General Ecological Information Does Not Support the Perception of Anything

One common critique of the ecological approach is how can we use perception to explain behaviour that is organised with respect to things in the world that aren't currently in our area? How do we plan for future activities, or how do we know that the closed fridge has beer? 

A recent attempt to get ecological about this comes from Reitveld & Kiverstein (2014) who propose a relational account of affordances that enables them to talk about opportunities for more complex behaviours. This account has developed into the Skilled Intentionality Framework (e.g. Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014), where skill is an 'optimal grip' on a field of task-relevant, relational affordances. 

I have always had one primary problem with this programme of work - I don't believe that they can show how these affordances create information and thus can be perceived. I discuss this here and here, and there's comments and replies for Rietveld and Kiverstein there too. You can indeed carve the world up into their kind of entities, but if they don't create information then they cannot be perceived and they are irrelevant to behaviour. 

I was therefore excited to see a new paper from the group called 'General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognition' (Bruineberg, Chemero & Rietveld, 2018; hence BC&R). There is a lot of excellent work in here; but their proposal for a general ecological information is, in fact, neither ecological nor information. It is a good way of talking ecologically about conventional constraints on behaviour, but it doesn't make those perceivable and so the main thesis of the paper fails.