Vicente Raja is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy (Western University, Canada) and the coordinator of The EMRG Lab (http://www.emrglab.org) in the same institution. His main areas of research are philosophy of cognitive science, theoretical neuroscience, history and philosophy of psychology, and plant behavior. He is specially interested in the way behavior and brain activity relate to each other in cognitive systems, and has worked on the concept of ecological resonance and its place within radical embodiment to address that issue.
Open peer commentary on the article “Précis of The Philosophy of Affordances” by Manuel Heras-Escribano. Abstract: Heras-Escribano argues against the normative character of affordances from a framework that relies on (a) a Wittgensteinian notion of normativity and (b) the incompatibility of direct perception, as it is described in ecological psychology, and perceptual error. We argue against this position and provide a pluralistic notion of normativity that is able to accommodate the normative character of affordances.
Segundo-Ortin M., Heras-Escribano M. & Raja V. (2019) Ecological psychology is radical enough: A reply to radical enactivists. Philosophical Psychology 32(7): 1001–1023. https://cepa.info/6418
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