From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Thu Aug 15 2002 - 03:25:41 MDT
On Tuesday, August 13, 2002 10:31 PM Damien Broderick
d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> If the Gestalt school argued many decades ago that we see what we do
> because our biology makes us look for patterns, Gibson turned the
tables
> and asserted that the densities of texture and gradient in the world,
a
> world we move through at will, provide all the cues we need to thrive
in
> it. In short, we are organisms adapted by evolution to this world. Its
> affordances - `potentialities for action inherent in object or
scene' - are
> its meanings. `Invariance in the ambient optic array,' Gibson claimed,
`is
> not constructed or deduced; it is there to be discovered.'
It might interest you to note that David Kelley relies heavily on the
work of J. J. Gibson in his _The Evidence of the Senses. (See
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Percept.html for my brief review.)
Gibson's point seemed to me to be not so much about evolution, but
merely that the amount of information incoming is very high and that
perceptual systems must filter out a lot so that the organism in
question could focus on the relevant stuff.
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
See my review of Paul Thagard's _Conceptual Revolutions_ at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Concept.html
See "A Dialogue On Happiness" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Dialogue.html
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