Animal Judgment

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 11, No. 2 (December 2014), 115–138

Editions Rodopi ©2014 

Animal Judgment Elizabeth Baeten

Though the overall setting of this essay is the development of an account of mind that is thoroughly naturalistic and amenable to a Darwinian perspective, I focus here on a small piece of that account – that is, what ecological perception and ecological psychology have to offer through the concept of “affordances.” This concept has gotten little purchase in mainstream philosophy of mind and related areas of inquiry. The explanatory power of the concept of affordances (with the experimental evidence supporting it) is overlooked because of particular ontological assumptions underlying most work on mind, though these assumptions are typically not subject to critical appraisal or justification. The metaphysical framework articulated in the work of Justus Buchler provides the conceptual tools for availing ourselves of the notion of affordances, though his category of “active judgment” will need to be stretched beyond application to the human animal.

The naturalistic turn in philosophical accounts of human ontology – in particular, accounts of cognition – takes as a typically inarticulate assumption the model of physics as the exemplar of knowledge of nature, and an outmoded version of physics at that. Thinking of visual perception, for example, as minute, discrete, and nearly instantaneous bursts of photoelectric energy lighting up receptor cells in the back of the eyeball depends on an assumption of the nature of causality that is very much like that of teeny-tiny billiard balls imparting energy or force at the point of collision.1 If we think of perception as meaningless physical impingements on the body’s sense organs, then it must be mind – as internal process – that gives meaning and order to the cacophony of sensuous experience that can then be responded to with action output. Moreover, the disparate impingements on sense organs (whether as different sense modalities or as a temporal sequence of discrete impingements) demands a solution to the “binding problem” that has yet to be solved, though much work has been done on it. That is, how does mind (or mind/brain) transmute a “poverty of stimuli” into a reasonably predictive account of the world outside of mind? We can instead begin with the life sciences, as was typical of some of those in the American pragmatist tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rather than beginning with mechanistic principles so apparent in contemporary philosophy of mind, with its assumptions borrowed from an outdated version of

116

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  physics. The latter tend to leave us with the quandaries associated with either equating mind and brain (and so leaving “qualia” as mysteries) or maintaining a strict distinction between mind and body (and so sequestering mind from objects of knowledge). We do not need to proceed based on unexamined commitments that begin with an assumption that either mind and world are utterly distinct or that one can be reduced to the other with no remainder. A naturalistic account of mind that takes it cues from the life sciences – ethology, ecology and evolutionary theory in particular – is capable of obviating many of the problems encountered in philosophy of mind. This is so, I argue, because starting from the presumption that cognition is an attribute of an animal engaged in, and adapted to, a particular ecosystem leads in an altogether different direction than starting from the presumption that mind is located inside, whether we think of “inside” as supervening on the neurochemical processes of a brain or think of “inside” as a purely private and subjective realm of experience distinct from the processes governing the rest of the natural world. 1. E cological Perception A naturalistic theory of mind adequate to the task of understanding cognition as an attribute of animals shaped by natural selection and making their livings in econiches (ecological niches) must jettison the mechanistic model of perception that prevails in most accounts of mind. If perception is assumed to be the incorporation of meaningless bits of data, then there is no alternative but to locate meaning-giving activity inside the organism in the mind or mind/brain. J. J. Gibson has articulated a theory of “ecological perception” that is thoroughly naturalistic without being in the least mechanistic; he does not assume that animals are mere passive receivers of random input impinging on sense organs which then must be bound together in the brain to make a coherent representation that triggers appropriate action. Ecological perception denies the “poverty of stimulus” presupposed by most theories of perception and allied theories of mind. The poverty of stimulus assumption necessitates the addition of mental structures or content to percepts to make them useable for further cognitive activity or that necessitates a cognitive “processing” in the brain to fill in all the gaps and to bind multi-modal information into a unified mental representation. This implies a kind of perception of percepts in brain regions as the model for sensory experience. We need not assume that neurochemical brain processes are irrelevant in perceptual activity; animals as perceiving organisms must entrain any number of organismic systems in finding and using what they need in complex ecosystems, and brains are integral to this activity for many animals. Gibson makes the point this way: We are told that vision depends on the eye, which is connected to the brain. I shall suggest that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body

Animal Judgment

117

  supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. (1979, 1) Furthermore, ecological perception theory claims a plenitude of perceptual content in the ambient optical array available to an animal equipped with an adaptive visual system, in the ambient auditory array vis-à-vis auditory systems, and so on. The task for the sensate animal, then, is to differentiate the plenary field, to make more precise what is initially vague. The animal’s task is to attune sensory systems to better utilize the information available in the ambient array, and this can be accomplished only through active exploration of the habitat by the creature. In an important sense, this is a matter of practice. To take a simple example: if one wishes to become a birder, one begins with a visual field that is far from bare. There is no poverty of stimulus, but a plethora. The eyes do not know where to “land” in picking out likely birdlike shapes over against leaves, twigs, wind swept branches, and so on. Effective bird-watching demands tuning one’s visual activity (looking back and forth and up and down, craning the neck, squinting, walking around, learning to use binoculars, and so on) in such a way that a flash of red jumps out from a background, even when no “bird shape” is evident, merely an oblique shoulder. Where the unpracticed eye sees a dense, impenetrable field, the practiced eye is able to perceive foreground and background and likely lighting spots on branches. This kind of example has no place in typical discussions of visual perception where the assumption is that perception happens in the mind/brain. In order to gain empirical evidence from the latter standpoint, the experimenter does everything possible to eliminate all variables extraneous to the simplest “stimulus” or “sense datum.” Heads may be rendered motionless, the gaze fixed, and flashes of colored light displayed. From the point of view of ecological perception, these kinds of experiments begin with mistaken assumptions about vision and can only lead to erroneous conclusions about functional perception.2 Ecological perception begins with the assumption that it is the living animal that perceives, not a brain or a mind, and that ecological perception is an activity that can only be accomplished in an animal’s direct intercourse with features of its ecosystem. Animals are in constant motion; they move around and through and passed features of their habitats, some of which are directly relevant to their vested interests and some of which are not. Many animals not only walk around objects of interest – squinting, looking left and right, moving to the sunlit side – they use hands or paws to turn things, stroke things, pluck things. And they sniff them, sometimes nip them, shake them, and so on. Animals do not act as passive receivers of meaningless stimuli; they actively seek out features of the habitat directly relevant to their well-being. Moreover, locomotion through a habitat is crucial for certain kinds of animal perception; for example, invariant features of the landscape (like trees for hiding behind) are perceived as invariant because of the appearance of looming as the animal nears and receding from view along a

118

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  periphery, and the looming and recession indicative of invariance is tied specifically to the animal’s size and rate of motion. 2. E cological Information Perception from an ecological point of view depends on there being particular kinds of information available to animals with particular sensory systems, body plans, patterns of locomotion, and so on. Ecological perception theory uses the term “information” in a way that is counter to the way we have become accustomed to using it. Following the work of Shannon and Weaver (1949), information has come to be understood as existing in “bits” conveyed through a “channel” or “medium” to be “decoded” when arriving at a “receiver.” This was especially useful in thinking about the degradation of messages sent via radios, telephone lines, and so on, as the bits, or units of information, could be quantified (for example, with a human voice converted to radio waves) as could the loss of intelligibility over time and/or distance. This way of thinking about information has become ubiquitous, especially as the technological devices we surround ourselves with embody this model of information processing.3 If we think about information available to a perceiving animal in its surround using this model, then the mind or mind/brain must process the discrete bits in order to construct a meaningful representation that can then generate a response. J. J. Gibson’s model of information presupposes available information that specifies features of an animal’s surround. This is a profoundly different understanding of “information.” E. J. Gibson and Anne Pick describe ecological information as the “structured distribution of energy in an ambient array that specifies events or aspects of events in the environment.” They continue: Information is not punctate, instantaneous or fleeting. It is spread over space and over time… J. J. Gibson called the description of visual stimulus information “ecological optics” to distinguish it from the optics of physics. It is a description of the distribution of light at a level appropriate for perceptual systems. Information is contained in arrays, for example, in the ambient array of light surrounding us. It is structured by the surfaces, boundaries, objects, and layout of the environment. (2000, 18) The information available in the ambient optical array specifies the objects and events salient for an animal; that is, the surfaces, objects, and events in the world are the sources for the structures of information embedded in the optical array and an animal with a visual system has access to those objects and events via the information. Again according to Gibson and Pick: “The optical disturbances created by an approaching car, for example, do not resemble the car; rather they uniquely specify it and its path of locomotion in relation to oneself.” This point is critical for ecological perception for “if information is fully specific to its sources in the world, then perception of the layout and objects and events in it is possible

Animal Judgment

119

  without hypothesizing processes of supplementation such as intermediary concepts and representations” (2000, 18). That is, under certain conditions properties of the animal’s world are directly perceivable by the animal. One of the most important conditions under which direct perception is possible is the movement of the animal (or, conversely, the movement of objects in the animal’s surround). Movement changes the ambient optical array, thereby providing salient information for the animal about what is in its world and about itself in relation to what is in its world. The ambient optical array “changes or flows as one moves one’s head around, stands up, sits down, or walks about” (2000, 18). Gibson and Pick add to this, saying: We move our heads to disocclude a portion of a temporarily invisible scene; we step forward to magnify a wanted view; we lean to peer around a corner or glance in our rearview mirror as we back the car. In sum, activities of observers result in changing points of view, perspective transformations, continuous occlusion and disocclusion of edges and boundaries, and flow patterns that specify one’s continuously changing relation to objects, paths, obstructions, and goals. The function of perceptual activity is to obtain information. (2000, 20) Whatever neural or other mental processes are associated with perception, they are secondary players when we consider living animals with adaptive perceptual systems as they wend their ways through life. Whatever the scientist is studying in the visual perception lab when the subject’s head is held motionless and flashes of colored light are projected in a darkened room, it is not perception as engaged in by animals actively embedded in an ecosystem seeking and finding (or not) what it needs to continue its life. We must be careful here, however, or we may be liable to committing what William James in The Principles of Psychology calls the “psychologist’s fallacy”; that is, of substituting a product of intellectual abstraction (a “concept”) for what is directly encountered (a “percept”). James was particularly concerned with perceptual and psychological theories of his own time that began with the assumption that the “what” that is perceived are sensations or sense data. As I noted above, one outcome of beginning with bits of sense data is that the mind or mind/brain must then accomplish both the integration of multi-modal discrete impingements streaming in from sense organs and perform meaning-giving functions on the meaningless bits now somehow bound together in a coherent representation of what is “outside.” James’s argument is somewhat different, though certainly related to the one I am making. For James, the assumption that what is perceived are meaningless bits of stimuli is thoroughly anti-empirical. What we find in experience are not meaningless bits of stimuli. The latter are, for James, “concepts”; they are abstractive products of a sophisticated theoretical endeavor. The “psychologist’s fallacy” is an instance of substituting the product

120

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  of theoretical abstraction (sense data) for the evidence that is found in direct experience. James writes: Most books start with sensations and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from the one below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever has a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. (1890/1981 219) My caution, following James’s lead, is that we not merely substitute information in the Gibsonian sense for sense data and end up in the same pickle. Information in an optical array, for example, is not what is perceived any more than sense data are what is perceived. Both should be seen as theoretical tools that may be more or less helpful in understanding how it is that animals are able to find and utilize what they need in on-going lives embedded in econiches. 3. A ffordances For ecological perception, what an animal seeks and responds to are not random patches of color or shape or texture that must be configured and given meaning by the mind/brain. Animals perceive “affordances,” or what is afforded by the habitat. J. J. Gibson claims that the

affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance does not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (1979/1986, 127) Basically, affordances are the opportunities for action available to particular animals in particular habitats and tied quite concretely to the animal’s body, perceptual systems, actions, and needs. For example, for some species of birds, small red berries are sought out and perceived as “eatable” or “affording eating.” Affordances are the relations that hold between animal species and the habitat at the level of the active organism. That is, our explanatory focus can shift in any number of ways when considering a bird finding and eating berries. If the order of explanation is one of extraction of nutrients by an energy consuming multi-celled organism, then “red, juicy, sweet roundness” cannot play a role in the description. In another order of explanatory focus, we may consider the change of frequency of a particular allele in a population gene pool linked to an enzyme more effective at breaking down fructose as drier conditions change local flora.

Animal Judgment

121

  Again, “red, juicy, sweet roundness” cannot play a role. But in the order of explanation of an animal with an adaptive visual system seeking a particular feeling in its mouth “red, juicy, sweet roundness” appears as a salient feature of the animal’s surround. The resources of the habitat constellated as red, juicy, sweet roundness afford eating for members of some species. While the earlier order of explanations are accurate descriptions at particular levels of generality, the perceiving animal is linked to its econiche in relations that must be described in quite different ways than those of nutrient extraction or enzyme production. The bird is not seeking “nutrients” or “fructose,” but things that are eatable by it. The nutrients necessary for the bird’s survival can be found in many other locations in its habitat, but the species has evolved to exploit the location of those in red, juicy, sweet roundness. The bird does not typically seek to link itself to any instance of red or juicy or sweet or roundness in its habitat, but only to the instances where these characteristics come clustered together. And because birds have played an important role in the reproductive success of the plants producing the berries, there has been natural selection pressure favoring those plants better able to display the cluster of traits that attract the perceptual activity (and eating activity) of members of that bird species. And natural selection pressure favors those individuals better at seeking and finding such clusters of characteristics than their conspecifics; hence perceptual systems evolve. (Below we will consider the fact that certain aspects of affordances may be too ephemeral to act as selection pressure on individuals; in these respects adaptive learning occurs at the ontogenetic level.) None of these levels of explanatory focus (nutrient extraction, enzyme production, berry-seeking) should hold us epistemically hostage; each may be accurate as long as we are clear about what we are trying to understand. Ecological perception assumes that acts of perception are acts of an animal as it seeks and secures (or fails to secure) the relations to its habitat necessary for its continued existence and well-being. If that is the case, then we need to pay particular attention to action of an animal at the grain of the animal in motion in its surround, not at the grain of its digestive system, or pattern of brain waves, or impulses in the optic nerve. Again, while each of these may be relevant, perception is most adequately understood as relations animal activity constitutes as the animal seeks what it needs. This necessitates the corollary consideration that the relations into which the animal enters with features of its habitat are features “scaled,” so to speak, quite concretely to the attributes of the animal. Hence, when thinking about the relation between an animal and its habitat that results in sustenance, the environmental corollary of the action is not sucrose or food, but specific constellations of traits perceived as eatable, or, more broadly, affordances. What is important to note here, and what makes ecological perception altogether different from other theories of perception, is that what is afforded by the econiche is constituted via specific relationships holding between traits of the niche and attributes of the animal. The attribute of eatability of the cluster “red, juicy, sweet roundness” in not separable from the actions of animals for which

122

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  this is the case, and at the same time it is a fact about the world that eating the berries sustains life for members of particular species. To put it another way, the eatability of this cluster of traits is an objective feature of nature, but an objective feature possible only because of its relation to animals whose perceptual systems are attuned to seeking and finding such. From this follows the claim that perception is “of” objective features of nature and these features are the result of animals actively seeking what they need. The import of this last claim will, I hope, become clearer as I continue my argument. But, for the moment, I believe these considerations allow us to avoid several of the deep conundrums evident in current work in philosophy of mind. In particular, the concept of affordances allows us to transfer our thinking about mind and perception from an outmoded version of physics to the realm of the life sciences – surely a reasonable change of venue. There is a growing body of research that supports Gibson’s account of direct perception of affordances;4 what remains contentious within the cohort of writers generally supportive of ecological perception has to do with the ontological status of affordances. For Gibson, eatability, traversability, and handgraspability, while naming particular kinds of relations between particular kinds of animals and habitat features, are not merely subjective impositions on an objective world best understood as it is described by physics or bio-chemistry. He writes: An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjectiveobjective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways… (1979/1986, 129) In a more provocative passage, Gibson writes: The theory of affordances is a radical departure from existing theories of value and meaning. It begins with a new definition of what value and meaning are. The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object… Physics may be value-free, but ecology is not. (1979/1986, 140) Many of those following Gibson in ecological perception and ecological psychology are troubled by these claims. For example, Anthony Chemero comments that this formulation “makes affordances seem like impossible, ghostly

Animal Judgment

123

  entities, entities that no respectable scientist (or analytic philosopher) could have as part of his or her ontology” (2009, 137). I would argue that affordances in the sense articulated by Gibson are not impossible, ghostly entities. Affordances are real features of econiches; affordances are precisely particular kinds of relations that hold between animal needs and features of the world; and an adequate understanding of mind is more likely with the model of ecological perception than with theories of perception that have as an underlying model the random impingement of meaningless sense datum on neural pathways delivering bits to a CPU. In order to draw the outline of this argument, I will suggest using a relational, ordinal ontology as a framework. I will not be championing this framework as providing the truth about perception, mind, and values – frameworks are not susceptible to claims of truth or falsity. Rather, I’ll use this as a means of reorienting our examination of what is available for our consideration. 4. A n O ntology of Constitutive Relationality Justus Buchler’s development of the generic metaphysical analysis of “natural complexes” and his insistence on “ontological parity” as a necessary presumption in our deliberations can give some guidance here.5 “Natural complex” is meant to convey a number of metaphysical commitments. The first is that anything and everything whatsoever that is exists as constellations of relations: there are no ultimate simples, and that whatever is, is a complex of nature. “Natural” in “natural complex” does not indicate that there might be “non-natural” complexes; it gives emphasis to the insistence that nothing may be excluded from the province of our most general lines of inquiry. Buchler does not begin by carving up whatever is into what is relevant to metaphysical analysis and what is irrelevant. Furthermore, “natural” in “natural complex” does not indicate that whatever is liable to metaphysical analysis is best understood via the natural sciences or analyses modeled on those of the natural sciences. “Natural” is more a rhetorical device; it is certainly not to be understood as one category among others. When speaking of our subject matter, “complex” would suffice. Buchler’s metaphysical system requires us to think of any discriminanda whatsoever (whether it ever has or ever will be discriminated by humans) as being fundamentally constituted relationally.6 A natural complex is located “in” and locates innumerable complexes; a natural complex comprises traits and each trait so comprised is itself a complex and the “constituent” traits are not strictly sequestered within the bounds of the complex of which they are constituents. For example, an important trait of my identity and personal history is that I am the eldest of 9 children. Each of my siblings has also been shaped by being 1 of 9, but none of them is the eldest and the differing birth order means different constitutive relations holding between each sibling and the set of siblings and between each sibling and each other sibling. It’s also the case that we have lost a brother and each of us now have somewhat different relations to each other and to the

124

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  immediate family as a whole. We are each now 1 of 8 children. The set of siblings is a natural complex that includes each sibling as a constituent element and each of us is a natural complex constituted at least in part through our relations to each other sibling and to our relations to the set of siblings. The siblings and my parents together are an identifiable natural complex with constituent traits: these include the relations holding between each of my parents and each of my siblings, their relations with a group of nine children, and so on, as well as the immediate family being located in and being a constituent of the set of relations we call the extended family. My immediate family is also located in the natural complex comprising mortal beings; the relations holding here include a brother who can only be remembered and a father gradually being lost to dementia. All members of the extended family are, or were, located in the complex of spatio-temporal entities. Some of us are at the same time located in the complex of living creatures. My deceased brother is spatio-temporally located beneath his gravestone, but I expect that some long dead members of my extended family no longer have a spatiotemporal integrity; they are dust. While they may no longer have that integrity, they may be constituents of individual memories or more widely shared as images in old photos or listed in genealogies or history books. Is there an advantage in having such an unruly and imprecise fundamental descriptor as “natural complex”? I would argue that there are many advantages, but here I’ll point out only two.7 The first is a kind of methodological prophylactic: we are not in the business of reducing our subject matter to the smallest and simplest bits which are themselves indivisible and hence what is “really real.” We are not seeking fundamental entities that have an existence independent of any relations other than those internal to the entity. When we do not begin with a default position of valorizing the small and the simple it becomes apparent that that is an impossible epistemological quest anyway. When we “find” the next candidate for smallest and simplest, “it” is in relation to, for example, an antecedent body of knowledge or technologically devised instruments or human inquirers, and so on. If “it” is available for human understanding, then that availability is a constituent trait, and “it” cannot be what “it is” without that relational trait, at least as a possibility. Whatever it might mean for “something” to “exist” as a relationless simple, it would be forever beyond the ken of human knowledge and experience and irrelevant to inquiry.8 Additionally, according to Buchler’s ordinal metaphysics, everything is not related to everything else, and there is no all-enveloping natural complex of which all others are components but which is not itself standing in constitutive relations. Given that whatever is is constituted in terms of its relations, there cannot be a “whole” of nature that is not itself embedded in a set of relations (1978, 157–168). An important implication of the latter consideration is that we are blocked from an uncritical assumption of a totality that is composed of “parts” that must be homogeneous if they are all to belong to a single totality. Beyond its usefulness as a preventive measure against a well-worn but obstacle-strewn path, beginning with “natural complex” (or “complex”) as the

Animal Judgment

125

  starting point of inquiry allows us to make sense of many features of the world we encounter that otherwise remain problematic. John Ryder gives the example of a pond ecosystem in illustrating Buchler’s concept of natural complex: The constituents of the pond all exist in a web of relations such that each conditions the others. In cases of an ecosystem like this the relations between two or more specific constituents may be so great that some are the condition of the very existence of others… In a scenario like this it is impossible to conceive of the constituents as possessing entirely independent traits, even what used to be called “primary attributes.” Size, shape, weight, and color, not to mention behavioral characteristics, are each constituted by the relational web that constitutes the system. No constituent of the pond has its traits “absolutely.” The constituents all exist and have the traits that they do by virtue of the specific relations among them. (2013, 34) As far as I know, ecologists are not familiar with Buchler’s metaphysics,9 yet their intellectual commitment to their subject matter is similar. That is, the ecologist is not in the business of discovering the indivisibly smallest bits out of which a pond ecosystem is built. Of course one could study an ecosystem in terms of energy transformations, but then one loses precisely what is most interesting to the ecologist – the patterns of relations that hold among and between various flora and fauna and the material and historical conditions supporting that life. This leads to a second key component of Buchler’s metaphysical system, a commitment to “ontological parity.” The claim of ontological parity demands that we consider all natural complexes equally real. Stars, G-rated movies, belief in God, God, the distance between Mars and Jupiter are all natural complexes, as are dreams, the character Jane Eyre, and mistakes on my tax returns. All of these are equally real in that each has traits, is a constituent of and comprises other natural complexes, and so on; there are no “degrees” of reality in light of ontological parity. This is an entailment of “natural complex”: if there are no fundamental simples to which everything may be ultimately reduced, then there is no yardstick for measuring how near or far something is from this state of ultimacy. Buchler does away with all talk about “reality,” given the impossibly embrangled conceptual knots we are left with when trying to prioritize what is “really real” and distinguish those (entities? actions? ideas? places?) that are not so real or only quasi-real or irreal or unreal. Again, Buchler gives us novel terminology that allows us to sidestep some of the calcified conceptual habits embedded in talk of “reality,” “existence,” “Being,” and other such general terms that are meant to identify what is relevant to metaphysical analysis and what drops out.10 While there are no degrees of reality, it is also the case that complexes may prevail in particular orders, while not in others. “Orders” (or “ordinality”) is a way of recognizing that natural

126

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  complexes are both embedded in and embed natural complexes as traits that constitute an integrity at each level. Buchler writes: Each man is an order of complexes, and so (on another level) is man; and each, therefore, comprises innumerable sub-orders. Every one of them has a definable character, an integrity. There is an order that consists in the individual man as a whole, but there is also a sub-order that consists in his nervous system. Ordinarily the nervous system is made intelligible in terms of the larger order to which it belongs. But to some extent and in some respect, the nervous system itself is a sphere of intelligibility; to that extent, it is not solely a constituent of the larger order. (1974, 88) Buchler lists “Mount Everest or the laws of arithmetic or The Brothers Kara mazov or the brothers Karamazov or the possibility of eliminating economic poverty or the hippopotamus I picture walking a tightrope.” He goes on: Each prevails in an order, an order of  complexes  to  which  it  belongs… [T]he large iceberg does not prevail in any different sense than a small iceberg. In the everyday sense of the term, the victor “prevails” over the vanquished. But metaphysically, the victor prevails as the victor that he is, and the vanquished prevails as the vanquished that he is. And whatever is, prevails in the way that it does. Each is dominant in so far as it is what it is in the way that it is with the scope that it has. A prevalence excludes – it excludes alternatives to itself. (1974, 130) For example, the character Jane Eyre does not belong to the order of spatiotemporally located biological entities. To say that because of that fact that Jane Eyre is not real is to deny that her character has had a tremendous impact on individual readers and movie-goers, on the economic fortunes of publishing houses, on the shape of the canonical works of English literature, and so on. Jane Eyre “prevails” in many orders (subjects of English literature courses, film adaptations, book publishing, individual imaginations, and so forth). In what sense is she not real? We would claim she is not real if we take the position that only spatio-temporally located individuals are real – with perhaps the additional caveat that they must be here now present to us. Otherwise, of course, they are in our imagination or our memory, and hence not “really real.” But one could make the argument that Jane Eyre is more real than most spatio-temporally located individuals in that ramifications of her existence are far more widespread than what follows in the wake of many of our lives. But from the framework of ordinality, Jane Eyre prevails in some orders, though not in others. Our consideration of her becomes muddled and likely incoherent if we assume that she has a lesser degree of reality than other kinds of natural complexes. The commitment to ontological parity does not mean a kind of metaphysical promiscuity where any sort of claim has equal standing demanding

Animal Judgment

127

  its inclusion willy-nilly in any analysis. Claiming that “phlogiston” is a natural complex and, as such, has no less a degree of reality than Mount Rushmore says nothing about the relevance of phlogiston in contemporary natural science (or that of Mount Rushmore in contemporary natural science, for that matter). Positively, ontological parity allows us to consider the pond ecosystem as describable in many respects in terms of energy transformations, entropy, and so on. But ontological parity does not allow us to consider such descriptions, in the order of physical processes, to render the ecosystem in the order of living (and dying) plants and animals as any less real or available for understanding and wonder. The ecosystem is, at one and the same time, located in the order describable by the laws of physics and located in the order of the experience of living animals as they seek food, mates and safety. These two orders may have some degree of overlap, but they are not identical; hence one cannot be reduced to the other. For example, the pond as an ecosystem includes the evolutionary history of the various species of plants and animals; it comprises adaptations that cannot be decomposed into constituent physical elements. Any current ecosystem is an accumulation of histories structured by contingent events and each of those histories conditions and shapes the accumulative histories of at least some others. The laws of physics cannot account for histories of contingencies (though of course those histories may not abrogate the laws of physics). A methodological commitment to ontological parity and a metaphysical commitment to natural complexes allow us to think coherently about what we find when we look at animals embedded in econiches. That is, the traits of individual creatures making a living (or not) are dependent upon and conditioned by the relations that hold between the creature and the features of the econiche (including other living creatures). For example, the reproductive success of individual creatures depends not only on whether they find appropriate mates, but on innumerable other relations. Hormones regulating ovulation may fluctuate given the ebb and flow of predators. The ebb and flow of predators may depend on changes in hunting and trapping laws. The successful fledging of young birds may depend on stable weather conditions. We may attribute reproductive success to the individual animal, but it is a trait highly dependent on many other factors. As well as “belonging to” sets of relations that condition traits of individual animals (predator/prey, mating opportunities, and so on), individual animals embed sets of relations. These latter should not be thought of as “internal” rather than “external” relations. While the digestive system is “in” an animal, the integrity of the individual digestive system is also constituted through relations that are wider than the individual animal. For example, the bacteria in the gut of an animal are necessary for digestion and, at least for some mammals, the gut bacteria are passed along to a newborn from its mother when it swallows them while moving through the birth canal. An ordinal, relational metaphysics insists on the irreducible complexity we find when considering animal life. It also requires us to admit into our analyses whatever it is we do find; we cannot dismiss as “unreal” or “merely subjective”

128

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  those attributes of nature that cannot be understood as having an existence independent of the activity of living creatures. The eatability of the berries is a real feature of nature that arises given a particular set of relations between members of certain bird and plant species. The traversability of a landscape is a fact about the world, but one that is conditioned by the attributes of animals within the landscape. These considerations indicate that the relations that hold between an animal and its econiche can be considered to have as much ontological standing as the animal itself or the objects that populate its ecosystem (or neurochemical brain processes or photons striking the back of the eyeball). Affordances are not “ghostly entities” to be eschewed for their unreality, but natural complexes to be investigated for their structures, functions, relevance, and so forth. Affordances are natural complexes, relationships holding between animals and particular resources of their econiches. These relationships are multifarious, as is the case for any natural complex. 5. E cological Psychology There is no way to make sense of ecological perception of affordances within the framework of the dominant contemporary discussions of mind. Yet from an evolutionary point of view – in which natural selection pressures modify speciestypical attributes such that the attributes are better tuned (relatively speaking) to acquiring what animals need to survive long enough to reproduce – ecological perception makes perfect sense. We should not expect that adaptations in perceptual systems make them perfectly fit keys to unlock a doorway to environmental information; natural selection puts pressure on what is already there and most adaptations are more like Rube Goldberg inventions than finelytuned watches. On the other hand, if information specifying what an animal needs is always already available in the ambient optical array, for example, then any animal only minimally better than conspecifics in utilizing that information would be at a reproductive advantage. We would also expect to see countless ways of gaining access to that information; and indeed there are innumerable speciesspecific perceptual systems exploiting various attributes of the optical array. If perception is an activity of an animal in direct intercourse with its econiche and not a neural activity switching on a meaning-giving processor in the brain or a mysterious correlation between minds that are not reducible to physical properties and an external world that is, then how ought we think about cognition or mind? Following the insights provided by Gibson, Edward Reed developed a rich set of hypotheses in “ecological psychology,” tightly tied both to the empirical evidence in research on ecological perception and to the principle of evolution through natural selection. Notably, Reed does not discuss “mind” in his major work; the term does not appear in the index of Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology (1996).11 This makes sense given his grounding in ecological perception. If animals have direct access to salient

Animal Judgment

129

  information specifying affordances, then most of what are typically considered functions of “mind” is redundant. For example, binding multi-modal sensations into a unified representation that somehow corresponds to DANGER! Or EAT ME! and then triggers action is unnecessary. Filling in the “gaps” presumably left given the assumption of discrete bits of information (to explain for example, why we don’t seem to see as if we were viewing rapidly changing snapshots) would also be extraneous if information in the ambient optical array is continuous over some temporal spread of perception rather than punctate bits of data. Even more fundamentally, Reed shares with Gibson a commitment not to begin inquiry with the unexamined assumption that mind and world are disparate and that the task at hand is to figure out if there is any way to come to understand how a private, internal, subjective sphere of personal experience can come to have a clear grasp of something in the objective sphere of nature surrounding the animal: an animal and its econiche must be understood as an interlocking system. For Reed, the subject matters of a properly naturalistic psychology are the various ways that animals regulate and adjust their actions to link themselves to the affordances necessary to support their continued existence and well-being. As Reed puts it: The unifying idea behind ecological psychology is its approach to the subject matter of psychology. From an ecological approach, psychology must take an animal ’s encounters with its surroundings as the fundamental phenomena to be explained. Moreover, The heart of ecological psychology is a functional account of these encounterings: animals seek out the affordances of the environment, doing so by means of available information. The functions of encounters are achieved – to the extent that they ever are, which is never fully, for encounters often put individual animals at risk – because animals are able to find and use available affordances. (1996, 184) From this theoretical perspective, the proper study of psychology includes neither mental activities nor brain states as primary objects of inquiry, nor does it include environmental triggers for behavioral responses as primary objects of inquiry. Above I made the argument that we can give ontological standing to affordances even if they are constituted in relation to what we typically think of as subjective experience. In fact, that’s a bit simplistic, though some ecological psychologists hold the position that affordances exist only when particular animals are actively engaged with them; that is, that affordances do not have an existence independent of their actual utilization. Reed calls this the “mutualist” perspective and argues against it. I agree with Reed on this, but I need to make

130

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  some finer distinctions in order to make the argument. This will, I believe, indicate more clearly the purview of ecological psychology. The further distinction that is needed is between the evolutionary history of affordances and the role they play in individual organisms’ lives. The affordances available for any particular member of a species today are the result of a co-evolution of the species ancestors, ancestral predators and prey, and so on – the description above of the co-evolution of visible traits of berries and certain bird species’ visual perception systems is an example of this. This is in addition to those ecosystem features that are not themselves subject to the pressures of natural selection (climate patterns, geological events, and so on). Some of the latter were subjected to modification by ancestral species and while such modifications are not adaptations, they may have changed the selection pressures for current organisms – coral reefs are an example of this. Affordances available for any particular creature are the culmination of millennia of evolutionary and co-evolutionary processes – they are historically determined products of prior interactions of animals in their econiches. Affordances are no less objective than the geological formations that have left evidence of the movement of tectonic plates or fossil remains that have left evidence of prior life forms. The eatability of the red berries is a fact about the econiche, whether or not any particular bird avails itself of this affordance. As Reed puts it: Having said that affordances are relations between organisms and their surroundings, it is important to clarify a persistent misinterpretation of the concept. This is what has come to be called a “mutualist” approach to the study of affordances. Mutualists argue that affordances do not exist without the animal that perceives or uses them… Although this argument has an admirable  pedigree… it is nevertheless wrong. An ecological niche is something that is available to a population of organisms, even if not completely used by any one member of that population… There is always an asymmetry between an environment and its inhabitants. Each organism requires its environment for its sustained existence, but the environment does not require any given organism for its sustained existence. (1996, 26) My comments and Reed’s just above contend that affordances are relations, have ontological standing as objective, cannot exist without a history of animaleconiche co-constitution and have an existence independent of the experience of any particular creature. Affordances are possibilities built into econiches, possibilities that may become actualized through the activity of individual creatures. This claim is stronger than it might seem; it should be considered in light of the principle of ontological parity. A possible state of affairs has as much ontological standing as an actual state of affairs, though each of these as a natural complex prevails in some order(s) and not others, is embedded in some set of natural complexes rather than others, and embeds some set of natural complexes and not others. Any

Animal Judgment

131

  affordance has an existence apart from any particular creature finding and utilizing that affordance, and the affordance stands in multiple sets of relations with other complexes. The affordance also has an evolutionary history shared with the ancestors of any particular creature. The affordance may enter into the relational orbit of an individual creature as a result of the actions of the animal as it seeks what it needs and coordinates and regulates various organismic systems to bring itself into alignment with the affordance. From an ordinal metaphysical position, this is what Reed means by “encountering,” the primary object of inquiry for ecological psychology. “Encountering” seems as sensible a term as any for an animal’s primary relationship with its econiche. It certainly is preferable, I believe, to exporting the misguided conceptual implications of “mind” to cover what animals other than human animals do as they make their way through life. (Imagine trying to determine what sorts of “representations” earthworms have as they dig burrows.) It also allows us to recognize the continuities we expect to find widely distributed across species, including Homo sapiens, which is what evolution through natural selection implies, without attributing mind to gnats and tadpoles. There surely are distinctions to be made in terms of the typical means of encountering affordances, as these will be, in many respects species specific, by definition. These distinctions are part of the research agenda for a robust ecological psychology. But there is a broad distinction that can be made, one that is especially pertinent for consideration here. That is, some (many? most?) encountering activity can be understood as adaptive behavior that flows primarily from an evolutionary history of ancestral reproductive success and the inheritance of genetic material from those ancestors. For example, the affordances available for many species of snakes are constrained by the selection pressures on millennia of ancestors resulting in the particular body plan and means of locomotion exhibited by snakes. For snakes, airborne birds are not affordances, though for those snakes that have adapted as tree dwellers, some nesting birds may afford eating. But other aspects of encountering are much less constrained by evolutionary adaptations. Some of the matters of life and death for individual creatures are too ephemeral to leave a trace in the genetic legacy and yet they must be dealt with if the creature is to survive and reproduce. For example, the prey available for a ground dwelling snake may be constrained by evolutionary history – heat emitting moving objects in a particular size range. The perceptual systems of the snake may be genetically “pre-set” to locate these, but the variability of an individual snake’s circumstances means that it will encounter selection pressures (what will kill it or sustain it) that would have been inconstant in the lives of its ancestors. Furthermore, escaping prey must run unpredictable paths; if they did not, ancestral predators would have adapted to the predictable paths and the prey species would not have left many offspring. What all this implies is that an animal in active engagement with unpredictable affordances (which way prey will run, where red berries will be found this year, where to find spider silk for nest making, how hungry predators are after a dry

132

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  season) must be able to coordinate, regulate, and fine-tune an array of attributes and activities if it is to find and utilize affordances. That is, at least for some animals, the unpredictability of affordance requires not only ontogenetic learning (fledglings encountering variable gusts of winds), but also an ability to coordinate various bodily systems in novel ways to link to unpredictable affordances (a snake hunting mice across a terrain that has been subject to recent flashfloods). These broader tasks of animal life are the subject of ecological psychology as well, with ecological perception a piece of that puzzle. Ecological psychology also studies the activities of appraisal or evaluation. The world does not push a series of sensory buttons that compel an animal to react; animals actively seek out information specifying affordances (those features that are of value in the on-going existence of the animal). As noted above, Gibson claimed that perceiving affordances “is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object… Physics may be value-free, but ecology is not” (1979/1986, 140). To take an example from another author in a different context (Arnhart 1998, 24–25): hermit crabs do not grow their own protective shells; they move in to occupy shells left by snails. They do this several times as they outgrow one and then another and often ‘try on’ several shells over a period of days or weeks before donning another. Which shell becomes occupied is complicated by the fact that there is competition among hermit crabs seeking shells and a corollary status hierarchy in which desirability of a particular shell for protective purposes must be balanced against the danger of picking a fight with the wrong competitor. Empirical evidence shows behavior that is species specific, but not stereotypic.12 Arnhart concludes that the behavior of hermit crabs displays a “normative structure”: [T]hey have natural desires, they have natural capacities for gathering information relevant to their desires, and they are naturally inclined to do whatever seems to satisfy their desires according to their evaluation of the information. (1998, 25) Arnhart does not refer to Gibson, Reed, or any others working on ecological perception or ecological psychology, but he is working from a Darwinian perspective, and this example seems particularly apt as an introduction to some final considerations. 6. Judgment There is a fundamental concept used by Buchler that is extraordinarily rich in its capacity to undercut stultifying dichotomies and extend our ability to think about human nature. This is the notion of “judgment,” the category developed by Buchler to analyze what he understands to be traits indicative of human existence. He writes:

Animal Judgment

133

  A man’s being acquires its essential character from two sources: the circumstances which befall him and the ways in which he judges the world… These ways of judging inevitably derive from and are dependent upon more pervasive conditions than a man’s own being provides. But they are the ways in which man grasps, delineates, bounds, and exposes his being and his world; they are the defining processes, the continuing definitions, of his being and his world. Furthermore: The products of a man’s life and history – described most generically as his acts or deeds, his assertions or declarations, and his contrivances – are his judgments… To the extent that a man can be said to be the product of other natural complexes, he does not judge. To the extent that any complexes can be said to be his products, he judges. (1974, 92) And an instance of judging is a “stance adopted” in determining and redetermining the “complexes of his world”; it may be exhibited “through what he includes  and  excludes,  preserves  and  destroys,  is  inclined  to  and  averse  to…” (1974, 93). Buchler identifies three types of judgment: active, exhibitive, and assertive.13 These correspond roughly to doing, making, and saying, but these are not as simple as they sound. A nod, for example, is an action that may function assertively when in a philosophical discussion. The recitation of a poem is typically not an instance of assertion, though we can imagine a case where a poem that signifies love of country may function as such. If there is a fundamental category in Buchler’s work that would be comparable to “mind” in the sense that I am pointing to in this essay, it would be that of judgment. But we must exercise caution in this, as he uses the triune category to undercut most assumptions about mind. Buchler describes several fundamental misconceptions about judgment that must be avoided. Judgments are not to be limited to deliberation, or to occasions of “intention or voluntary choice” (1974, 93). Judgment is also not to be equated with a “mental operation” (1974, 94). Closely related to this misconception is another: that judgment “always takes the form of thinking something or saying something about something else” or as claims of truth or falsity (1974, 95). By avoiding these assumptions, Buchler is able to develop a more generic category, hence one with greater explanatory reach and one that does not lend itself to mystifying dichotomies. In particular, it allows us to predicate judgment of the individual person, as a cumulative history exhibiting a direction and in multifarious relations with other natural complexes, as opposed to predicating judgment of a mind. Judgments are “products” of individuals, and as such actualize “a relation between the individual and some natural complex, but a relationship consummated by him.” Furthermore, a judgment “defines a place

134

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  where he stands. Collectively, a man’s judgments constitute the record of all the places where he stands – meaning all that he does, makes, and says” (1955, 10). Judgment in this sense is closely related to appraisal or evaluation, at least insofar as we don’t fall into the errors listed above. For example, Buchler describes the act of taking a short cut home as making a judgment. He writes that: He is devising or applying a technique that arises out of what he is and what he has been. To say that in taking the short cut he is making a judgment does not mean that he is asserting to himself what goals the action will accomplish. It is his action that is the judgment. (1955, 11) Buchler cautions that we should not interpret this claim to mean that the man “said to himself, this is the shortest way home.” He goes on: If the man walking home were completely preoccupied with other matters and took the shortest path automatically, this habitual action would still, fully as much as the verbal representation, embody a policy relating him to his environment and to his own past history, and characterize the existences among which he is located. (1955, 12) Given what Buchler cautions against in considering judgment – that it need not be conscious, or a mental operation, or an assertion of truth, or a linguistic utterance – and given his characterization directly above about an exemplar of active judgment, it seems to be stretching the category of active judgment very little to apply it to other animals in some way. This seems especially true when we look at what Buchler says about the appraisive function of judgment. Every judgment is a “pronouncement” (though of course not every pronouncement is an assertion or verbal construction) and to “separate appraisal and pronouncement is impossible. In pronouncing upon traits we are appraising their status in relation to other traits” (1955, 13). A bit later Buchler uses this example: A discriminative and appraisive phase of action obtains on the animal level. If we choose to regard shivering from the cold as a form of action by the organism rather than as a mere event in its life, we cannot overlook its total character as an act: by its act the organism is appraising a situation as discomfiting, having made a primitive discrimination of quality and responded by a form of movement instead of inert submission. (1955, 15) Recall the example of hermit crab earlier. Whatever morphological traits it has by dint of its evolutionary history, a hermit crab is constantly active in merely maintaining a relatively stationary position over against an inherently unpredictable background of micro-events such as shifting grains of sand, erratic currents, unexpected predators, and so on as it waits for lunch. Now imagine the

Animal Judgment

135

  hermit crab not merely maintaining its posture and orientation in relation to its surroundings, which affords it opportunities for feeding, but at the same time seeking something that affords shelter because of increasing pressure of its adopted shell as it grows larger. Its perceptual systems are tuned to information in its surround that specify such objects, maintain basic orientation to its surround, be on alert for what offers danger, and so on. Once a possible new shell is found it must be appraised and if competitors for the shell are near, the relative danger they afford must be assessed as well. The crabs are actively seeking out and appraising what the world affords in the sense in which Buchler suggests happens in active judgment when we avoid the pitfalls of mentalistic presumptions. While we might not want to ascribe mind to hermit crabs – and I’m sympathetic to relegating the term “mind” to the dustbin altogether, as it seems to denote a grab-bag of disparate functions and tends to lead to more trouble than it is worth – I believe the notion of active judgment will provide a useful way of framing some of the questions we ask about how many animals, including human animals, encounter the world. NOTES 1. Aligned with this, the second half of the 20th century gave us the model of computers as the foundational metaphor for cognitive processes proper. The crude physics picture of cognition and the computer model are not identical, of course, but there is sufficient overlap to provide a formidable edifice of peculiar sorts of naturalistic assumptions regarding mind and cognition. The mind as software metaphor demands its own rebuttal, one beyond the scope of this essay. 2. Gibson makes distinctions between conceptions of how vision should be understood and the sorts of experimental evidence that are implicated in those conceptions. If the evidence sought relies on the subject’s head held motionless, vision fixated on a point and momentary flashes projected on the eye, we assume that vision is like a snapshot. If the experiment includes longer gazing while still held motionless and fixated while a series of patterns are projected, we assume that vision is akin to a sequence of snapshots taken through an aperture with vision as akin to a series of snapshots. Visual perception studies do not typically include “ambient vision” (swiveling the head) and “ambulatory vision” (walking around). For Gibson, the latter are essential in understanding ecological vision. (1979/1986, 1–2) 3. It has also become the norm in areas other than computation. For example, the National Communication Association, the professional body representing all communication disciplines, is explicit in its commitment to the Shannon/Weaver model as offering the best and most comprehensive account of human communication in every sphere of life (http://www.natcom.org/discipline/). 4. See, for example, Lee (2014), Newcombe (2014), and Kim (2012). 5. Buchler’s metaphysical system is extraordinarily rich and far-reaching in its ramifications. In this short piece, I can only indicate some of its features. For recent work using a Buchlerian framework, see John Ryder (2013) and Lawrence Cahoone (2013).

136

ELIZABETH BAETEN

  Buchler offers his most sustained discussions of “natural complex” and “ontological parity” in The Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (1990). 6. This is not a claim about internal and/or external relations as if internal relations constitute the necessary conditions for the identity of an entity and external relations constituting the contingent conditions of the entity. 7. See John Ryder’s The Things in Heaven and Earth: An Essay in Pragmatic Naturalism (2013). 8. I do not at all mean to imply that whatever is is in some constitutive relation with human experience or inquiry. Whatever we discover will have as a trait the possibility of being known or experienced. If we can know it, it cannot be a relationless simple. I am also not claiming that the integrity of a complex that stands in some relation to human experience is altered in some significant way when this relation is consummated. Buchler speaks of “strong” and “weak” relevance to mark this important point. For example, there are relations that hold between me and the sun; my integrity as a natural complex is only (very) weakly relevant to the integrity of the sun as a natural complex, while the sun is strongly relevant to my integrity as a living creature. 9. But see, for example, Stanley Salthe (2003), who offers an account of evolution informed by Buchler’s metaphysics. 1 0. I believe that Buchler attempts to engage in a more radical critique of fundamental metaphysical category than that engaged in by John Dewey. Dewey certainly warned us to avoid the pitfalls of granting existential priority to those features of life that we covet or desire – like the stable over the precarious. Buchler’s metaphysical analytical mill can use any grist whatsoever: nothing is excluded from the arena of the fundamental description of natural complexes, not even the arena. 11. This is not quite accurate. Reed briefly discusses cognitive ethology and its attempts to develop a psychology adequate to a Darwinian understanding of animal life forms. From a Darwinian perspective, of course, we would expect to see many correlations between activities and attributes of the human animal and other animals, including those we call cognitive. In response to Donald Griffin’s contention that other animals have mental representations that are used to guide behavior, that there is a “mind” behind animal action (1994), Reed remarks: “There simply is no mind behind what animals (or people, for that matter) do. There are however, actions that embody awareness and other actions that do not.” (98) Reed is, of course, refusing to buy into a bifurcation of mind/nature or subjective/objective. (Baeten 2012) 12. Arnhart does not make this point, but it is relevant: stereotypic or instinctive behavior can gain evolutionary purchase only over against relatively invariant habitat features; many actions undertaken by animals arise in contexts where salient features are variable across many dimensions and often in principle unpredictable. 13. Buchler published two volumes on judgment, Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment (1951/1979) and Nature and Judgment (1955/1965). A third volume, The Main of Light (1974), is an extended inquiry into poetry as the subject of his general philosophic framework, especially as the concept of “exhibitive judgment” can be brought to bear.

REFERENCES Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Rights: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature . Albany: State University of New York Press.

Animal Judgment

137

 

Baeten,  Elizabeth.  2014.  “Steps  Toward a  Zoology  of  Mind.”  Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28(2): 107–129. Buchler, Justus. 1951/1979. Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment . Mineoloa, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Buchler, Justus. 1955. Nature and Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. Buchler, Justus. 1978. “Probing the Idea of Nature.” Process Studies 8: 157–168. Buchler, Justus. 1974. The Main of Light. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buchler, Justus. 1990. Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, 2nd edn. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cahoone, Lawrence. 2013. The Orders of Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press. Chemero, Anthony. 2009. Radical E mbodied Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Gibson, Eleanor J., and Anne D. Pick. 2000. An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, James J. 1979/1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Griffin, Donald. 1994. Animal Minds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, William. 1890/1981. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Kim, Nam-Gyoone 2012. “Ocular Effects in the Size-Distance Paradox and the Moon Illusion.” Ecological Psychology 24: 122–138. Lee, David. 2014. “Moving to Make Contact,” Ecological Psychology 26: 47–59. Newcombe, Nora. 2014. “The Origins and Development of Magnitude Estimation.” Ecological Psychology 26: 147–157. Reed, Edward. 1996. Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryder, John. 2013. The Things in Heaven and Earth: An Essay in Pragmatic Naturalism. New York: Fordham University Press. Shannon, C. E., and Warren Weaver. 1963. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

138

ELIZABETH BAETEN

 

Salthe, Stanley. 2003. Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Elizabeth Baeten Institute for Liberal Arts Emerson College 157 Taunton Street Wrentham, Massachusetts 02093 United States