Introductions in the 2014 Edition (Gibson, 1979 Reading Group)

The 2014 reprint of Gibson (1979) includes the original Preface and Introduction, as well as an Introduction to the Classic Edition by William H Mace. A few things come up in Gibson's sections that I thought were cool, and worth documenting as part of the reading group. 

Mace's Introduction does some nice work reviewing Gibson's intellectual development over the course of his career and exemplified by his three books. He points to how the ecological approach has grown and connected to other fields in the years since Gibson's death, and talks about how the 1979 book was received (a mixed bag, to say the least!). It's a good read, but it doesn't have much new content in it so for this reading group I'll just focus on the bits Gibson says that set things up nicely. 

Preface

Physics, optics, anatomy and physiology describe facts, but not facts at a level appropriate for the study of perception. In this book I attempt a new level of description. It will be unfamiliar, and it is not fully developed, but it provides a fresh approach where the old perplexities do not block the way. 

This is important setup that I come back to a lot when talking to non-ecological types. The ecological approach doesn't deny the basics of anatomy, etc, but it denies that these are the basic tools we should be using to build a theory of perceiving. This book is going to be about identifying the ecological scale, and identifying what is real there. That's going to make this book feel weird to anyone already brought up in these other traditions. That's ok! But if you are going to read this book, you have to approach it on it's own terms.

Introduction

We are told that vision depends on the eye, which is connected to the brain. I shall suggest that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system.

When no constraints are put on the visual system, we look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see if from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision, and that is what this book is about. 

Perception, like everything, is going to be an accomplishment of a system; specifically an organism-environment system. It's not what brains do; it's what the system does. This builds on the work from Gibson (1966). 

He makes the point that vision is not actually simplest when the eye is held still in the lab. This snapshot vision is actually the weird case, even when the eye is allowed to scan a bit from a set location (aperture vision). Moving the head allows ambient vision while moving the body allows ambulatory vision. You can study any of these 'forms of vision', we can do them all - but the latter are not built of the former. They are all different. 

Gibson then outlines the book, and notes that he will do things in a reverse order compared to typical books about perception. First, he is going to talk about the environment to be perceived; then he can talk about the information for that perception. Only once he has done this can he come the 'psychology proper' part, namely how organisms go about using information to perceive their environments. Finally, he will be in a position to talk about pictorial perception. This really is reversed; standard sensation-perception approaches begin with image-based cues available to the retinal image, and develop processes the organism must apply to those sensations in order to build representations of the things in the world. It's then those representations that are what is perceived. Gibson won't talk about any of this, because it's either irrelevant, or because they are facts from the wrong level. 

Some other points emerge. Gibson notes the ecological approach is 'a new approach to the whole field of psychology', and that '[W]hat psychology needs is the kind of thinking...called systems theory'. He also notes that the concept of space has nothing to do with perception; the ecological approach will use geometry, but not the abstract geometry of the mathematician;

The doctrine that we could not perceive the world around us unless we already had the concept of space is nonsense. It is quite the other way around....if you agree to abandon the dogma that "percepts without concepts are blind," as Kant put it, a deep theoretical mess, a genuine quagmire, will dry up. This is one of the main themes of the chapters that follow.

Turvey, of course, spent a lot of time on this in his Lectures, and now we see why. 

Finally, he notes that it is important that all of this can be tested empirically. But experiments imposing control via biteboards and pictorial stimuli made it seem as if the resulting snapshot vision was the whole it vision, or at least the basis. That' not going to be true, and Gibson notes he will spend time talking about experiments about information to show that the ecological approach can be tested. Of course, in 1979, not a lot had been done, but enough to make the case it was possible.

So the scene is set!