Abstract
We first contextualize Gibson’s views within the broader space of theories about perception. We do this to illustrate how Gibson’s perspective, more so than many others, is most intimately connected with place. For, unlike many dualists, and those drawing on inferential theory, Gibson’s foundational claim is that place is directly perceived. As such, one’s experience of place is not representational in nature. Phenomenologically, there is no translation of sensory input when one experiences place. Then, to make our case for how the Gibsonian perspective can be conceptualized as a theory of place, we describe the fundamental concepts of direct perception and affordances. Although Gibson did not specify what would be meant by a place, his theory of perception inextricably links an organism to the environment in which it interacts. From this, we then provide a Gibsonian perspective on place. We conclude by linking Gibsonian theory to a subset of philosophical concepts via current ideas in Cognitive Science. Our purpose here is not to provide a definitive conclusion as to how Gibsonian ideas align with these concepts. Rather, we hope to plant the seeds for further exploration of the concepts of meaning and purpose, their context in psychological theory, and how they may bridge the gap between psychology and ecology and a broader interdisciplinary theory of place.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that the eye is not an organ independent of the nervous system, but is rather an extension of the nervous system, which itself is composed of multiple integrated neural systems relevant to perception and action. In this context, referring to the eye is just a convenient shorthand for a complex nervous system which has the job of subserving perception/action via the detection of ambient information. Because coordinated activity requires the recruitment of what is usually thought of as peripheral (sensory and motor) and central (visual cortex, motor cortex, etc.) systems, as well as autonomic processes that perform fine, graded adjustments to calibrate metabolic processes to the energy demands of ongoing movements, it should be emphasized that the nervous system is functioning in its entirety in the control of perceptually-guided action (Bingham 1988).
References
Baddeley, A. 1992. Working Memory. Science 255(5044): 556–559.
Bingham, G.P. 1988. Task-Specific Devices and the Perceptual Bottleneck. Human Movement Science 7(2): 225–264.
Chemero, A. 2003. An Outline of a Theory of Affordances. Ecological Psychology 15(2): 181–195.
DeJaegher, H., and E. DiPaolo. 2007. Participatory Sense-Making. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4): 485–507.
Fodor, J.A. 1980. Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 63–109.
Gibson, J.J. 1950. The Perception of the Visual World. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press.
———. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Westport: Greenwood Press.
———. 1968. What Gives Rise to the Perception of Motion? Psychological Review 75(4): 335–346.
———. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Kihlstrom, J.F. 2013. The Person-Situation Interaction. In Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition, ed. D. Carlston, 786–805. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kosslyn, S.M. 1973. Scanning Visual Images: Some Structural Implications. Perception & Psychophysics 14(1): 90–94.
Lewin, K. 1935. A Dynamic Theory of Personality. New York: McGraw-Hill.
———. 1951. Field Theory and Experiment in Social Psychology: Concepts and Methods. In Field Theory in Social Science, ed. K. Lewin, 130–154. New York: Harper & Row.
Mace, W.M. 1977. James J. Gibson’s Strategy for Perceiving: Ask Not What’s Inside Your Head, but What Your Head’s Inside of. In Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, ed. R. Shaw and J. Bransford, 43–65. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Metzger, W. 1930. Optische Untersuchungen am Ganzfeld. Psychological Research 13(1): 6–29.
Reed, E.S. 1988. James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Perception. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rosch, E.H. 1973. Natural Categories. Cognitive Psychology 4(3): 328–350.
Shepard, R.N., and J. Metzler. 1971. Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects. Science 171(3972): 701–703.
Sternberg, S. 1966. High-Speed Scanning in Human Memory. Science 153(3736): 652–654.
Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic and Semantic Memory. In Organization of Memory, ed. E. Tulving and W. Donaldson, 381–403. New York: Academic.
Turvey, M.T. 1992. Affordances and Prospective Control: An Outline of the Ontology. Ecological Psychology 4(3): 173–187.
Varela, F.J., E. Thompson, and E. Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Wilson, A.D., and S. Golonka. 2013. Embodied Cognition Is Not What You Think It Is. Frontiers in Psychology 4: 58. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00058.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McConnell, D.S., Fiore, S.M. (2017). A Place for James J. Gibson. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52212-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52214-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)