Browsing by Subject "Ecological Psychology"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    Open Access
    Distal engagement: intentions in perception
    Brancazio, Nick; Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Filosofía
    Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of longterm planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecologicalenactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for “high-level” or “representationhungry” capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a nonrepresentational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating prereflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    Open Access
    Ecological psychology is radical enough: a reply to radical enactivists
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2019-09-26) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Heras Escribano, Manuel; Raja Galián, Vicente; Filosofía
    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.