Abstract
Several articles published in this journal over a number of years have examined the social dimensions of Gibsonian ecological psychology. The present paper picks up several of their themes, with an emphasis on the social developmental consequences of individuals participating in community structures and engaging the affordances that support them. From this perspective, the situated nature of activity in everyday settings is examined, which in turn highlights the role of places as higher order emergent eco-psychological structures (or behavior settings) in everyday life. Moreover, ecological psychology’s discovery of occluding edge effects, which demonstrates that objects that have gone out of sight are experienced as persisting in awareness, serves as the basis for a proposal that the awareness of social structures of a conceptual nature may arise from the pragmatics of perception–action from an ecological perspective.
Theory & Psychology has provided a venue over a number of years for articles examining the social dimensions of Gibsonian ecological psychology (e.g., Costall, 1995; Good, 2007; Pederson & Bang, 2016; van Djik & Withagen, 2014, 2016). To orient readers unfamiliar with this form of ecological psychology, 1 suffice it to say here at the outset that James J. Gibson (1966, 1967, 1979) saw ecological psychology most fundamentally as offering the unorthodox view within perceptual psychology and philosophy of mind that individuals experience the environment directly. A claim of direct perception, and its commitment to direct realism, means that features and events of the environment surrounding the individual are perceived without the mediation of nonperceptual processes such as cognitive inference. Under those latter circumstances, individuals would experience the environment indirectly by way of mediating processes, such as via mental representations. By denying the role of processes of cognitive mediation in environmental perception, ecological psychology stands in stark opposition to several centuries of perceptual theorizing that placed the burden of perceiving primarily on those processes, resulting in a lineage of perceptual theories that embrace an epistemological commitment to indirect realism.
It has seemed to many commentators on ecological psychology that Gibson directed his attention only occasionally and sporadically to the social dimensions of perceptual experience. That is an understandable conclusion to reach given the way in which his thinking about ecological psychology was explicated in his two books; and yet that seemingly cursory attention to the social should strike us as rather surprising in view of Gibson’s long-standing interest in social psychology beginning even in the earliest decades of his career (Reed, 1988). In this light, a number of publications in recent years, besides those cited above (see also, Costall & Richards, 2013; Heft, 2018; Reed, 1996), demonstrate that Gibson paid far more attention to the social dimensions of perceptual experience than has often been recognized even by those sympathetic to ecological psychology.
The aim of this brief essay is to pick up several of the threads developed in the previously cited Theory & Psychology articles and to explore their implications for an ecological psychology with an emphasis on the sociocultural dimensions of the human econiche. An underlying theme here is that when Gibson turns his attention to perceiving among humans in the course of everyday life in particular that his awareness of the role of the social dimensions of human experience on perception becomes especially apparent. Drawing on some of the earlier publications in this journal and elsewhere (e.g., Heft, 2017, 2018), I will propose that the ways individuals engage the environment, in large measure, grow out of an ongoing developmental history of participation in social practices within their community. 2
Preliminaries
One immediate advantage of embracing the epistemological position of direct realism, if it can be shown to be viable, is that it arguably provides for our post-Darwinian age a more straightforward way to conceptualize perceiving as an adaptive function than do received indirect, representational views. The perspective that has held sway for centuries is one that assumes perceiving to be an “intellectualized” process of mental construction operating “within” the mind of the individual. From that stance, functioning in an adaptive manner in the environment would seem to be a matter of ongoing, considerable guesswork from a stance removed from the environment—a consequence that is in evidence from Hume’s (1748/1955) analysis of perceived causality to Helmholtz’s (1860/1924) unconscious inference to contemporary probabilistic models of perceiving.
On its face, at least, and in the wake of evolutionary theory, indirect perception in its various theoretical manifestations would seem to be a rather precarious way of operating adaptively. In this vein, indeed several ecological psychologists have argued that such an account remains anachronistically tied to assumptions that are rooted in pre-Darwinian eras (e.g., Heft, 2001; Lombardo, 1987; Reed, 1996; Turvey, 2019). A theory of direct perception such as the kind Gibson offers is not only more parsimonious than indirect accounts, which posit the involvement of any number of postperceptual processes; but it would seem to reduce the degree of cognitive uncertainty that accompanies standard representationalist accounts of perceiving. In short, a direct theory of perception seems prima facie to hold out the prospects for an account of perceiving that is comparatively more compatible with the adaptive necessities of functioning amidst the changing circumstances of the everyday environment.
Any concerns about the adequacy of indirect theories of perception in accounting for adaptive functioning in relation to material properties of the environment should only grow when we turn our attention to the social dimensions of daily life. Individuals not only perceive other persons as they do other features of the environment as “objects” of perception, but regularly, they must co-ordinate their activities in relation to the dynamics of ongoing interpersonal processes. Indeed, societal and community actions in human societies, where the complexities of interpersonal processes seem to exceed those of most other species (including social insects), depend on co-ordination with the actions of others. The sociocultural dimensions of human life typically are marked by ongoing and often integrated and interdependent actions among individuals. Arguably, such actions are available to be perceived in publicly accessible domains of everyday life. If that can be demonstrated to be so, the direct perception approach offered by ecological psychology might be well-suited to account for how an individual can “stay in touch” with the dynamic, reciprocal exchanges that characterize these intersubjective, joint processes. Alternative indirect “intellectualized” approaches to perception that relegate experience of the world to so many separate minds (e.g., as in so-called “theory of mind”; see Leudar & Costall, 2009) as a foundation for explanations of interpersonal co-ordination simply strain credulity. That said, the social dimensions of daily life have received far less attention within much of the ecological psychology literature than have issues closer to traditional topics of perceptual theory. The citations above point to efforts that attempt to extend the scope of ecological psychology in the direction of the social dimensions of living.
One theme in particular has emerged across several of these publications, and my goal in this brief article is to explicate and elaborate on it. Stated in the form of a question, that theme is the following: “how do considerations of the social dimensions of everyday life as a context for individual development inform our understanding of the nature of perception–action from an ecological perspective?” Note that this question does not necessarily limit our attention to perceiving other persons, but can include our engagement with inanimate features of the environment. Overall, the question as posed suggests that developing as a participant in a community’s sociocultural practices may affect the ways an individual engages the environment broadly speaking.
Objects of perception and ways of engagement
As will be familiar to most readers of this journal, studies of visual perception in modern psychology have been profoundly shaped by discussions of epistemology among philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries working in the so-called British tradition. Generally, a central question driving these efforts is: How do individuals acquire knowledge about the world around them? This approach has led to a focus on the “objects” of perception, which aligns with the formative Cartesian image of a physical world standing independently and apart from the perceiver. Two different shifts in thinking—one in 18th-century philosophy and the other in the biological sciences of 19th century—have offered alternative ways to think about the nature of perception.
The first was Kant’s (1781/1929) reformulation of knowing in Critique of Pure Reason, which frames perceiving as a process whereby the individual brings to encounters with the world particular ways of engagement, rather than taking perception to involve the mere passive reception of sensory stimulation (see Ben-Zeev, 1984). Although Kant famously proposed the operation of a priori categories of thought, it is not necessary to follow that nativist line. Instead, we will take up only his emphasis on the ways the knower engages the world—which, a century after Kant, takes the form of an emphasis on the intentional character of perceiving—and in doing so, and contrary to Kant, will argue that the ways knowers engage the world stems to a significant degree from their participation in social processes during ontogenesis (e.g., Bourdieu, 1977; Rogoff, 2003).
The second shift was the 19th-century transformation of biological thought accompanying Darwin’s theory of natural selection (Richards, 1988). The full impact of Darwinian thinking has yet to be fully felt within psychology, as we will suggest below. Initially, for the most part, the reevaluation of the nature of perceiving in the light of evolution led only to minor modifications in British philosophical-inspired views of perception as the passive reception of sensory stimulation. What mostly changed among these views in light of evolution was going beyond efforts to account for how features of the environment are perceived to include an emphasis on the functional value of those perceptual processes, with an all-too-easy speculative eye toward the alleged history of a species.
At the outset of experimental psychology in the late 19th century, the respective intentional and functional approaches to perceiving mentioned above were characteristic of different lines of thought—although pragmatists such as William James (1910) and the neo-Hegelian John Dewey (Westbrook, 1991) attempted to bring them together. Differences between a functional as contrasted with an intentional emphasis were paralleled at that time by a mostly mechanistic experimental psychology, on the one hand, and an approach that would later be attributed to the human sciences, on the other. Wundt (1873/1904) famously argued that the experimental psychology he helped to found was insufficient on its own to account for the full range of human experience. He saw the necessity for a parallel disciplinary study of the cultural phenomena of human experience that he assumed to be beyond the reach of experimental psychology. This disjunction widened in the first half of the 20th century, particularly in North America, as an experimental psychology struggling to establish itself as a natural science and a cultural anthropology that resisted the positivism of its counterpart held each other at arm’s length. Commenting on this historical moment, Bruner (1996) observed: “The historical separation of anthropology and psychology, whatever may have caused it, must surely be counted as one of the most stunting developments in the history of the human sciences” (p. xvii).
This impasse slowly began to erode after midcentury, and notably it did so on empirical grounds, although this erosion often escaped notice as much of psychology at this time became fixated on the possibilities of computer models (Bruner, 1990). Two lines of inquiry were critical here. First, in the aftermath of WWII, the growing numbers of orphaned infants and toddlers warehoused in conditions of relative social isolation brought into view how critically formative the character of early environments are for human development. Strikingly absent in these settings were opportunities for interactions with caregivers. The developmental effects of these conditions substantiated that early immersion in environments marked by the possibility for social interactions is essential for species-typical development of humans (Hunt, 1961; Thompson & Grusec, 1970).
These new insights dovetailed with an altogether different line of inquiry—namely, studies of human origins. By the 1970s, archeological and paleontological research led to discoveries about the patterns of living that characterized earlier hominid groups. The image of the “isolated individual” that historically has so typified psychological study is, in the light of hominid evolution, a biological aberration from the point of view of cultural anthropology (Geertz, 1973). Growing evidence of community life and co-operative practices was found among some of our comparatively recent hominid ancestors (Donald, 1991), suggesting that our lineage has long been an intensely social one, and that, developmentally, human newborns enter a world marked by observable and recurring patterns of social life.
When we juxtapose the growing recognition of the significance of early social experience for human development and the presence of complex and co-ordinated community life as a distinguishing feature of early human settlements, what we begin to see emerging is the following picture: species-typical development among humans requires engagement in even a modicum of interpersonal interaction, and correlatively, infants are born into human communities where interdependent and collective social processes are already in place. With these facts in mind, we can propose that, owing to their prolonged period of neurological immaturity and plasticity, children’s socially mediated engagement with the environment—for example, actions guided by others or modeled on the actions of others—gives rise to habits of attention and skilled action that are attuned to the local patterns of social processes and practices, including those involving a community’s artifacts. Perception–action in a domain of sociocultural processes and guided engagement with artifacts “socialize” the developing individual leading to patterns of perceiving–thinking–acting that are enmeshed with structures of daily community life and the artifacts that support them (Costall, 1995). In other words, the Kantian insight that individuals bring particular patterns of engagement to their encounters with the world can now be seen to be rooted, not in a priori categories of thought, but in ever-developing habits of intersubjective engagement with respect to social structures and artifacts that are already present in a community. It is not psychological (i.e., in the sense of inner mental) operations that are a priori, but rather social structures that function as contexts for the emergence of predispositions for human cognition that develop to mesh with them over the course of development.
The social reality of the human econiche
In his discussion of “what the environment affords the animal,” Gibson (1979, see, pp. 36–42 ff) deliberately avoids drawing a distinction between environments for nonhuman and human organisms, and that is as it should be. After all, environments for all living things include the material world and the inorganic and organic processes that typify them. But still, Gibson highlights some of the ways in which human activity alters the environment in distinctive ways. For example, the environmental layout for all terrestrial organisms has paths, obstacles, and barriers; and yet through human activities those features may be greatly elaborated in support of the intentions of individuals and groups. Likewise is the case for shelters and tools, among other things. Gibson (1979) makes a special point of emphasizing both tools that are fabricated and fashioned in extensive ways for human goals and tasks, as well as displays, pictorial and later textual, which are surfaces that have been “shaped or processed so as to exhibit information for more than just the surface itself” (p. 42). Such displays, as far as we know, are entirely unique to the hominid econiche, and “afford a special kind of knowledge that [Gibson] call[s] mediated or indirect knowledge at second hand” (p. 42). He continues, “[I]mages, pictures, and written-on surfaces, insofar as the substances shaped and the surfaces treated are permanent, permit the storage of information and accumulation of information in storehouses, in short, civilization” (p. 42). Mediated knowledge constitutes an important part of community life that individuals inherit.
Although in standard psychological theory “the social” dimensions of experience are usually attributed to intra-subjective processes (e.g., schema) by which individuals mentally construct or impose representational structure on the otherwise nonsocial material world, we see that such a characterization does not apply to any of the above. The human econiche—the context for ongoing human life—is itself fully a material–social domain in that the imprint of a history of sociocultural patterns of action is directly perceivable in the artifacts of everyday life and in patterns of action. Customary ways of comportment, of engaging with others, and the socially “proper” ways to utilize artifacts, for example, are readily perceivable in daily activities within the communities where we live. In the early years of life in particular, other persons often mediate one’s engagement with tools and artifacts by drawing children’s attention to them as well as guiding and modeling ways that they are to be incorporated into daily activities. Artifacts such as books, photographs, and all manner of media made available to individuals also inform them about the communities in which they live, including about patterns of normative action in social settings. Training in literacy, a quintessential interpersonal process, makes information in symbolic form accessible to successive generations.
The environment for human development is social through a shared awareness of cultural practices and mutual social responsibilities. Costall (1995) points out that the experience of even mundane objects is a socialized one as objects “have a place in relation to definite cultural practices and represent various human purposes; [moreover] their reliable and safe functioning depends on a social system of mutual responsibilities and obligations” (pp. 476–477). For these reasons, he adds, “the reality that is known is already a social reality” (p. 477). There is a “thickness” to everyday life that van Dijk and Withagen (2014, 2016) insightfully discuss in this journal as they urge, respectively, a “horizontal” view of experience and an appreciation for the temporal structures that run through daily life.
Let us interweave these latter two points in the articles by van Dijk and Withagen (2014, 2016). Consistent with a Jamesian tradition of considering psychological processes as being extended in time—“The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort
How might we apply this retrospective–prospective viewpoint on immediate experience to the social dimensions of everyday life?
Situated action
Although it was not always so, it is now nearly commonplace to state that behavior is situated. But what does this assertion mean? To point only to one relevant consideration here, let us consider the role of “place.” Typically, the actions of individuals are appropriate, within a range of normative possibilities, with respect to the place where they occur. I use place here in a manner that is comparable in most respects to what Barker (1968) has called a “behavior setting,” and what follows mostly derives from his work. Critically, place should be understood to be more than a location; rather it is a “space–time” ecological unit. As we will see, it is a higher order, extra-individual ecological entity that exists in a certain location for a specifiable duration.
An example of place as a “space–time” ecological unit is a commercial establishment, such as a coffee shop during its hours of operation. Outside of these hours, even though the shop as a material entity can be located, for example, at a certain street address, the coffee shop does not exist as a “live option” for individuals to enter and make use of its possibilities for action—that is, as a perceivable eco-psychological resource. It only comes into existence and is sustained for some period of time when participants come together in some location, and act collectively and interdependently in ways that are compatible with what is intra-subjectively understood to be the setting’s purposes. In other words, a place is an emergent sociocultural phenomenon. Moreover, most of the time, those shared purposes can only be realized with the support of affordances in the setting. In the case of the coffee shop, affordances would include equipment with which to make drinks, a counter to give and receive orders, coffee cups, and furniture for sitting. In short, and following Barker, a place or behavior setting is an extra-individual (i.e., emergent), higher order recurring pattern of behavior and milieu (e.g., affordances).
Places, as just detailed, afford possibilities for individual action and experience that would not otherwise be present in the environment. For those places to exist, individuals must know practically speaking how to act within the normative social dynamics of those places. Those actions collectively are constituents that contribute to or give rise to the existence of the place; and conversely, by virtue of an individual’s participation in the collective dynamics of the place, their actions are constrained. This is not to suggest that places have a determinate character, but rather that actions by individuals in some place are constrained with reference to what is intra-subjectively understood to be normative for that place. Most of the time, there can be a wide range of “degrees of freedom” for acting within any set of constraints.
Because the functional stability of the behavior setting over time depends on the participants in a behavior setting limiting their actions in ways that sustain its operations, the “where” and “when” of an individual’s actions are far from incidental. It is in this sense that actions are situated. Knowing where a person is in the community at a particular time gives us a great deal of information as to what they are likely doing at that time.
Finally, because of the dynamic of interdependent actions and affordances that constitute any particular setting, it might be hypothesized that places have a perceptually discernible pattern of collective action—a physiognomy. After all, for individuals to act in ways that are normatively appropriate in some place, they must be able to identify what type of setting it is. Some initial research on the physiognomy of place suggests that this is the case (Heft et al., 2014).
We might add then to the list of features characteristic of the human econiche offered above, these perceptible extra-individual “space–time” units, namely, places or behavior settings, which arise from collective action and affordances. Like the other features listed, they are objective in that they are publicly accessible—that is, anyone with requisite experience in the community can recognize them for what they afford. Also, like the other human econiche features, places are “already there” from the standpoint of the individual. They are not mental constructions by perceiving individuals, but rather they have tangible, material, and behavioral properties that are specifiable independently of an individual.
Those new to the econiche, such as toddlers and young children, eventually need to learn to recognize places or behavior settings when they are “in operation.” They need to learn how to function properly “in” them if these individuals are to have access to the resources they offer in the course of daily life and to avoid the disapproval of others (Heft, 2018). As already noted, learning the socially normative expectations in settings can come both from explicit guidance of others, and more commonly from observing over the course of ontogenesis how others conduct themselves in those places.
Owing to their social-developmental history, then, individuals bring to any given “present moment” a set of dispositions and skills to act that are attuned to affordances and to places. By virtue of that history, these dispositions have a retrospective character—these actions are “history turned into nature” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 78)—and when expressed on the tide of ever-emerging goals, they have a prospective character (see Pederson & Bang, 2016). In addition, being adept at engaging affordances and participating in social settings contributes to an individual’s growing feelings of social competence and self-efficacy in their world (Chawla & Heft, 2002). In short, developing the habits and skills for navigating the social structures of one’s community is an adaptive, if mundane, aspect of human life, and it promotes the individual’s flourishing in their daily habitat.
Conceptual structures of social reality: A proposal
Perhaps an approach such as the one just sketched that grounds ongoing perception–action in an individual’s social developmental history can be extended to take into account the conceptual character of environmental experience. This step has some significance for the ongoing development of ecological psychology because it remains an open question whether this essentially perceptual approach can address conceptual phenomena (Rietveld et al., 2020).
To explain what I mean by reference to the conceptual character of environmental experience, let us begin by noting that quite often actions directed toward or employing particular features of the environment are only understandable or intelligible if those actions are taken with respect to a wider set of circumstances that extend beyond what is immediately present. Consider, for example, the actions involved in writing a letter to someone who lives at some distance away. After the letter is written, it is typically placed in an envelope, which is addressed and then sealed; a stamp is likely affixed to the envelope, and then the envelope is dropped into a mail slot, such as one in the side of a metal container on the street. These actions—or equivalent variations—either taken individually or as an entire sequence are not meaningful in themselves. Someone totally “alien” to that community would fail to understand the purpose of any of them. What is required in order to make sense of them is an appreciation for the social/institutional circumstances that function as a background for them. Such circumstances are, of course, the operation of a postal system.
But although some tangible aspects of this system can be perceived, such as the paper, envelope, and container/postbox, for the most part, the system is out of sight. And that could not be any other way. It is not out of sight in the manner that an object might be presently hidden from view—such as the surface of the desk on which my keyboard sits—because to treat the postal system as if it were an object that could be perceived, only now hidden from view, is “a category mistake” (Ryle, 1949). A postal system is not an entity to be perceived in its entirety, but rather the designation refers to a series of social practices that are distributed across individuals, places, equipment, and time. It is a conceptual entity rather than a material one, even though it has material aspects to it. The intelligibility of the actions referred to above are all dependent on an abstract, conceptual awareness, however vague and even imprecise, of the “background” operation of a postal system.
The question we must confront then is how, from the point of view of ecological psychology, can an individual come to be aware of such structures whose existence is mostly conceptual? One avenue to consider is suggested by the commonplace fact that we are continually aware of aspects of the environment that are at least temporarily out of sight. As we move around our immediate surround—that is, as we adopt a series of observation points over time—portions of the layout regularly go in and out of sight as nearby objects temporarily occlude (“hide”) objects farther away from us that are in the same line of sight. As one walks, for example, through a wooded area, trees go out of sight behind other trees along the same line of sight, and then return to view with continuing movement. These temporarily hidden objects are not experienced as going in and out of existence; rather they are experienced as going in and out of sight (Gibson, 1979). What is being referred to here is “the occluding edge effect” first discovered by Gibson et al. (1969) and Kaplan (1969; see the recent discussion by Heft, 2020).
Experimental research with young children is consistent with this phenomenology. When an object moving along a trajectory temporarily goes behind the edge of an occluder, such as a screen, children visually track the position of the object even when it is out of sight (e.g., Bertenthal et al., 2007). Further, if an object different from the one that was initially occluded reappears from behind the occluder, young children express surprise (Bremner et al., 2015). Both of these findings indicate that there was awareness on the part of the child of the existence of the object when it was temporarily out of sight.
Critical to this phenomenon are its pragmatic qualities. Objects temporarily going out of sight and then coming back into sight are routine events from the earliest days of life. As infants become more able to control their own movements, the persistence of objects temporarily out of sight can be readily tested by shifting one’s point of observation by small and large displacements of the body. In this way, awareness of an object that is presently out of sight can be shown to be not due to imagination, but a pragmatic consequence of perception–action as well as events in the world.
Let us now return the example of a postal system. There we also see that the pragmatic qualities of actions can function to sustain an awareness of circumstances out of sight. In this case, it is not an object that is out of sight but a social structure that is realized across many individuals, processes, and so forth. Awareness of the reality of this conceptual structure is sustained by acts of mailing letters, and subsequently some indication that they were received by the addressee. The concept “the postal system” knits these tangible events together. But in this case—unlike that of the occluding edge effect—the time lag between the two events can be considerable. For this reason, “a placeholder” may be needed. Language can ably serve that function. Giving a name to the processes that are “out of sight” can contribute to sustaining awareness of their operations—again, as vague and even woefully imprecise as that awareness in its details might be.
What has arisen, then, is a conceptual awareness of this social structure, and its reality ultimately rests on the pragmatics of perception–action. That the presence of a postal system is not the result of imaginings can regularly be substantiated through effective actions by means of that system. And to paraphrase Gibson (1966), language fixes the gains of perception–action.
Those familiar with Gibson’s writings will understand my selection of a postal system as an example. In a now well-known discussion of the character of affordances, Gibson (1979) objects to Kurt Koffka’s (1933) assertion that a postbox is a phenomenal object that only is realized when a person needs to mail a letter. Gibson asserts that this way of stating things promotes a “pernicious dualism” of the mental and the material. Gibson controversially maintains that although affordances are relational properties—that is, they are properties of the environment taken in relation to a perceiver—at the same time they exist independently of a perceiver. But how can an affordance such as a postbox possibly exist independently of a perceiver when clearly it is an object with culturally based meaning? We get an indication of how this can be so from Gibson’s standpoint in the following: the real postbox (the only one) affords letter-mailing to a letter-writing human in a community with a postal system [emphasis added] . . . the main fact is it is perceived as part of the environment—as an item of the neighborhood in which we live [emphasis added]. (p. 139)
In the prior section, it was argued that based on their social-developmental history, individuals bring to any given “present moment” a set of dispositions to act that are attuned to particular affordances and places. A postbox, in Gibson’s words, “affords letter-mailing to a letter-writing human in a community with a postal system (1979, p. 139). What does it mean to be “a letter-writing human in a community with a postal system”? I propose that developing in a community with a postal system tends to promote habits of attention and skilled action that are attuned to the local patterns of social processes and practices. In the present example, those habits and skills stem from prior participation in social practices involved in making use of the postal system. The concept of a postal system emerges from participation in those social practices.
To make another pass at this argument, let’s turn to an example that postdates Gibson’s writings but is very familiar to a contemporary reader—namely, the use of the internet. It is by virtue of our awareness of the internet that our actions in sending and receiving email are in the least intelligible. And yet, if most of us were asked to explain concretely what the internet is, that explanation would surely be exceedingly vague. Is then the internet a product of our imagination or is it a concept stemming pragmatically from perception–action? Our actions in sending email have concrete effects; and for this reason, the reality of the internet is pragmatically sustained as a concept with its very use. Attaching the name “the internet” to this hidden reality helps to make our actions of composing and sending emails intelligible, even though, for most of us, we have only the vaguest idea of what that term specifies. We come to an awareness of this network through what is for many of us routine activity (a social practice), and the designation “internet” is a placeholder in our everyday discourse and thought.
That this conceptual awareness stems from social practices may be evidenced by the difficulties so many in the previous generation had in making sense of this technology when it first arose. Their difficulties were clearly not due to inexperience in using a keyboard; but instead they were lacking the conceptual understanding that would come from pragmatic social practices. We should be able to expand this reasoning to account for the reality of other social structures.
Final comments
Building, in part, on some of the publications appearing in this journal that addressed the social dimension of the ecological approach to perception, I have attempted to explore the social nature of the human econiche from an ecological perspective. This effort begins by recognizing that many of our actions as social beings develop through our participation in the social practices of a community, and that our psychological awareness of the social dimensions of the world we live in is largely rooted in those practices. By engaging in social practices, we develop habits of engaging the environment, including its artifacts, in socially normative ways; come to recognize the social significances of places as emergent eco-social entities; and develop and sustain an awareness of the pragmatic reality of conceptual social structures.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
), and “Perceptual Information of ‘an Entirely Different Order’: The ‘Cultural Environment’ in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems” in Ecological Psychology (2017).