Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both challenge representationist cognitive science, but the two approaches have only begun to engage in dialogue. Further conceptual clarification is required in which differences are as important as common ground. This paper enters the dialogue by focusing on important differences. After a brief account of the parallel histories of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism, we cover incompatibility between them regarding their theories of sensation and perception. First, we show how and why in ecological theory perception is, crucially, (...) not based on sensation. We elucidate this idea by examining the biological roots of work in the two fields, concentrating on Gibson and Varela and Maturana. We expound an ecological critique of any sensation-based approach to perception by detailing two topics: classic retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The second main point emphasizes the importance of the idea of organism-environment mutuality and its difference from structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior. We point out how ecological - phenomenological methods of inquiry grow out of mutualism and compare Gibson’s idea of visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body. Third, we conclude that Ecological Psychology and varieties of Enactivism are laying down different paths to pursue related goals. Thus, convergence of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism is not possible given their conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization is possible and desirable. (shrink)

The word ‘pseudoscience’ is a marker of changing worries about science and being a scientist. It played an important role in the philosophical debate on demarcating science from other activities, and was used in popular writings to distance science from cranky theories with scientific pretensions. These uses consolidated a comforting unity in science, a communal space from which pseudoscience is excluded, and the user's right to belong is asserted. The urgency of this process dwindled when attempts to find a formal (...) demarcation petered out, and the growth of social constructionism denied science any special access to truth. The reaction to this led to the science wars, which ushered in a new anxiety in the use of ‘pseudoscience’, especially from the least secure branches. But recent writings on the disunity of science reveal how the sense of support drawn from it may be based on an illusion, creating a disunity of pseudoscience as well as of science. (shrink)

Advertising presents special difficulties for business ethicists. Ads are trivial entertainments, yet advertising culture has been held up as a metaphor for a general moral degradation in the post‐modern epoch. Ads confuse us since they are a new and unfamiliar form of communicative discourse which we find difficult to place in an ethical category. This, mainly conceptual, paper attempts to explore how ethics in and of advertising may be subject to examination within a broadly social constructionist perspective. The paper sketches (...) out a view of social constructionism which draws significantly on the ‘turn to language’ in psychology. It then attempts to discuss how ads might work, or rather, as the paper suggests, how ads mean. The social constructionist view point entails a rejection of cognitivist schemes of advertising psychology in favour of a mutualist framework within which ads and consumers jointly construct meanings which are essentially indeterminate. This ontological perspective has implications for ethical treatments of the field. The notion of meaning making as a psychological principle leads the discussion into an initial consideration of how normative approaches to advertising ethics might be framed. The self regulatory system obtaining in the UK is offered as an appropriate example. An underlying theme of the paper is that discussions of ethics in relation to advertising cannot rest upon a simplistic cognitivist notion of how ads ‘work’ upon consumers’ minds. The paper tries to show that a broadly social constructionist approach may offer a richer scheme for examining advertising ethics in its local, mediated, indeterminate and socially constructed character. (shrink)

This paper is about rational and irrational uses of deontological words, such as “should”, “ought”, and “must”, referred to as “the shoulds”. Rationality is taken as a mutual relationship between conceptual schemes and human agency. These are expressed in what Bakhtin referred to as authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse respectively. When the conceptual scheme is in place and its authority transparent, and there is interplay between authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse, then the shoulds are perceived as rational. When (...) the interplay is disrupted or suppressed the shoulds are seen as irrational. Breakdown occurs in two main ways. First, when the effective conceptual schemes are hidden, and the origin of the shoulds obscured. We describe some instances of the latter, from philosophy, psychotherapy, and experimental studies of rationality. Second, in technology and science the mutual relationship sometimes breaks down because authoritative discourse is too powerful, and inhibits the interplay in order to maintain itself. After describing these pathologies, we turn to William James, who drew attention to a repair kit for rationality in his detection of the psychologist's fallacy. Describing the work of Dewey and Husserl as elaborations of this, we distinguished two essential aspects of rationality, disciplinary expressed in authoritative discourse, and emancipatory expressed in internally persuasive discourse. (shrink)

This article presents a developmental ecological approach to the emergence and development of metaphor in children, based on the ecological psychology tradition following the work of J.J. Gibson, and its extension into developmental research and theory, as developed by E.J. Gibson and others. This framework suggests that a basic compatibility and meaningfulness exists between the knower and the known, based on the direct perception of affordances. To build an ecological understanding of metaphor we need to clarify how this metaphysical ground (...) plays out in acts of knowing that involve metaphor. In this endeavor, it is important to understand the ontogenesis of novel insightful metaphors and the role of perception. Developmental ecological psychology has repeatedly shown that infants can perceive meta-modal invariants that specify persistence of qualities. Early metaphors are consequences of the process in which invariants over naturally occurring kinds are perceived. Thus, novel metaphor production is an act of situated and experience-dependent perceiving and acting in the ecological world of socially shared meanings. Examples from previous experimental and qualitative research are reviewed to substantiate theoretical claims. (shrink)