Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: This commentary highlights some controversial aspects of enactivism and ecological psychology, specifically the notions of subjectivity and ecological information. I argue that, instead of choosing between them, both theories could complement each other at different levels of analysis in a single research framework for explaining cognition from a situated perspective.

Abstract: I offer a response to some criticisms raised by the commentators on the basis of the following claims: (a) Disagreements and publicness are not counterexamples to my view on normativity, but cases that are explained by appealing to its social basis. (b) It is possible to offer a general view of experience from a situated and embodied approach based on the concept of affordance but without perverting its scientific basis. (c) The Rylean-inspired dispositionalism that I offer can explain why the concept of affordance is based on the organism-environment complementarity explained in nomological or causal terms without committing to substance ontology. I also try to find a common ground that could work for establishing the conceptual basis of a post-cognitivist, affordance-based approach to the mind.

Context: Affordances are gaining momentum as a key object of study in the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind. In The Philosophy of Affordances I propose a new way to understand affordances that avoids some philosophical problems that have been overlooked in the literature. Problem: I summarize two of the problems and discussions that are analyzed in the book: first, the ontological characterization of affordances; second, the alleged normative character of affordances. Method: I apply a conceptual analysis of the main philosophical implications that result from understanding affordances as grounded on the principles of the ecological approach. Results: I propose a dispositional approach to affordances based on a Rylean, non-reductive perspective that avoids both the hidden Platonic commitment of dispositionalism and the alleged normative character attributed to affordances. Implications: Affordances can be understood as dispositional properties from a non-reductive or Rylean perspective, which helps preclude some key problems related to the ontological status of these scientific entities. Constructivist content: Affordances do not imply mental construction; they refer to a new way in which we can describe the reciprocity between organism and environment while avoiding dualizing terms. Keywords: Affordance, agency, ecological information, enactivism, disposition, James J. Gibson, normativity, phenomenology, Gilbert Ryle.

This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one (the neural dynamics of the sensorimotor contingencies and the emergence of enactive agency) and the personal one (the dynamics that emerges from the organism-environment interaction in ecological terms). If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology.

Key words: pragmatism, enactivism, ecological psychology, affordances, cognitive science.

In this paper we explore in what sense we can claim that affordances, the objects of perception for ecological psychology, are related to normativity. First, we offer an account of normativity and provide some examples of how it is understood in the specialized literature. Affordances, we claim, lack correctness criteria and, hence, the possibility of error is not among their necessary conditions. For this reason we will oppose Chemero’s (2009) normative theory of affordances. Finally, we will show that there is a way in which taking advantage of affordances could be considered as possessing a normative character, but only when they are evaluated within the framework of social normative standards in particular situations. This reinforces our claim that affordances, per se, lack normativity and can only be taken to be rule-governed in relation to established normative practices.

Key words: Affordances, normativity, perception, ecological psychology

In this paper, we offer a criticism, inspired by Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, of the enactivist account of perception and action. We start by setting up a non-descriptivist naturalism regarding the mind and continue by defining enactivism and exploring its more attractive theoretical features. We then proceed to analyse its proposal to understand normativity non-socially. We argue that such a thesis is ultimately committed to the problematic idea that normative practices can be understood as private and factual. Finally, we offer a characterization of normativity as an essentially social phenomenon and apply our criticisms to other approaches that share commitments with enactivism.

Key words: enactivism, normativity, wittgenstein, action, perception, descriptivism.

Excerpt: The 30 papers that make up this Research Topic address a wide range of questions concerning ecological psychology, enactive cognitive science, and their shared domain of scientific interest. The topics broached bring to the fore a number of key points of contact between ecological and enactive thinking, and provide varying evaluations for the possibility of some kind of reconciliation, complementarity, or alignment of the two. Some authors highlight divergence, conflict, or even distinct foundations, which motivate a pessimistic prognosis on integration, noting differing views on the relationship between the agent and the world, or sometimes even the basic scientific approach. Others appear more optimistic that these are perhaps two perspectives on the same avenue of scientific advancement. Even in this latter case, however, it is clear that the differences between the two are not simply ones of appearance, but potential points of theoretical dissonance that will require real theoretical or empirical work if they are to be reconciled. In this collection of papers we see a number of potential diagnoses of differences, ranging from different starting points in examination of the agent-world relationship, to different commitments to “realism” about the world, or the role of other agents in our account of human cognition, where specific gears of ecological and enactive theories touch one another and either grind hopelessly or engage with some degree of success.

Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its ‘pick up’ in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be “RECtified” so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified. Abbreviations: EP = Ecological Psychology REC = Radical Enactivism

Key words: ecological psychology, radical enactivism, information, affordances, meaning, specificity