Abstract
In his writings, Gibson firmly claimed that cultural or social factors could never distort perception. Cultural artefacts, social norms, language and signs were instead described as influencing perception and behavior only indirectly. At the same time, in his last monumental monograph, Gibson introduced the concept of affordance as applicable to the “whole realm of social significance”. Unfortunately, Gibson did not elaborate further on the relationship between the notion of affordance and the socio-cultural organization of niches like ours. This issue divided Gibson’s followers into two sides. Some of them followed Gibson, claiming that socio-cultural factors can drive behavior but never permeate perceptual experience to its bottom layers. A second group assumes instead that the presence of a structured socio-cultural context permeates the meaning of affordances already at the perceptual level. The aim of this chapter is twofold. The first part of the chapter aims to reconstruct Gibson’s view on the role of culture and sociality and then highlight the reasoning that animates both groups of theorists. In particular, a large part of the discussion is based on motivating the problematics that led the second group of theorists to disagree with Gibson and his idea that the individual’s social background never permeates sensory perception. The second aim is to throw the seeds to develop a methodological tool available to these theorists in order to characterize the experience of affordances as shaped by the social and cultural context in which they are embedded; the notion of field. This notion has a long history in psychology but its methodological consequences are often overlooked. Notably, one of the risks of the concept of field is, as scholars of the Gestalt school like Parlett and Lee claimed, that the notion could be framed so broadly to include “anything and everything”, making it theoretically and scientifically trivial and hence unable to provide a rigorous characterization of what is encountered in individual experiences. To avoid the trivialization of this concept, I conclude by developing a recent proposal that suggests endorsing the notion of field specifically elaborated by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch.
Do you not believe that one can first speak of symbols only after the differentiation between the sacred and the profane has occurred, or is starting to occur? Before this differentiation, the sacred is not symbolized, but rather manifests itself in that, what from the perspective of our standpoint is a symbol – from ours and not from that of the participants […]. It is “self-evident” to us that they are facts and events, and so we interpret them as symbols.
September 10, 1952. Aron Gurwitsch , Letter to Alfred Schutz,
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Notes
- 1.
Following Costal and Still (1989, p. 482), Gibson’s differentiation between the perception of affordances and the perception of cultural artefacts was primarily motivated by ethical and not just ontological concerns, mostly developed during the World War II. Gibson was worried about the ethical outcomes of cultural relativism and the cynicism of the social scientists of his time towards the rise of anti-Semitism. He refused to accept the idea that Germans related to the Jews perceptually or in an immediate fashion, claiming instead that they were purely guided by social stereotypes and non-perceptual habits.
- 2.
Importantly, this chapter deals with Gibson’s followers that endorsed the central ideas at the heart of the ecological approach, i.e., the thesis of direct perception, the coupling between perception and action, the complementarity between organism and environment, etc. At the same time, it should also be recognized that the popularity of the concept of affordance has surpassed that of the ecological research program and has often been appropriated by conventional cognitive science. On many occasions, the term has been extrapolated from the role it plays in ecological psychology and has been either read in a representationalist key or, even if theorized as a world-involving phenomenon, that could nonetheless be grasped by neurocentric and representationalist theories of cognition (see Bickhard & Richie, 1983; Orlandi, 2016; Scarantino, 2003; Dennett, 2017 just to name a few). The theoretical issues concerning the relationship between the socio-cultural environment and individual affordances would certainly be approached differently from the perspective of representationalist theories, in which, as one reviewer kindly noticed, the notion of mental representation would play a key role in determining the normative character of a situated action. A position that may summarise the representationalist position on this issue was articulated by Chow (1989) in his debate with Heft, in which he argued that theorizing affordances in representational terms is necessary to make sense of how the meaning of the same object may be differently perceived when situated in different social contexts (for a response see Heft, 1989). Including the limitations and strategies available for non-ecological approaches that decided to rely on the term affordance is unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter. I would like to thank the reviewer for bringing out this important point to light.
- 3.
It is worth noticing that in this book Reed substituted the word “perception” with “experience”.
- 4.
The notion of form of life is in this context borrowed from the late-Wittgenstein and is used by Kiverstein and, in general by defenders of the relational approach to affordances known as the Skilled Intentionality Framework to grasp the stable and regular way of doing things together of a group of animals or individuals (see also Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014)
- 5.
See Moran (2017) for an excursus on the phenomenological tradition on this issue.
- 6.
It is also interesting to notice that Lewin’s Field theory, as much as the work of Koffka, have directly inspired Roger Barker’s Behavior Setting theory; an approach to study social behavior in an ecological fashion that in recent years has received a large attention in 4E and ecological theories (see Heft, 2001; McGann, 2014)
- 7.
It is now possible to compare it with Gibson’s asocial conception of affordance perception. In the passage mentioned in Sect. 16.2 (1972, p. 88), Gibson thought of affordances as exclusively determined by the stimulus “and nothing else”. Gurwitsch, because of the influence of Piaget and Gestalt psychology (in particular Koffka and Köhler), assumed an opposite stance and characterized perception as a developmental and historical process. The Lithuanian phenomenologist follows Gestalt psychologists in claiming that perception cannot be understood independently of the equally relevant contribution of the perceiver’s developmental history and environment. Gurwitsch defended the idea that the contributions of internal (organismic) and external (environmental) factors are both necessary and dependent conditions to understand how the objects’ functional connotations can be acquired, modified, and maintained. The dependency on internal and external conditions has been sometimes formalized through the formula P = f (xe, xi) (2010, p. 94). Here, a percept P is modified even if just one of the two constants goes through any change. These modifications might include the subject’s individual developmental history (internal conditions; xe) and the presence of new environmental stimuli (external conditions; xi). Very reasonably, by not off-loading to the environment the role of fully determining the stimulus meaning, Gurwitsch managed to open a window towards the developmental and historical factors necessary to consider the socio-cultural dimension at the roots of affordance perception. This stance, however, does not need to be interpreted as the idea that reality is perceived through abstract concepts, rules or memories (that actually consisted in the view of Benussi, a Gestalt psychologist from the School of Graz that Gurwitsch heavily criticized and labeled for the dualistic commitments of his approach) but rather seen as a stronger form of relationalism. Gurwitsch followed the main idea promoted by Gestalt psychology that, as Piaget puts it, is s to explain intelligence by perception” (Ivi., p. 48). The field of consciousness, as much as the same existence of the orders of existence constituted by the activities of the members of a society needs thus to be seen as going through continuous re-organizations and changes as the same notion of field implies.
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Artese, G.F. (2023). Affordances, the Social Environment, and the Notion of Field: State of the Debate and Methodological Insights. In: Casper, MO., Artese, G.F. (eds) Situated Cognition Research. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39744-8_16
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