chemero notes that situation semantics requires that the organism have access to the situation and the constraint in order to have any information: the constraint is what does the work (by acting between types of situations), but all you have access to are tokens of situations. In the laws scheme, the law does it's work 'behind the scenes' by restricting the set of possible situations. You don't have separate access to the law, but this is fine because you don't need it. The operation of the law makes the information the kind of thing that can be informative (see the first half of the symmetry principle). It's not clear how you can have 'access' to the constraint without it being in the form of supplementary knowledge, because constraints are things which don't necessarily structure, say, light. Perhaps, like laws, mere constraints can 'work behind the scenes' to simply make it the case that the connection exists - but with no symmetry principle and no lawful necessity it is not clear that this will work well enough. While there may be ways of implementing this that aren't representational, it a) bangs the door wide open to a representational account and b) that implementation needs to be more carefully explicated than it is here. Gibson and TSM went to great lengths to discuss how properties of the world came to be specified by a process of projection into energy arrays; there is, as yet, no clear account for how this works for constraints.
Conclusion
In effect, I don't see that there is any need to give up on laws just yet. Turvey famously tells researchers that if your experiments haven't revealed the lawful relation yet, it's because you haven't looked hard enough so don't stop now. I tend to think this is a healthy attitude, and I don't see yet any need to abandon ship for the problematic land of situation semantics.
Next time
Next stop is Affordances, 2.0. As I've discussed before, Chemero has his own account of affordances as relations which he expands and develops in the next chapter.I think I'm going to break that chapter up, because the post I've prepared on Affordances 1.0 and 1.1 is already long.
As I said above, the reason TSRM framed everything in terms of laws is that they wanted a way in which the structuring of light by affordances was non-accidental; this allows perception to be direct, because no inference is required to cope with the possibility of mere correlation. Specifically, this directness is underpinned by a specific consequence of lawfulness, the 'symmetry principle' (Shaw & McIntyre, 1974):
We can represent the symmetry principle as follows. Let E = ‘‘The environment is the way it is,’’ I = ‘‘The information is the way it is,’’ and P = ‘‘Perception is the way it is.’’ Also, let ‘‘>’’ stand for the logical relation of adjunction, a nontransitive conjunction that we can read as ‘‘specifies.’’ Then, the symmetry principle isThis principle is critical, because it describes the route that information can take so as to specify the world in information, and it also describes how picking up the information takes an organism all the way back to the world. Detecting information created via the first part is equivalent to detecting the world, because of the symmetry between the first and second parts; no inference required.
[(E > I) & (I > P)] & [(P > I) & (I > E)].
In English, this says: ‘‘That the environment is the way it is specifies that information is the way it is and that information is the way it is specifies that perception is the way it is, and that perception is the way it is specifies that the information is the way it is and that information is the way it is specifies that the environment is the way it is.’’ We can simplify this to say that the environment specifies the information, which specifies perception, and perception specifies the information, which specifies the environment. This principle is symmetrical in that the environment, information, and perception determine one another. This, on the Turvey-Shaw-Mace view, is what it is for perception to be direct.
Chemero, 2009, p. 111
Chemero correctly notes that the major objection to his account of information from ecological psychologists is losing this symmetry. Situation semantics is quite specifically not symmetrical: "information flows about tokens in virtue of constraints among types" (p. 122) and so the link from perceiver to the world (via tokens of the situation types) is not equivalent to to the link between the world and the perceiver (situation types; see the diagram on p. 121).
Ecological information processing
Chemero concludes the chapter with a discussion of two examples of how organisms use action to 'process' information (i.e. make it available for direct perception, etc). Weirdly, neither of these entail his situation semantics version; both are law-based. What they have in common is reliance on higher-order variables.
The first example is the variable tau (τ) which David Lee proposed could serve to specify 'time-to-contact' and thus allow the direct control of numerous interception tasks. τ is a higher order variable (mathematically defined as the ratio of image size and image expansion rate), but this ratio does not need to be computed by the visual system because it actually describes a structure in optic flow that occurs when a surface is approaching a point of contact at a fixed velocity. Detecting that structure is to directly perceive the time-to-contact.
τ has a mixed history; Lee's original studies with gannets, etc are a little suspect, τ itself only specifies time-to-contact over an ecologically uninteresting scope (motion along the line of sight with constant velocity), and there is a long modern literature on interceptive action that suggests τ is not actually used anyway (James Tresilian from the University of Warwick has spent a lot of time on this problem; see Tresilian (1999) for an excellent review). This is an interesting topic in and of itself (including the historical footnote that Lee found τ in Fred Hoyle's book The Black Cloud but never tells anyone this), but for now let me just say that a) τ is indeed a good simple example of ecological information processing (visual information for time-to-contact does require action to become available) but that b) it turns out not to be an actual thing that gets used, so while it can serve as a useful, simple example, it's not anything I'd want to rely on too heavily.
The second example is analogical reasoning (making inferences about one situation on the basis of your knowledge of a similar situation). This is part of Chemero's offence, where he takes not only the straight-forward perception/action case (τ) but also a 'representation-hungry' task, and shows how it can be understood using ecological/radical methods. He describes (p. 129) experiments by Wasserman and colleagues that show pigeons and baboons can effectively do analogical reasoning by directly perceiving the higher order variable entropy. This variable is effectively a measure of disorder, and ranges from 0 (every element in an array is identical) to 'at least 1 element is different' and up to 'every element is different'. The exact values depend on the size of the array. Wasserman showed a pattern of behaviour in their animals that was best explained by the perception of entropy, and Chemero has produced a two-layer neural network that replicates this qualitative pattern. The lack of hidden layers in the neural network is a proof of concept that entropy can be discriminated without an intervening representational layer (i.e. directly). It's not clear what the information for entropy is, but this is certainly an interesting first cut at the problem and these assaults on 'representation-hungry' problems is a feature I admire of Chemero's approach.
Some thoughts
There are interesting elements in this chapter. The summary of the TSM formalism of Gibson's system is an excellent and readable resource that captures all the key points. Given how opaque Turvey can get when left to his own devices, this is no small thing. The discussion of situation semantics is also clear, and I assume a fair description, and the final section on what information processing might look like to an ecological psychologist is great (although τ is not as strong an example as he makes out, and the entropy story, while interesting, is in it's infancy).
However, Chemero's proposal for a theory of ecological information which includes meaning from conventions (via constraints) falls flat for me - I simply don't think the motivations for it work. I don't think his concerns about perceiving individuals matter, and it's not clear to me why I need to directly perceive beer presence from beer can presence. Squirrels famously don't remember where they bury nuts; they just look in places where, if they were a squirrel, they would have buried nuts. and use smell to hone in. I think beer-presence might not be what we perceive; perhaps the opportunity for beer hunting behaviour? I don't want to get too caught up on the specific example, but Chemero has not made it clear here what we do, in fact, know about beer-presence from beer-can presence, and these are, as ever, empirical questions.
I think the loss of the symmetry principle is a disaster for a theory of direct perception, which is why TSM make it such a central feature of the laws account. Directness is entirely underwritten by symmetry, and Chemero is simply too glib in his dismissal of this as a problem. Effectively, he defines 'direct perception' as 'not involving representation', which permits him to invoke the explicitly non-representational situation semantics of Barwise & Perry; but convention simply isn't enough to underwrite directness. I also don't share Chemero's pessimism about law based accounts: I think lawful information is going to be entirely ubiquitous enough.
Worse, though, I feel like there's another real problem for a theory of direct perception lurking in situation semantics. Chemero notes that situation semantics requires that the organism have access to the situation and the constraint in order to have any information: the constraint is what does the work (by acting between types of situations), but all you have access to are tokens of situations. In the laws scheme, the law does it's work 'behind the scenes' by restricting the set of possible situations. You don't have separate access to the law, but this is fine because you don't need it. The operation of the law makes the information the kind of thing that can be informative (see the first half of the symmetry principle). It's not clear how you can have 'access' to the constraint without it being in the form of supplementary knowledge, because constraints are things which don't necessarily structure, say, light. Perhaps, like laws, mere constraints can 'work behind the scenes' to simply make it the case that the connection exists - but with no symmetry principle and no lawful necessity it is not clear that this will work well enough. While there may be ways of implementing this that aren't representational, it a) bangs the door wide open to a representational account and b) that implementation needs to be more carefully explicated than it is here. Gibson and TSM went to great lengths to discuss how properties of the world came to be specified by a process of projection into energy arrays; there is, as yet, no clear account for how this works for constraints.
Conclusion
In effect, I don't see that there is any need to give up on laws just yet. Turvey famously tells researchers that if your experiments haven't revealed the lawful relation yet, it's because you haven't looked hard enough so don't stop now. I tend to think this is a healthy attitude, and I don't see yet any need to abandon ship for the problematic land of situation semantics.
Next time
Next stop is Affordances, 2.0. As I've discussed before, Chemero has his own account of affordances as relations which he expands and develops in the next chapter.I think I'm going to break that chapter up, because the post I've prepared on Affordances 1.0 and 1.1 is already long.
References
Bingham, G.P. (1995). Dynamics and the problem of visual event recognition.
In Port, R. & T. van Gelder (eds.), Mind as Motion: Dynamics, Behavior and Cognition,
(pp403-448). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Download
Fodor, J., & Pylyshyn, Z. W (1981). How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections on Gibson's “ecological approach” Cognition, 9 (2), 139-196. DOI
Runeson, S., & Frykholm, G. (1983). Kinematic specification of dynamics as an informational basis for person-and-action perception: Expectation, gender recognition, and deceptive intention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 112(4), 585-615. DOI
Shaw, R., & M. McIntyre (1974). Algoristic foundations to cognitive psychology. In Cognition and Symbolic Processes, ed. W. Weimer and D. Palermo. Hillsdale, N.J.:Erlbaum.
Posts
Wow, lots of stuff covered here… and it is not even the whole chapter! We share suspicion of what Chemero is trying to do in this chapter, but for different reasons. Let me lay out my concerns with both of your approaches.
ReplyDelete1) Your example seems to miss the point about the (proposed) problem with “individuals.” -- In many situations, opportunities seem to be “afforded” (now in scare quotes) based on the particular identity of an object, rather than general objects properties: a scuffed baseball caught at a memorable game “affords” displaying in public, while a scuffed baseball found in my yard “affords” returning to my neighbor. This is difficult for ecological psychologists to talk about, and it is impossible to talk about if we are restricted to “natural laws” in any proper sense. I suspect that “identity” problems are a subset of the problems of social convention, making Chemero’s first and second problems intertwined. I also suspect, quite presumptuously, that no satisfactory solution to this problem is possible within the ecological system as currently conceived, by TSRM or Chemero (i.e., you can do it, but it will leave the listener unsatisfied). (Semi-random note: Francois Tonneau will offer a solution to similar problems in behavior analysis in my upcoming edited volume on Holt.)
2) Regarding language perception: Some early comparative / ecological psychologists developed approaches to animal communication compatible with the ecologically inspired perspective (I am thinking particularly of Don Owings and Nicholas Thompson). I don’t understand why their work is not part of the discussion about how eco-psych should handle language. The insights from the behaviorists’ work on “verbal behavior” are also routinely ignored or dismissed. If language is not placed on a continuum with other behavior (I suspect) there will be no satisfactory solution.
3) You can’t have direct perception of “all things.” That is another silly overreach that some ecological psychologists try for (I can’t tell how seriously you or Chemero intend it). The best you can do is have direct perception of all things not obviously and literally indirect. When I see a picture as my daughter, any experience of my daughter is mediated by a re-presentation (a physical one, not a mental one). The word “mental representation” came into psychology using that metaphor, and while we all agree in rejecting the metaphor, it is nonsensical to reject the original meaning. If we allow that I “perceive” my daughter in the photo, it is obviously and literally indirect perception. The only way out of this is to say that such an experience is not “perceptual,” in which case you win by definition, but then we must introduce into our system at least one variety of non-perceptual experience.
4) Chemero and I are in almost complete agreement about the best way to think about affordances, but I wish he had dug up the deeper problem with the TSRM model: To the extent that it is true, it is true by definition, and hence uninteresting (except perhaps as a demonstration that you can defend eco-psych against certain types of challenges by marshaling certain types of formalisms). The TSRM model abuses the notion of affordances and the notion of ability to the point where we cannot interestingly talk about them, or their relationship. For example, if you use “effectivity-talk,” then you necessarily lump motivation, knowledge, and physical capability together under a single term: A satiated organism “lacks the effectivity” necessary to take advantage of easily accessible food in exactly the same sense that an untrained mechanic “lacks the effectivity” necessary to disassemble an engine and exactly as a short-necked giraffe “lacks the effectivity” to take advantage of leaves on high-branches. (Charles, frustratingly unpublished manuscript)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSee my note on the front page. Blogspot has a bug just now; make sure you are signed in before posting, and copy your comment in case you need to try twice. Sorry, no idea what the issue is :(
ReplyDeleteWhoa, I had planned to reply just to Andrew, when I saw this long post by Eric. I will have to deal with that separately. (Maybe in person, later this week…)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Andrew has set out the typical ecological type objections to what I (and Rob Withagen) have to say about information. Andrew, at least, doesn’t think that I’m aiming to ruin the enterprise.
Re, information about individuals. The issue is that laws don’t apply to individual as individuals. So there are no laws that range over Andrew Wilson, but there are circumstances in which we want to perceive Andrew as Andrew. But if information requires laws, then information can’t be about Andrew. I really do think this is a serious problem.
Re opening the door to indirect perception. I’m assuming that we agree that animals do not perceive everything that is lawfully specified in the ambient array. That is, there are laws relating the light that arrives at my eyes to things that I see and things that I do not see. I bring this up to point out that being specified in the light that strikes my eyes is not sufficient for being perceived by me. How, then, do we say which things I perceive? The typical answer (and the correct one, I think) is that over time I become attuned to the patterns in the array that carry information about things that I care about. This attunement, which Gibson called “the education of attention”, can occur equally well for patterns that carry information by law and patterns that carry information by other kinds of constraint (like conventions). So, Andrew’s concern that the organism is going to “need access to the situation and the constraint”, to the extent it should be seen a causing problems at all, also causes problems for law-based accounts of information. Constraints do their work “behind the scenes” just as laws do. Animals have to learn that *this* pattern in the array gets them lunch; they don’t have to know which law or convention makes it the case that the pattern is connected to the lunch. The point is that the work done by constrains is exactly the same as that done by laws in Turvey et al. It seems to me that, unless the door is open to representations in the law account, it is not open to them on the constraints account.
Sorry to be slow replying; busy busy at the moment.
ReplyDeleteTony:
The issue is that laws don’t apply to individual as individuals. So there are no laws that range over Andrew Wilson, but there are circumstances in which we want to perceive Andrew as Andrew. But if information requires laws, then information can’t be about Andrew. I really do think this is a serious problem.
I understand the issue, I just don't think it's a real problem. While there are no laws about me, there are laws within who's scope I fall; information I generate lawfully leads to particular patterns in the optic array. Like the fly ball example, I am producing an instance of a type of information, and a suitably interested person can learn that instance. Think about point light walkers, and biological motion displays in general. It's also an empirical question: on what basis do we perceive individuals? You've made an in-principle argument against laws, I've made one in favour, but Gibson's right as usual, we need to run the studies. Maybe Troje has already; I should look into that.
The confusion lies, I think, in the way you start to talk about information. As this chapter progresses, information comes to mean 'is informative about', in a fairly abstract kind of way (eg the presence of the beer can is informative' about the presence of beer). The laws account, however, takes information to be the projection into, say, light of a property of the world; that projection can then specify via the symmetry principle.
The problem seems to be this: you don't have a mechanism like this by which your information can be informative. In fact, you've explicitly broken the only available mechanism (the symmetry principle) and you haven't replaced it with anything. You note the situations and the constraint, but you have no story as to how these facts of the world project into an energy array such that if an organism detects the projection it perceives the world.
I noted above that you end up defining direct perception as 'not involving representation'. But this isn't enough - you haven't done any work equivalent to Gibson's ecological optics to show how your notion of information ends up actually available to an organism, and that's what's required in order to claim that perception can be direct. (Eric, re your point 3: I don't think either of us are claiming you can have direct perception of everything, but RECS needs all our access to whatever it is we do have access to to be direct.)
More soon...
a scuffed baseball caught at a memorable game “affords” displaying in public, while a scuffed baseball found in my yard “affords” returning to my neighbor. This is difficult for ecological psychologists to talk about, and it is impossible to talk about if we are restricted to “natural laws” in any proper sense.
ReplyDeleteThe whole point of the laws paper was to rule out precisely these kinds of things. The Fodor & Pylyshyn argument (what I call 'the dick move by the Establishment') was to say all you need for specification is to perceive the one property all objects have that is unique to them, namely being that object. The laws reply was that this is not the kind of property that can structure light. 'Shoeness' doesn't create information.
So I think that ruling some of these out is exactly what a good theory has to do. I don't actually think those are good examples of affordances, and I think the hint from the laws account is that we have good reason not to think these are, in fact, the kinds of things that project information in and of themselves.
I also still think that an individual can be readily identified as an instance of a type of information variable, or the intersection of multiple sources of information (a higher order variable made of other, higher order variables). As usual I'm thinking about point light walkers, etc.
Constraints do their work “behind the scenes” just as laws do.
ReplyDeleteWell first, on pg 117 you say "First, the constraint between the situation types is doing all the work. That is, the information that exists in the environment exists because of the constraint, and for some animal to use the information the animal must be aware of the constraint." I know you don't mean 'aware' in any problematic way; but I read this to mean that situation semantics only works with separate access to the constraint. If that's not the case, what is this section saying?
Animals have to learn that *this* pattern in the array gets them lunch; they don’t have to know which law or convention makes it the case that the pattern is connected to the lunch. The point is that the work done by constrains is exactly the same as that done by laws in Turvey et al.
I'm actually a little on board with this basic idea. Sabrina and I have been banging it around for a while, since I started being grumpy about Withagen's stuff on non-specifying variable use which I haven't had a chance to read properly.
First, I think that an organism cannot tell the difference between a pattern generated via a law and via a 100% correlation. Second, I'm also on board with taking a developmental view of these: the education of attention takes time and experience, and if your range of experiences only covers the range where a correlation/constraint is good enough to be at 100%, then of course you could end up learning a variable that isn't law based. I also think these isn't a terribly straw man situation, it's the kind of thing that I think could readily happen.
That said: I'm inclined to think that typically, experience breaks merely convention-based relationships fairly easily (think of Runeson's analysis of the Ames Room, and the issue of how hard it is to reliably build a view that isn't robustly related to the thing in the world). I also predict (and plan to test someday, if I can get the task sorted out) that if you reveal the break to someone currently using a non-specifying variable, and there's a specifying variable available, they will rapidly shift. Put those together, and I think that for tasks like locomotion, prehension, posture, etc, we will have already been driven to use genuinely specifying variables.
I need to work more on this, and read the non-specifying variable literature in more detail. But it's on my list.
Re individuals:
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. The example was intentionally awkward, in exactly the way you identified. Chemero hopes we will one day have a theory that can cover such instances as well. It is not accidental that TSM avoids them.
The problem is that TSM can't have it both ways! It is a fact of the world that we treat individual instances of things differently. No theory should ever "rule out" things that obviously happen. Rather, a good theory sets out a domain of inquiry and general method for tackling it. I assume that you are doing this tacitly, and assume that such a reasonable stance is obvious to all involved. But TSM (in my personal experience, especially "T") are NOT being reasonable about this.
They do not say, "Look, we are only interested in certain aspects of perception and action, and in those aspects we think Natural Laws will do the trick" Instead, they want their formulas to extend to the far reaches of Psychology's domain. I think they have to choose. Either they want to make a theory general enough to cover all of psychology, or they want a theory of perception-action linkages, narrowly construed. Both are perfectly good things, they are just different things.
The problem is that TSM can't have it both ways! It is a fact of the world that we treat individual instances of things differently.
ReplyDeleteYes. But it is, as ever, an empirical question precisely how we come to do this. I've suggested a way to get this from a laws story and I have yet to hear a viable objection to it.
Turvey, for all that he can be annoying, is generally annoying for quite good reasons. The beauty of the laws account is that when taken seriously, it stamps down hard on the typical psychology approach to problems. I've heard a lot of talk about how we clearly interact with individuals as individuals, but precisely no evidence that 'as individuals' is actually the mechanism. This is the psychologist's fallacy: assuming the words we used to describe what's up also describe the mechanism. A good theory (as the laws account is) forces you to rule things out and try to find an explanation within your theory. That then works, or it doesn't, and as I say, so far I have heard nothing at all that makes me think it's time to jump ship.
Point taken.... the psychologist's fallacy is a dangerous thing.... and I have not answered your request.
ReplyDeleteLet me try to work my example through with the laws. I put the quotes around "afford" in my original example, to specifically point out that we might not like to use the term in that way. I will remove the quotes below, because if we are in TSM-land, we must mean the term absolutely seriously.
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The ball I caught at the memorable game is not identically scuffed to the ball I found in my yard. One could argue that, in fact, the identity of the ball is forever beyond my grasp, and that any balls, similarly scuffed would lead to the same action patterns. Thus, there exists, relative to me, a class of scuffing that affords displaying on the walls. When I, as an organism with the physical ability to display such balls, the motivation to display such balls, and the knowledge of how to display such balls (i.e. the effectivity of ball scuff-type-A displaying), encounter a ball of the proper type, in the proper location, in an environment where nothing else in more pressing (i.e., the affordance of ball scuff-type-A display-ablitiy), then, due to the confluence of dispositional properties, I necessarily place the ball in the display cabinet and remind any guests present about the day I caught it.
We can tell an identical story for the balls I return to my neighbor. in that story, the critical variable is not the scuff, but the location the ball is found in (my backyard).
Notice, that the notion of a 'critical variable' here is potentially meaningless. All aspects of the world to which I am responding with my ball-display behavior are equally critical. (This is not to say that "everything" is critical, but only to point out that the list of critical things is potentially neigh infinite.) Ditto properties of me, the actor.
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Hopefully, this addresses your request to take the TSM approach seriously. If understood in THIS way, the TSM approach could potentially deal with the "individuals" problem, as well as almost anything else in psychology. But notice that it has given up something in exchange. We have, I think, given up on the ability to directly perceive something that often seems important to us, and that often seems to be perceived ("identity"). In its place, we have admitted only to being able to see things as instances of a class of phenomenon. -- If that seems perfectly reasonable, it is probably because it is reasonable.
The part that rubs me the wrong way, is that we have also lost the apparent elegance of the Natural Laws approach. To talk about the natural laws that govern ball-catching behavior - running a certain way if the optical projection of the ball is expanding in certain ways - is to connect deeply with mechanics, optics, mathematical necessity, etc. To talk about a particular pattern of scuff as bound to displaying behavior by Natural Laws seems like a reducto ad absurdum argument. It is not, in any way, deeply connected with anything other arguments from physiological necessity.
The affordance of the displayableness of the scuff-type-A ball lacks all the elegance of the affordance of catching the fly ball. The perception of the affordance of displayableness lacks the elegance of the perception of how to catch the fly ball. The information specifying the displayble properties lacks the elegance of the information specifying how to catch the fly ball. If we want to go this route, then we will be carrying on the TSM legacy, without any sense of the nobleness with which the project began.
So, you can (probably) have TSM all the way down if you want to, but in so doing you are going to lose most of what makes TSM seem so appealing initially.
Hopefully, this addresses your request to take the TSM approach seriously. If understood in THIS way, the TSM approach could potentially deal with the "individuals" problem, as well as almost anything else in psychology. But notice that it has given up something in exchange. We have, I think, given up on the ability to directly perceive something that often seems important to us, and that often seems to be perceived ("identity"). In its place, we have admitted only to being able to see things as instances of a class of phenomenon. -- If that seems perfectly reasonable, it is probably because it is reasonable.
ReplyDeleteThe part that rubs me the wrong way, is that we have also lost the apparent elegance of the Natural Laws approach. To talk about the natural laws that govern ball-catching behavior - running a certain way if the optical projection of the ball is expanding in certain ways - is to connect deeply with mechanics, optics, mathematical necessity, etc. To talk about a particular pattern of scuff as bound to displaying behavior by Natural Laws seems like a reducto ad absurdum argument. It is not, in any way, deeply connected with anything other arguments from physiological necessity.
The affordance of the displayableness of the scuff-type-A ball lacks all the elegance of the affordance of catching the fly ball. The perception of the affordance of displayableness lacks the elegance of the perception of how to catch the fly ball. The information specifying the displayble properties lacks the elegance of the information specifying how to catch the fly ball. If we want to go this route, then we will be carrying on the TSM legacy, without any sense of the nobleness with which the project began.
So, you can (probably) have TSM all the way down if you want to, but in so doing you are going to lose most of what makes TSM seem so appealing initially.
You wanted an account that handles individuals, because you suggested it was important; but now you don't want one because it makes laws a bit pedestrian? So either law accounts don't work, or they do but they become boring - that hardly seems fair, or, frankly, a real problem.
ReplyDeleteWell, that is awkward! The first part of my last post is missing! Luckily, Word has saved it form me. Try two:
ReplyDelete-----
Point taken.... the psychologist's fallacy is a dangerous thing.... and I have not answered your request.
Let me try to work my example through with the laws. I put the quotes around "afford" in my original example, to specifically point out that we might not like to use the term in that way. I will remove the quotes below, because if we are in TSM-land, we must mean the term absolutely seriously.
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The ball I caught at the memorable game is not identically scuffed to the ball I found in my yard. One could argue that, in fact, the identity of the ball is forever beyond my grasp, and that any balls, similarly scuffed would lead to the same action patterns. Thus, there exists, relative to me, a class of scuffing that affords displaying on the walls. When I, as an organism with the physical ability to display such balls, the motivation to display such balls, and the knowledge of how to display such balls (i.e. the effectivity of ball scuff-type-A displaying), encounter a ball of the proper type, in the proper location, in an environment where nothing else in more pressing (i.e., the affordance of ball scuff-type-A display-ablitiy), then, due to the confluence of dispositional properties, I necessarily place the ball in the display cabinet and remind any guests present about the day I caught it.
We can tell an identical story for the balls I return to my neighbor. in that story, the critical variable is not the scuff, but the location the ball is found in (my backyard).
Notice, that the notion of a 'critical variable' here is potentially meaningless. All aspects of the world to which I am responding with my ball-display behavior are equally critical. (This is not to say that "everything" is critical, but only to point out that the list of critical things is potentially neigh infinite.) Ditto properties of me, the actor.
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Hopefully, this addresses your request to .... ....
Hopefully the above information clarifies my last prior post, but your criticism may still remain. If so: There is a difference between A) accusing something of being boring, B) and accusing something of lacking, upon deeper inspection, many of the features we thought it had, and that motivated us to adopt it.
ReplyDeleteYour first comment got caught in the spam filter. If you post something and you don't get an error but it doesn't show up, give me time to find it, I'm checking the spam regularly.
ReplyDeleteThus, there exists, relative to me, a class of scuffing that affords displaying on the walls. When I, as an organism with the physical ability to display such balls, the motivation to display such balls, and the knowledge of how to display such balls (i.e. the effectivity of ball scuff-type-A displaying), encounter a ball of the proper type, in the proper location, in an environment where nothing else in more pressing (i.e., the affordance of ball scuff-type-A display-ablitiy), then, due to the confluence of dispositional properties, I necessarily place the ball in the display cabinet and remind any guests present about the day I caught it.
Yes. Two things which are indistinguishable are indistinguishable; the market for forgeries depends on this. However, due to how hard it is to accidentally end up with equivalent configurations (thanks to the laws requirement and a host of other facts of the matter) it's really hard for this to happen.
All aspects of the world to which I am responding with my ball-display behavior are equally critical. (This is not to say that "everything" is critical, but only to point out that the list of critical things is potentially neigh infinite.)
Actually it's not. We are finite creatures with limits to our perception and action capacities. Some things simply fall beneath the threshold of mattering, and when we doing one task rather than another, numerous things get actively filtered out. This is the task specific device approach.
Well yeah, but fly ball movement is related to optic projection by NATURAL LAW, fly ball movement is related to how I need to move to intercept the ball by NATURAL LAW, and aspects of the optic projection are related to how I need to move to intercept the ball by NATURAL LAW.
ReplyDeleteAre you really going to allow me to put the scuffed ball in the same realm? Are you going to allow a particular scuff patten be related to displaying behavior by NATURAL LAW?!? (Even when I put it in all-caps?!?)
I can't imagine T, S, or M being happy with such an arrangement. That is not inherently a problem, as over deference to a theory's creator is not always wise. I just want to make sure.
As a perceptual psychologist I'm personally more interested in the basis for treating one thing differently than the other; so I was focused on how you come to know the difference between two individuals. Identifying which ball is which is about perception, up to and including your perception that one was involved in an interesting event and the other was not.
ReplyDeleteI think the point of departure is that 'displayable' isn't the right kind of affordance property. Yes, you end up displaying one ball and not the other, but I don't think it's correct to characterise that behaviour as effecting a displayability affordance; I say that because, as you note, it's not clear how to tell a laws story about such a property.
My theoretical basis then gives me two options: find a laws account for displayability, or find a laws account in which that isn't the affordance but the net result is similar behaviour. These will either work or they won't.