Chemero (2009) - A Brief Pause to See Where I'm At

There are still a couple of chapters left for me to go over in Chemero, but the last two were the crux of the book for me, and I want to try and summarise where my analysis has left me before I go on holiday for Easter.

First, I'd like to separate out a couple of themes. First, there's the overall 'radical embodied cognitive science' programme, and second is the specific form of the 'shored up ecological psychology' that Chemero advocates as a basis for this programme. I am entirely on board with the basic idea of RECS; specifically, I think that cognition, whatever that is, is non-representational and that we can make great progress by making our science non-representational. I think Chemero has written a clear exposition of what such a radical science might look like, and why we might want to bother, and I think this makes RECS a must read for the field. 

Second, I think that Chemero is right to go to ecological psychology for a theoretical basis. The more I look, the more I have come to believe that James Gibson is about the only psychologist to have actually proposed a genuine scientific theory in psychology. A true theory provides you with tools to empirically attack novel problems in your domain, and provides you with a clear basis to interpret the results of your tests and to begin to tell a coherent story. Psychology has been chasing phenomena for most of it's scientific life, with no clear framework emerging to tell us a story about why things are the way they are. Ecological psychology is a genuine theory, and it's about a critical feature of our psychological lives: how we maintain contact with our world and move through it successfully. Regardless of what topic you're specifically interested in, you need to understand how we come to have knowledge about our environments.

Finally, though, I have problems with the proposals Chemero makes about the two pillars of an ecological psychology, affordances and information. It's these problems I want to try and sum up here, to focus the conversation a little.

Affordances

Chemero wants affordances to be relations; not properties of the world, but relations between features of the world and abilities of an organism. He motivates this with several specific points (e.g. the problem of two minds) but as I described last post, none of these work to motivate the account he wants.

But this is just the starting point, and Chemero has commented that the differences between the net results of the relational and dispositional accounts aren't that great. What he really wants to do in the book is to define affordances dynamically, as time varying features of a system which spans world and organism. What affordances are currently available would then depend on the recent activity of the organism, as well as it's developmental history and the available resources in the immediate surroundings. 

I think this is fine; the general point is well taken. But the capacity to do all this is already present in the dispositional, laws account - the time varying, relational aspect is the act of perception itself. This is part of my main concern with Chemero's analysis; it repeatedly sounds like he's confusing the world with information about the world. Information, our access to information, our ability to use information to guide action; these things are already time-extended and dynamic, so it's not clear to me that affordances have to do the work here.

I also actively prefer the dispositional formulation because dispositional properties, grounded via anchoring properties, capture everything about Gibson's description of affordances, including being the kind of thing which can interact with energy arrays to create information. These properties can then be projected into light, or sound, and can be measured by a perceptual system calibrated to it's own capabilities (perhaps body scale). This measurement by a calibrated device is all that's required to ensure that perception is direct, and of affordances.

Information

The Turvey-Shaw-Mace approach grounds information in ecological law. Affordances (dispositional properties of the world) interact with energy arrays over time and produce structures in those arrays which are invariant over the transformations which come with a change in perspective, etc. Those structures are the lawful consequence of the way the properties interact with the arrays; any organism which detects this structure is, in effect, detecting the property, and the ecological hypothesis is effectively that we detect these structures and thus perceive the world. This is underwritten by the symmetry principle; the laws account therefore provides a mechanism by which the structure contains information.

Chemero feels that this account is too restrictive, and proposes that organisms can happily use sufficiently regular features of the arrays, which are the result of constraints in the situation. But this approach loses the symmetry principle and Chemero does not replace it with anything. This is a problem.

Chemero has a good point lurking here. As Geoff Bingham says, there is no 'peeking behind the curtain' in perception. All an organism has is the information which is presented to them, and we have to come to know what this information means via perceptual learning. If I present an organism with a structure in light which I have generated via a lawful process, or by a merely constrained process, and these structures are the same, then the organism has no basis on which to tell the difference and could readily end up using the non-law based variable. This is effectively what Chemero would like to allow into ecological psychology - the possibility (or rather, the likelihood) that a busy and needy organism will happily latch onto anything that's useful.

At one level, I agree with this. There is no peeking behind the curtain, and if a merely constrained situation was capable of producing a sufficiently stable information variable, then an organism might indeed learn to use it. However, while I agree this is possible, I am not at all convinced that this is all that likely. It's hard to make genuinely invariant features of an optic array. We have so much scope to move and reveal any problems that stability must be underpinned by something very robust. Can a mere constraint produce such an unbreakable structure in a flowing perceptual array? I don't think so, and I have yet to hear an example - the two in the book chapter (tau and entropy) are law based. A mere constraint is simply unlikely to be good enough to produce anything which will survive typical exploratory behaviour during learning.

Summary

Essentially, Chemero's critique of law based information and dispositional affordances is missing too many of the pieces which already do the work he thinks is needed. Dispositions have anchoring properties which can interact with energy arrays to create spatial-temporal structures in those arrays. Organisms will learn to differentiate those structures from the flowing arrays only when they are sufficiently stable over space and time to allow the process to run; they will be stable enough only when they are generated by a robust, lawful process. This lawful process allows the invariant to be informative about the world via the symmetry principle; the invariant is directly  informative about action relevant properties when measured by a suitably calibrated perceptual system.

Ecological psychology is the right theoretical framework for a radical embodied cognitive science. It's strength is that it is a true scientific theory, and the dispositional/laws formulation provides a clear research programme and methodology. This means that we owe it a rigorous empirical trial before we give it up because we can't think how to cope with one or two results, and frankly we have a lot of hard work ahead of us before we've done due diligence.

A Side Note
I don't actually object to people raising these kinds of questions; I think it's healthy to pay attention, so this isn't directed at anyone in particular. But more than anything I want to see psychology make something that looks like progress in my lifetime, and I'm tired of the endless goddamn fiddling we do with the basics of our field, because it's part of the reason we never get anywhere. I've come to the conclusion recently that Gibson and Turvey went to a lot of trouble to provide us with a powerful research programme, and it's time the field stopped fucking around and knuckled down to a little hard work and normal science based in this, without trying to stamp our own little tweaks on it. Admittedly I've come to this conclusion by arguing with Ken Aizawa and reading Chemero carefully, so it's not like there isn't a good place for this work. But there's a reason I stuck with science over philosophy, and it's because, at the end of the day, I really just want to get on with it. I have the tools I need, and having banged them around pretty hard recently I feel pretty good about them, so Game. On.