Ecological realism and the fallacy of 'objectification'

An important criticism of cognitive psychology is that it treats historically contingent practices as though they were 'natural' and universal. Yet the critics themselves - in their attempts to define more fundamental forms of relation between organisms and environments from which derivative, social forms might develop - can appear to be involved in their own kind of biological reductionism. As Reed has explained in Chapter 10, Gibson's theory of direct perception should be regarded as a preliminary to a sociohistorical account of human cognition. The following chapter is based on an important discussion of Gibson's work first published by William Noble in 1981. Noble argues that there are two problems within Gibson's own account of perception that will need to be resolved before the wider project could be realized. The first problem is Gibson's vacillation between a 'static' realism that treats the environment as 'given', and a pragmatist account of the organism and environment as interdependent (see also Katz, 1987). The second, related problem is Gibson's failure to explore the fundamental difference that language makes to the way humans relate to their world.