Lecture 21: Barriers to Ecological Realism (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)

Last Lecture Turvey introduced the notion of ecological realism; realism that has a species-dependence to it. Normally a realism is for everyone, but different organisms inhabit different habitats and/or niches, and have different job descriptions. So another preliminary that needs to be dealt with is that there are immediate and long-standing objections to ecological realism that need to be noted and addressed. The two main ones addressed in this Lecture are dualism and the doctrine of physics as complete.

Chemero (2009) Chapter 9 - The Metaphysics of Radical Embodiment

The final chapter of RECS tackles the metaphysical implications of the radical stance. Gibson was a staunch realist, but there are some odd elements to entities like affordances that, to certain minds, sound like idealism or antirealism of some kind. Realism is, essentially, the claim that there is a world independent of our experience of it, and that we can have basically accurate knowledge of that external world. In modern times this reality has been equated with the description given by physics. Affordances don't belong to physics, however; whether relations or dispositions, they are, at heart, facts which span the organism and the environment. This sounds wrong to a lot of ears (as Ken's comments on that post readily show!). Chemero therefore devotes the final chapter to defending the claim that RECS can be realist; this matters, because people tend not to like idealism in their science these days, and it's going to be a standard philosophical objection to the RECS programme if not addressed.