The ecological approach is a theory of direct perception. Put simply, direct perception proposes that our perceptual experience of the world is not mediated by anything that sits between the world and that experience. Making this viable is a big challenge, however, and the idea seems preposterous on the face of it to many people.
In this post, I want to lay out the basic idea of direct vs indirect perception, and then explain how each approach addresses the problem of how we perceive the world. There will be some big words, but I will aim here to place them in a context that supports them usefully, and focus mainly on the straight-forward ideas in play. In a future post, I will ask the question 'what do we know about how plausible direct and indirect theories of perception are?'
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