Ecological Realism as a Reaction to New Realism: Holt's Legacy to Gibson

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Ecological Realism as a Reaction to New Realism:

Holt’s Legacy to Gibson

Robert Shaw

Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action

University of Connecticut

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Ecological Realism as a Reaction to New Realism:

Holt’s Legacy to Gibson

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Ecological Realism as a Reaction to New Realism:

Holt’s Legacy to Gibson

Robert Shaw

Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action

University of Connecticut

Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which

it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them.

Knowledge, then, seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or

disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas. (Locke, 1690, p. 167)

The gulf between percepts and physics is not a gulf as regards intrinsic quality, for we know nothing of the

intrinsic quality of the physical world, and therefore do not know whether it is, or is not, very different from

that of percepts. (Russell 1927a, 264)

Foreword

Realism, Idealism, and Dualism

Realism, idealism, and dualism are the three worldviews from which psychologists may choose to

guide their thinking and to constrain and even shape arguments, experiments, and theories. Among the

three, dualism is by far the most popular choice for psychologists and a broad range of other scientists as

well. It is also the heart of folk psychology that the culture thrusts upon us before we reach the age of

reason. We psychologists have a unique responsibility. For we are both the most ardent proselytes and

most opinionated proselytizers of the mind legacy, just as physicists are for matter. No wonder that in

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modern times dualism has emerged as a privileged worldview, garnering easy acceptance by most as a

received truth.

In the history of psychology one school staunchly opposed idealism and dualism by making their

best case for a direct realism, that is, one without representations or mediators so epistemic contact with

world was assured. They called themselves the New Realists, comprising six philosophers from four

universities: Edwin B. Holt and Ralph Barton Perry (Harvard), W. P. Montague and Walter B. Pitkin

(Columbia), Walter T. Marvin (Rutgers), and E. G. Spaulding (Princeton). The neo-realism doctrine they

espoused was heavily influence by William James (1842-1910) and his philosophy of Radical Empiricism

Although this school of psychology, like an earthquake tremor, was short lived, it upset the

field—surprising and shocking some and confusing and angering others. Much press was given to their

cause, as the next quote shows:

With the issuance of the Program and First Platform the six men from that time on . . . became the

outstanding figures in the literature of realism in America. During the two years between the appearance of

the Program and First Platform and publication of The New Realism (1912) approximately two thirds of

the total realist titles in American philosophical books and magazine articles were either written by the neo-

realists themselves, or were reviews or discussions of articles or books by them (Harlow, 1931, p. 53).

This new version of realism was the main topic of discussion at the 1910 meeting of the American

Philosophical Association. Clearly, New Realism (1910-1912) had an immediate and dramatic effect

upon the field but passed too soon to polarize it; although there was no bandwagon effect its tune was

heard. One philosopher of psychology who had studied with William James at Harvard, James B. Pratt

(1875-1944), described the dramatic but ambivalent effect New Realists had on many like himself:

The originality of this view thus suggested is so great as to arouse both admiration and wonder. It is in

some respects so revolutionary that it is difficult during the first year of one’s acquaintance to do it justice.

The admiration which one feels, and should feel, for its ingenuity should not, however, blind one to the real

difficulties which it has to face (p.175).

The aftershock of New Realism was not felt until a half century later when James J. Gibson (1904-

1979) resounded with a new and revised version of New Realism. The aim of this chapter is to reveal the

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nature of this remarkable failure and to explain how Gibson’s Ecological Realism helped set things aright.

A measure of success of this effort is that an international society, a journal, and a book series were

established in the 1980’s to further Gibson’s ecological worldview. Although the Society of Ecological

Psychologists is not large as societies go, its membership has not slacked nor its influence waned since its

inception. Their influence has made it more ordinary to ask about the role of the environment in the

governance of animal and human action.

Choosing a Worldview

To appreciate the New Realists’ undertaking, we must understand the worldview choices they faced.

The three most prominent ones were idealism, dualism, and realism, each briefly sketched below:

(i) Realism views the objects of experience as not being manufactured in the act of experiencing but

as existing apart from our experiencing or knowing them. Such a world is not conditioned by our

existing in it but may be as alien and inhospitable as we might fear. Here there is no reason to

believe reality has been tailored for human benefit or predilections, although as our presence

proves it is a home for life. This pessimistic outlook is matched by that of idealism, which

underwrites a closed-off psychology that contrasts sharply with realism in all regards except its

pessimism.

(ii) Idealism as a worldview contrasts sharply with realism; it underwrites a psychology that endorses

Locke’s surprising and disturbing conclusion (see caption quote) that all we can know are our

own ideas—a view that is existentially unsettling. For it tells us, in no uncertain terms, that we

are cut off from experiencing the world itself, including other beings, and can know it and them

only if our ideas were somehow their true reflection. It may be more comforting to believe that

our world of experience is of our own making than to believe we are made by a world we cannot

know but whose mysterious vastness we must nevertheless fit into. No wonder that many of the

greatest thinkers in history (e.g., Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton, Kant, Bergson, Whitehead, Einstein)

were moved to postulate a higher power that comforts and abets our living.

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(iii) Finally, dualism is the worldview that assumes everything is either one of two kinds: mind or

matter. As used here, a kind is a category designation that refers to those primitive ‘things’ that

are irreducible, in the sense of not being composed of any other kind of entities nor sharing any of

their essential properties (e.g., molecules of matter versus ideas of mind but not ideas of matter or

molecules of mind). The ‘kinds’ in question may be substances, properties, or functionalities. In

psychology, the dualism usually treats ‘matter’ as ‘body’ (biological tissue) whose material

substrate may be physical but is organized in such fashion as to allow distinct, nonoverlapping,

properties, or functionalities.

Worldviews and their Root Metaphors

Aware or not, scientists and non-scientists alike live their lives under the pervasive influence of a

worldview. A worldview is not just an abstract speculative construct that subsists in the rarefied realm of

metaphysics; rather it is a living philosophy with practical consequences. The longer one lives with and

defends a worldview, the more it becomes “the very flesh and blood” of ones mind (Peirce, 1903/1997, p.

163). As philosophical baggage goes, a person’s chosen worldview is the heaviest burden and yet the

hardest to set aside. Its acceptance is like a political or religious conversion, but more so, since it brings

our hopes, prejudices, and fears into alignment with our intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic commitments.

No doubt the English term ‘word-view,’ that we shall use throughout, seems anemic when placed

next to its German counterpart, ‘Weltanschauung,’ which has the gravitas needed for so serious a job.

Weltanschauung refers to a comprehensive view of the world. The term ‘worldview’ is a loan word (or

calque, as linguists call it) borrowed from German philosophy. It is compounded from Welt, the German

word for "world" and Anschauung, the German word for "view" or "outlook." This compounded term

encompasses both an intuitive wide-world perspective as well as the framework of ideas and beliefs

through which an individual forms an outlook on life, the world, and all activities—both ordinary and

scientific.

This is a broader, more inclusive concept than “paradigm,” as introduced by Thomas Kuhn

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(1962) in his renowned book, Structure of Scientific Revolution. Kuhn describes the difficulties

encountered in trying to replace one scientific paradigm by another; however, trying to replace one

worldview by another is considerably more difficult since its anchors ones total belief system.

Philosophically construed, the term explicitly refers to ones fundamental beliefs about what is

real, or metaphysics, and how we can know what is real, or epistemology. Even though scientists rarely

make explicit detailed declarations of their credos, they nevertheless invade the warp and woof of their

work, urging acceptance or rejection of facts and principles that either do or do not conform to their

strictures.

Worldviews for Psychology

Why worry about worldviews? One reason is that psychologists are as likely as anyone to have

their vision narrowed or broadened by their adopted worldviews. Realism, our main topic of discussion

here, is but one of three primary worldviews that compete for hegemony in our scientific culture—the

others being idealism and dualism. Close scrutiny of a person’s worldview may reveal how biases run

deeper than what their proponents care to admit. This becomes especially clear in heated debates where

conflicting attitudes rather than respect for reason are seen to guide the antagonists’ disagreements about

what facts and principles are of consequence in settling issues at bay.

For those who find the mind-body/matter dualism stultifying, as realists do, and who hope to

replace it, the task is monumental and probably unrealistic—at least at this time. For dualism is far more

entrenched in our culture than any other worldview. It is the one thing that psychologists, physicists, and

biologists are most likely to agree upon. Labels, like ‘idealism,’ ‘realism,’ and ‘dualism,’ are not just

technical terms used by professional philosophers but are conceptual schemes with broad intuitive appeal

that anybody, philosopher or not, may use to connote their ‘worldview’—a way of thinking about the

most fundamental problems and issues wherever they might occur—in the mind, the academy, or the

marketplace.

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So much of ones life is invested in them that once adopted a worldview is extremely difficult to

recant and nearly impossible to overthrow by outside criticism. Scientists become beholden to them for

the ballast and structure they provide for their deepest and most recalcitrant beliefs. Thus when a

psychologist reveals his/her worldview to be realism, idealism, or dualism, it tells us something important

about the core of that person’s belief systems, its ’root metaphor’ as one philosopher called it (Pepper,

1942).

The root metaphor, like the ground of an analogy, is not always apparent but makes its presence

known implicitly during polemical discourse, as exemplified in the following dialogue:

HUME: Is that a knife I see before me?

BERKELEY: No! It is only your idea of a knife.

HUME: Oops! I just cut my finger on my idea.

BERKELEY: No, there is no ‘real’ cut, only the idea of a cut.

HUME: Well, the idea of a knife and the idea of a cut just gave me the idea of blood dripping from

my idea of a finger onto my idea of a carpet!

BERKELEY: Now you understand.

HUME: But whose uninvited ideas are thrust upon me, for I would never willingly author such a

hurtful idea.

BERKELEY: Don’t be obtuse; you know very well they are all God’s ideas for it is He who is the

author of all ideas.

HUME: Then God must also have authored my idea that there is no God and, therefore, no ideas at

all. From this, then, it must follow that there is a real finger, a real knife, a real cut, real blood, and

a real stained carpet.”

BERKELEY: Brother Hume, now you are just being silly!

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Clearly, there is no argument here, only a clash of words for Hume, and a clash of ideas for Berkeley.

Held together stubbornly by its root metaphor, a worldview is virtually unassailable by argument or

evidence an antagonist might present. Hence arguments between idealists and realists can be mutually

quite frustrating since nothing said or done by the opponent can dislodge the root metaphor of the true

believer.

In what follows we shall review the conflicting worldviews to discover what motivates adopting one

over another. And what objections to idealism and dualism led to the birthing of a new and distinguished

worldview by William James and his followers—one that contrasted uniquely with the other realisms of

its day.

William James’ Worldview Crises

No better example of how seriously one can be influenced by a chosen worldview is provided by

William James’ report of his conversion crises from a pessimistic materialism to a more optimistic

pragmatism.

A young William James (circa 1868), during a period of deteriorating health also suffered from

melancholia induced by his belief that British empiricism and German physiology together showed free

will to be an illusion. A worldview upheaval was initiated by his reading an essay on free will by the

French thinker Charles Renouvier (1815-1913). This experience was propitious; it helped to move James

out of depression and away from his fatalistic thoughts of suicide (James, 1920). Apparently, his

melancholia was, in some fundamental way, a philosophical ailment that only a philosophical insight

could cure.

I think yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second ‘Essais” and see no

reason why his definition of Free Will—‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have

other thoughts’—need be the definition of an illusion (James, 1920, Vol. 1, pp. 147-148).

The French essayist Montaigne had rightly observed that humans were the only animals who increased

the burden of existence through their imagination. Could this process not be reversed as Renouvier

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suggested? Assuming free will were possible, life could be made more bearable by ones own efforts—if

only one were stubborn enough.

This conversion crises convinced James that a pessimistic worldview which fostered depression

and suicidal thoughts might be replaced by a more optimistic one—that if free will were possible, we

could choose to believe even that which is uncertain. Though pawns of fate, we may staunchly choose to

believe whatever we like and choose to like whatever we believe. No other freedom is truly open to us but

this most primitive will to believe. Choosing to believe may be difficult but it is within our pragmatic

control. Protected from depression by this new worldview, James began the most productive period of

his career.

In addition to Renouvier, the Scottish philosopher/psychologist Alexander Bain and the German

physicist Ernst Mach were important influences on James’ thought. Although the topic was widely

discussed by philosophers, Bain was perhaps the first psychologist to emphasize the deep problem mind-

matter/body dualism posed for both psychology and physiology; and the physicist Mach the first modern

thinker to adopt neutral monism as a worldview. These influences will be discussed in due course.

James’ Radical Proposal

As the 19th century edged into the 20th century, physical materialism gained a growing number of

adherents in the sciences. From ancient times four elements earth, fire, air, and water, had been thought

the ingredients of everything material—in the pre-quantum theory of ordinary matter. Molecular theory

now seemed to explained what each element was and how it differed from the other elements. With this

growing success, physical realism began usurping idealism as the received truth—although mathematics,

then as now, remained its safe haven. This was the scientific milieu into which Wilhelm Wundt (1832-

1920) made his case for psychology being an experimental science.

At the same time, hoping to steer their field toward scientific respectability, psychologists

adopted the empirical method and embraced the physical realism accompanying it. Many who heeded

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Wundt’s (1862) call for an experimental science that would uncover the facts of consciousness, rushed to

Leipzig to learn how to do so. By the end of the 19th century, Wundt had succeeded in his avowed goal of

making his Leipzig laboratory (est. 1879) the dominant center of an international ‘school’ of experimental

psychology. Spearheaded by those who had studied with him, this school embraced the large number of

students and scientists around the world who were converts to Wundt’s principles and believed in his

introspective methods.

This convergence of success in the physical sciences and the broad acceptance of mentalism

provided fertile ground in which mind-matter dualism could take fresh root. This was the Zeitgeist in

which William James strove to foster a new worldview. He strongly believed this hybrid science was a

serious threat to having a scientific theory of knowledge, and offered a better though radically different

worldview:

I give the name of 'radical empiricism' to my Weltanschauung. Empiricism is known as the opposite of

rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of

logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the

element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction (James,

1920, p. 41).

James further explained that to be radical means an empiricism must neither admit for consideration any

element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from consideration any element that is. Thus it is to

be a theory of everything that is experienced but of nothing else. Among the things directly experienced

he also included all relations that connect experiences; any relation experienced must be considered as

'real' as anything else in the system. James democratized experience by a bold move toward a kind of

monism that was as surprising as it was unfamiliar. By making relations objects of experience, he found

a way around dualism. It might work this way:

If x is an object in the environment of which z is the experience, then the relation joining x to z

provided by perception is also experienced. Likewise, if y is the observer, then the whole complex, xyz, is

experienced, as is the observer-environment context in which it occurs, and all the associated psychical

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and the physical relations to the complex. And both are specified by the same experience. To know an

experience is, at the same time and in the same way (i.e., perceptually), to know the experienced. An

experience is no more of the mind than it is of the world. How then can the experienced complex be other

than ‘neutral’ with regard to subjective and objective, or internal and external? For lack of a better term,

call the superordinate relation superjective. Thus we have dissolved dualism into the real but neutral

relational complex of the subsuming superject. James did not use the term ‘superject’ but it seems to me

to capture the spirit of his intent.

The significance of James’ novel theory is best recognized in the context of the unresolved

problems he inherited and the people who most influenced his choice of method. As mentioned, two such

influences were Alexander Bain and Ernst Mach. Also, John Locke, since much earlier he had introduced

a profound problem that threatened all realists. To set the stage, let’s look at him first.

Locked in Our Own Minds?

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke (1632-1704) offered an odd worldview

that he, ever the practical thinker, thereafter ignored. Still it is of interest because he was both an

empiricist and realist. Locke presented an eloquent argument that made indirect realism formidable (see

caption quote above): Since the mind, when thinking, remembering, reasoning, or imagining, involves

only its own ideas, which it knows immediately, then it is self-evident that our knowledge can be about

nothing but our own ideas.

In mythology a symbol for infinity is the serpent Oroboros that swallows its own tail. Locke’s

epistemology is like this; it has mind turning back upon itself with ideas ‘devouring’ other ideas.

Knowledge for Locke is directly experiencing the contents of some ideas as consisting of certain other

ideas—an infinite regress. Whatever ideas we know are experienced just as directly as we do our own

pains. It follows that experience of the external world (if it exists) must be indirect; it is the inference to

some ideas taken to be ‘worldly’ from other ideas taken to be their non-worldly representations.

Unhappily, being unable to know anything outside of one's own mind means thoughts have no external

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reference, or intentionality. This is most troublesome, for it renders perceiving and imagining completely

indistinguishable and allows no perceptual authority for correcting errors in thought.

Believing an external world exists, as Locke did, but being unable to know anything about it is

surely an empiricist’s nightmare. Under his view, we are all in the same predicament, being trapped in

our own minds, like windowless jails. Perception then becomes nothing but mental reflection, a

rummaging around through ones own ideas as if they were curios whose provenance is long lost. Action

fares no better since we are no longer able to act upon or even toward the world, but are restricted to

acting upon mental representations that refer only to other mental presentations. Thus Locke's nightmare

precludes there being knowledge of the world; since all knowledge is second-hand, nothing is known by

acquaintance (Shaw, 2003).

The New Realists thought there was a way to explain the origins of intentionality, avoid Locke's

empiricist’s paradox, and nullify dualism. If, as they believed, external knowledge is possible, then a

fallacy must lay at the heart of indirect realism. What the fallacy might be will be discussed a little later

after a brief look at Bain’s eloquent description of the problem of dualism.

Alexander Bain: Wrestling with a Miracle

Alexander Bain (1818-1903), the Scottish thinker, was one of the most highly regarded scientists

of the nineteenth century, often referred to as the first full-fledged psychologist. He authored the first

textbooks in psychology. Until William James wrote his Principles of Psychology (1890), Bain’s two

volumes, Senses (1855) and Emotions (1859) were the most popular texts on psychology. He is also

noteworthy for recognizing that philosophers and psychologists had totally failed to come to grips with

the problems of mind-matter and mind-body interaction, an ineptitude that left untouched the mysterious

causal gap that exists between the mental and physical realms. No one had found a way to avoid the

Cartesian conclusion that since this gap is left unbridgeable by any known principle, it must be mended

by the hand of God. Some thought this gap might be the locus of mind.

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To Bain interactionism was not an acceptable solution, for it merely named the problem without truly

addressing it. He framed the puzzle this way:

It would be incompatible with everything we know of cerebral action, to suppose that the physical chain

ends abruptly in a physical void, occupied by an immaterial substance; which immaterial substance, after

working alone, imparts its results to the other edge of the physical break, and determines the active

response—two shores of the material with an intervening ocean of the immaterial (Bain, 1983/1875, pp.

130-131).

It would take a miracle to jump the chasm separating the material realm from the immaterial realm.

Later, the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) echoed Bain’s sentiment. He observed that

as long as we adhere to conventional mind-matter dualism, we condemn perception to the miraculous

rather than the scientific (Russell, 1927). We are left to marvel at a process that leap-frogs from the

physical to the biological to the psychical and again to the biological, finally, landing in the physical

expression of behavior.

Bain proposed a solution in the spirit of Leibniz’s psycho-physical parallelism, a solution that avoids

the need for interaction all together. He explained that even though every sensory input causes both

physical (biological) and mental reactions, the two realms never interact. He proposed this:

There is, in fact, no rupture of nervous continuity. The only tenable supposition is, that mental and

physical proceed together, as undivided twins. When, therefore, we speak of a mental cause, a mental

agency, we have always a two-sided cause; the effect produced is not the effect of mind alone, but of mind

in company with body (Bain, 1873/1875, pp. 130-131).

If we consider the mental and the physical to be a pair of coordinated series, like a paired sequence of

synchronized alarm clocks that go off together, then we must ask how they got synchronized in the first

place; but even if they were, what would keep them synchronized as they run their separate courses.

Alas, Bain offers no answer to this crucial question—except to say they proceed “as undivided twins.”

Hence the synchronization step, without which there could be no parallelism, is just as much a miracle as

the mysterious causal step he wished to banish, and without which there could be no interactionism.

William James respected Bain for his clear grasp of the problem but preferred a solution that made

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parallelism and interactionism irrelevant.

Mach’s Influence on James

The German physicist, Ernst Mach (1838-1916), should be remembered not only for his place in

science, but for the notable people he influenced. Among these were William James, chief proponent of

modern realism and father of American psychology, and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who

was first a critic of James’ radical philosophy but, eventually, one of its strongest supporters. Mach’s

goal was driven by an inclusive worldview to find a common framework that psychology, biology, and

physics might comfortably share. By this strategy, he hoped to incorporate these diverse sciences into a

single cohesive and elegant framework.

To secure the legitimacy of his worldview, Mach had to overcome two formidable adversaries—

the mind-matter problem that kept psychology and physics apart and the related mind-body problem that

separated psychology and biology. Here the three sciences, which on the surface looked so different,

might be treated as but different phases of an underlying neutral ‘stuff.’ For example, an optical stimulus

can evoke a visual response that the perceiver experiences as something in the environment. No one

doubts the general validity of this description but is left to wonder what optical energy, neuro-

physiological signals, and visual experiences could have in common that allows them to interact.

Mach’s answer was both unexpected and novel. He hypothesized something ‘neutral’—some kind of

stuff that is not physical nor biological nor psychological yet able to function as if it were when

circumstances demanded. What is it about the particular ‘circumstances’ that explained how this

chameleon-like stuff could change its character? Mach was a well-rounded physicist who did research in

psychology and physiology as well. Consequently, he spoke not as a dilettante but as an expert. Here is

an example of how he answered the critic who dismissed the neutral stuff on the grounds that in trying to

be everything it becomes a muddle of contradictory properties.

Thus the great gulf between physical and psychological research persists only when we acquiesce in our

habitual stereotyped conceptions. A color is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for

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instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colors, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth. When

we consider, however, its dependence upon the retina . . . it is a psychological object, a sensation. Not the

subject matter, but the direction of investigation, is different in the two domains (Mach, 1886, pp. 17-18).

Mach found a way of unifying the three disciplines in the philosophy of ‘neutral monism,’ as

anticipated by Spinoza in his double aspect theory and Leibniz in his double substance theory. In the

philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of

the same substance. An alternative view is Leibniz’s monad theory. Monads are atoms of substance;

each monad lives simultaneously in two kinds of parallel spaces, one presenting subjective perspectives

on the same reality with the other presenting objective perspectives. Regarding Leibniz’s philosophy,

Russell (1945) concluded:

What I, for my part, think best in his theory of monads is his two kinds of space, one subjective, in the

perception of each monad, and one objective, consisting of the assemblage of points of view of the various

monads. This, I believe, is still useful in relating perception to physics (p. 596).

Mind-matter dualism, a two-substance theory, is inelegant by comparison to this one substance, two-

perspective view. Substance theories carry much more metaphysical baggage than either aspect or

perspective theories, and therefore tax Occam’s razor more. James realized that perhaps the most difficult

idea to grasp is how what appears as two things can actually be only one thing. How can dualists

miscount so badly? James (1912/1976) explained how with a simple analogy:

The puzzle of how one identical [experience] can be in two places at once is at bottom just a puzzle of how

one identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their intersection . . . It could be counted

twice over, as belonging to either group, and spoken loosely as existing in two places, although it would

remain all the time a numerically single thing (p. 8).

More than a half century later, Gibson (1979) revived this same idea in his ecological theory of

perception:

Information about self accompanies information about the environment, and the two are inseparable . . .

like the other side of a coin. Perception has two poles, the subjective and the objective, and information is

available to specify both. One perceives the environment and co-perceives oneself (p.126).

Apparently, Mach casts a long shadow.

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Neutral Monism: A Strategy for Overcoming Dualism

William James abhorred equally the subjective-objective distinction and the internal-external

metaphor as ways to distinguish mind and body. This metaphysical aversion was passed on to the New

Realists, and inherited by Gibson decades later. The impetus for all three schools of thought was belief in

the need to repudiate Locke’s agnosticism if realism was to be defensible.

According to James, experience is all that exists and all that exists is experience. Thus James

avoids positing ‘gaps’ in the material succession that causality dictates. There is no ‘chasm’, as Bain

observes, between knower and known; they are but different ways of relating experience to itself. For

James relations introduce nothing new, they are also pure experience. In this way, no gaps are possible

when two things (forms of experience) enter into some relation. This homogeneity of stuff allows

experience to flow continuously, while different relations keep experiences from being boringly the same.

In this way there can be plurality in unity—an idea endorsed by the New Realists.

Neutral monism was designed to remove the alleged difference between the mental and the

physical, as conventionally construed. It does so by showing the difference to be one of different

organizations rather than different kinds of substance. Russell (1956) suggests an analogy can be found

in the difference between arranging people geographically as opposed to arranging them alphabetically.

In both cases the same human material is used, and the difference lies in the method of selection and

organization. Likewise, according to neutral monism appearances are grouped in one way to form

physical objects and in another way to form minds.

Here is an image that may help. A physical object is specified by all the appearances that radiate

outwards centrifugally from its position in physical space. A mind, on the other hand, is specified by the

appearances that start from surrounding objects and converge centripetally on its position in physical

space. A physical object however is not the source of its appearances to be perceived, but only the

grouping of all the appearances whether perceived or not, and similarly a mind is not the sink for the

appearances of physical objects, but only the grouping of all the appearances where a perceiver might be.

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James’s contemporary and sometime correspondent, Bertrand Russell (1921/1992), summed up the

remarkable theory this way:

James’s view is that the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and

the other mind, but that it is arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations, and that some arrangements

may be called mental, while others may be called physical (p. 23).

Russell (1927/1954) captured the essence of neutral monism by asserting that from one point of view my

percepts are inside my head, while from another point of view they are outside my body, suggesting that

as brain is the mind looked at from the outside, so the mind is the brain looked at from the inside. No

better statement of neutral monism exists than Russell’s (1956) clarifying remark:

An event is not rendered either mental or material by any intrinsic quality, but only by its causal relations.

It is perfectly possible for an event to have both the causal relations characteristic of physics and those

characteristic of psychology. In that case the event is both mental and material at once (p. 164).

On more than one occasion, Russell made the provocative observation that since we know nothing

about the intrinsic nature of mind or matter, it would be pure speculation to say whether they are

fundamentally alike or different. We need such skepticism to keep our inquiries from falling into traps set

by our prejudices as psychologists or physicists. Being open to the possibility of neutral monism serves

to keep the idealists and dualists in check.

Whether James was a neutral monist, as Russell assumed, has been debated among James’s scholars,

and is still somewhat problematic. Even if James’s ultimate commitment to this is debatable, the New

Realists commitment to neutral monism is not (see Heft, 2001, for details).

New Realism: A Brief Glimpse

As indicated, an unbroken lineage of realist’s ideas runs from the admirers of William James (1842-

1910), who identified themselves as New Realists (1910-1912), down to the ecological program in

psychology founded by James J. Gibson (1904-1979) a half century later (Gibson, 1966, 1979).

Although, both at home and abroad, the New Realists initially received much fanfare, boosted in part by

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their vociferous critics, their philosophical goals were modest. Asked if their program was a new

philosophy, one of its founders, William Pepperell Montague, demurred:

Our realism was thus not a philosophy; it was rather a prolegomenon to philosophy and a declaration of

independence that would make it possible to investigate the nature of things on their own merits without

dragging in the tedious and usually irrelevant fact that they could be experienced by us (Harlow, 1931, p.

55).

In other words, it was meant to be nothing less than a new worldview designed to undercut

idealism and dualism. Despite this qualification, their philosophy, such as it was, directly influenced

Gibson’s development as a theorist, and through Gibson the eventual emergence of ecological psychology

more than four decades later. The influence of one of the founders of New Realism on Gibson, Edward

Bissell Holt (1873-1946), was particularly strong. Gibson had studied with Holt at Princeton in the

1920’s—completing his doctorate (with a colleague, H. S. Langfeld) in 1928.

In his autobiographical essay Gibson (1982) described Holt as being “a slow writer but a great

teacher” and as having “contempt for humbug and a clarity of thought that has never been matched” (p.

9). He also spoke of Holt as his mentor, confessing that for thirty years he had considered himself a

‘Holtian philosophical behaviorist’—a proponent of a molar, purposive behaviorism in contradistinction

to traditional reductionist behaviorism (Gibson, 1967). Through Holt’s tutelage Gibson was exposed to

James’s radical empiricism and to the promise and plight of the New Realists’ movement.

Following James and Mach’s creative efforts, the New Realists banded together for the explicit

purpose of opposing idealism, escaping mind-matter dualism, and protecting direct realism. They

recognized that the battle line between direct and indirect realism had been sharply drawn by Locke two

centuries earlier.

Like all direct realists, the New Realists were bedeviled by the question: If sometimes we see

something at odds with physical fact, then how can perception be a direct experience of the world? Must

there not be a ‘buffer’ zone before experience takes place where such errors might intrude? If so, can we

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escape the conclusion that perception must, then, be mediated and not direct? A fair question that the

New Realists, especially Holt, took very seriously.

Evading the Argument from Illusion

Idealism and indirect realism are sometimes confused since they both depend on mental processes

for knowledge—reality being carried by an organization of ideas in the former and by mediating ideas in

the latter. Different forms of realism also tend to be confused. The mix-up is partly due to them seeming

susceptible to some of the same criticisms. If left unchallenged, the argument from illusion is potentially

the most damaging. Briefly, the argument proceeds by citing many cases where ones experience of the

world fails to conform to what other experiences show to be the case. This contradiction between

experiences is taken as strong evidence against direct realism. A frequently cited case of the argument is

the straight stick that looks bent when half submerged in water. While naïve realism, with its simplistic

notion of directness, has no defense against this argument, other realisms easily escape it.

The New Realists thought the best defense was simply to make its position clear. Once their

theory was truly understood, the dreaded argument would be shown not just false but irrelevant. They

believed the argument was deeply flawed and could not withstand careful analysis. The collectively

authored book The New Realism (1912) was their main attempt to clarify their theory. Here Holt wrote a

lengthy essay about the arguments from illusion and error entitled ‘The Place of Illusory Experience in a

Realistic World.’ His argument went as follows:

Naïve realism claims that how something appears is how it really is; what you see is what you get—

unvarnished, unabridged, and unadulterated. By contrast, non-naïve direct realisms emphatically

disagree: How something appears is not how it is but how it is when it appears but not necessarily how it

is in other situations. Holt (1912), like later Gibson, was careful to point out that for New Realist’s

version of direct realism, unlike naïve realism, not everything perceived is real. Misperceptions are

possible—a point of clarification that many critics have inexplicably ignored. Their counter-argument

goes like this: If misperceptions are possible, then true perceptions must exist as the standard; but how

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can you know the standard is true and the misperception untrue unless both are directly perceived.

Otherwise there would be no basis for comparison. Holt (1912) elaborates this point:

But while all perceived things are things [subsistents], not all perceived things are real things [existents]. . .

. For the gist of realism is not to insist that everything is real, far from it, but to insist that everything that

is, is and is as it is. Not a dangerous heresy, this, it should seem; but it just happens that every form of

idealism has maintained the contrary, has maintained . . . some kind of ‘false bottom’ theory of the universe

(pp. 358-359).

Admittedly, this twisty statement “ . . . everything that is, is and is as it is” is borderline inscrutable

until clarified. It helps to note that this statement is baldly contradicted by some idealists (e.g., F. H.

Bradley, 1893) who would rather say, not everything appears as it is nor is as it appears because at the

heart of our experiences lies contradictions. For holt, Russell, and other realists, this promotes a ‘false

bottom theory of the universe’—an idealism which asserts that appearances are lies and our senses are

liars; thus our experiences mislead us, rather than revealing the truth about reality, it disguises it as

something it is not. One cannot help but wonder if this were so, why are we are so rarely fooled by our

every day perceptions of the world; for bad choices could prove dangerous, even lethal? The fact that we

continue to thrive as a species is evidence enough to the open-minded that perception, on the whole,

makes few life-threatening mistakes. We do not carelessly eat poison nor wander aimlessly off of cliffs.

There must be a difference between reality and illusion that is being ignored.

Illusions: A Bare Subsistence

Straight talk about illusions is that they subsist as illusory objects because of misperception but

emphatically do not exist as real world objects. Just as an error in arithmetic cannot invalidate the

number system, so an error in seeing cannot invalidate the perceptual system. The presumed difference

between existence and subsistence is important to New Realism’s attempt to stave off dualism. Let’s take

a closer look.

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The notion of subsistence is generally the claim that something exists only because something

else exists. Subsistence refers to dependent existence, such as a misperception depending on veridical

perception as a standard for comparison. Other forms of subsistence, such as ideas, memories, illusions,

mirages, dreams, or hallucinations—like rainbows and mirages, are effects that depend on other things for

their cause (e.g., such as humans who dream, misperceive, hallucinate, etc.). Existence exhibits, as a

French existentialist might say, mûr pour être cueilli, or ‘ripeness for picking.’ Where existents are ‘ripe’

with possibilities yet to unfold, subsistents are barely etched in reality; they lack the fullness and depth of

nested detail revealed by further scrutiny, and they exhibit discontinuity within nature’s causal nexus that

existents enjoy.

Holt was particularly incensed by what he took to be the cavalier way many idealists, and even

some realists, failed to distinguish between things that exist in reality and other things that subsist in

being. In other words, they inexplicably confuse perception with misperception. They ignore the crucial

difference between particular concrete things that exist in the world with general abstract entities like

numbers and sets that subsist in being conceptual but do not exist in reality—a distinction Aristotle made

over two millennia ago.

If illusory experience has any place in a realistic world, it is in the conceptual realm of subsistence,

not the concrete realm of existence. The failure to make this distinction, Holt thought, was a sophomoric

error that created much mischief in philosophy and, unfortunately, had been allowed to spill over into

psychology. Like a stern schoolmaster chiding a wayward child, Holt (1912) expressed his

condescension for such wayward thinkers:

Thus when the realist says that as things are perceived so they are, the idealist stupidly misunderstands him

to say ‘as things are perceived so they are really,’ i.e., all perceived things are real things. But while all

perceived things are things, not all perceived things are real things. Stupid as such a confusion is, it will be

found to have been made at some point in every anti-realist argument (p. 358).

In sum, the take-home message is this: since the argument from illusion is based on a confusion, it

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has nothing at all to say about realism, direct or indirect.

Perception Without Mediators

The keystone of New Realism, of James’s radical empiricism, and of Gibson’s later Ecological

Realism is the controversial concept of direct perception (from which direct realism follows as

consequence). Foremost in understanding this concept is to consider ‘directness’ as not an assumption

but rather as an entailed consequence of an epistemic concern—the explanatory principle needed to

account for how agents can know their environment well enough to act toward it intentionally and react to

it adaptively.

Roughly, direct perception is the principle that follows from the assumption that adaptive agents

are able to ‘keep in touch’ with the functionally relevant properties of their environment—an achievement

made impossible if any cognitive ‘way stations’ intervened. It seems clear that allowing mediating

constructs to come between an agent and its environment not only severs this epistemic contact but leads

to dire theoretical difficulties as well (Shaw, 2003).

Direct realism is a ‘worldview’ needed to support the possibility of direct perception.

Preliminary to understanding direct realism is distinguishing among the three forms it may take: naïve

realism, proposed by no one I know, non-naïve direct realism, proposed by the New Realists, and

Ecological Realism, proposed by Gibson and contemporary ecological psychologists (e.g., Shaw, Turvey,

and Mace, 1982; Turvey, Shaw, Reed, and Mace, 1981). Surprisingly, critics of direct realism typically

ignore how radically the three forms differ. They jump to the erroneous conclusion that to be direct is

necessarily to be naive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Being direct in one theory is not

necessarily the same as being direct in another theory. Gibson and the New Realists strongly repudiated

this simplistic notion of naïve realism, as we shall see.

What shapes a theory in the mind of a theorist is not just what it presupposes taken in isolation

but how it fits intuitively with other views the theorist holds. The same is true for what shapes a critic’s

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view of a theory. Understanding the nature of the worldview under which a theory is formulated is a

requisite first step in critical appraisal of that theory. Let’s take a step back and look at the larger network

of ideas into which a theory must fit prior to and during its inception. For the deep division between

direct realists and advocates of indirect realism is nothing less dramatic than a clash of worldviews—a

battle that is fought under the banners of Internal and External Relations, respectively. The figure

graphically summarizes the differences distinguishing direct realism, indirect realism, and idealism.

I. Direct realism; arrow indicates direct specification relation, i.e., information.

II. Indirect realism: the large arrow indicates inference to a vague world perceived only indirectly

through a layer of mediating ideas. The arrow from the mediators to the representer ideas

designates inferences.

III. Idealism is where reality resides only in how symbol-ideas refer to other ideas. Notice,

idealism unlike indirect realism postulates no external world; reality is how representational

ideas are organized.

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The Doctrines of Internal and External Relations

These two opposing doctrines provide a convenient way to capture a polarized account of idealism

and New Realism, with idealism sitting at the internal relations pole and realism at the opposite external

relations pole. Indirect realism is idealism that hints at an external world, and so comes less near to the

internal relations pole. Like idealism, consistency must be its greatest concern, without which its claim

on reality is hollow. In modern terminology, idealistic theories must satisfy a ‘possible worlds’ logic,

where something contingently exists if propositions about it are consistent with some worldview,

necessarily exists if propositions about it are consistent in all worldviews, but cannot exist if its

propositions are consistent with no worldview. Mark Twain (1897) sums up the idealist’s predicament in

his inimitable style as follows:

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't (p. 156).

By definition, then, idealism has weaker standards to uphold than direct realism, for idealism necessarily

can be, at best, only contingently true, while direct realism has the strongest standards since they must

hold sway in all possible worldviews. If this is taken seriously, then one test of the validity of a

worldview is whether or not it supports direct realism. Of course, it may be that no worldview is true in

all possible worlds; if so, then arguments in their favor can at best be contingently true and never

necessarily true.

The Doctrine of Internal Relations entails each entity losing its old identity as an individual and

gaining a new identity whenever it participates in an organized whole. Hence an entity’s identity depends

on the context in which it occurs. Bachelors become husbands when joined in marriage; unaffiliated

citizens become voters when they join the party; loose bricks become foundation when they participate in

a building’s grounded support, and so forth. The new identity is specifically determined by how the

entity fits and functions as a member of the collective. Under this view, there are no true objects, only

subjects. Monism is also presumed because all things are related, and therefore must be essentially

similar to be so related. Locke's dictum that we can know only our own thoughts leads to a mentalistic

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monism because the external material world cannot be accessed, much less understood, by its opposite

kind.

This figure illustrates how ordinal relations exemplify internal relations. An ordinal number names a

place in a series and nothing else, so total meaning of that number is its relative position with respect to

the other members of the whole (e.g., series). Nominal labels exemplify external relations since they

express only the individuality of the entity independent of any collective to which it might belong. The

labels under the different heights are nominal and free of internal relations (i.e., ordinality) since the

people designated might be interchanged with others of the same height.

Attempts to build causal chains between incommensurate kinds (e.g., mind-to-matter or matter-to-

mind connections) fail because continuity is lacking over their connections; indeed, such a connection is

indefinable. However well defined, continuous connections can only underwrite causality between things

of like kind, whether they are material bodies or mental processes. Only the internal consistency of such

relations makes causality possible. If this reasoning is correct, the only way dualism survives under this

doctrine is as a parallelism, that is, with mind and body being separate and non-interacting. If then we

live materially in a world governed by causal conditions, we could not know this world but only imagine

its nature. The knower and the known retain their distinction but at the price of total separation. For the

New Realists this price was too high to pay, so they elected the contrary doctrine.

The Doctrine of External Relations was formulated by those who objected to being imprisoned in

their own minds. This doctrine asserts that no object is essentially changed by its participation in the

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whole, save with respect to the functions it assumes by the place it occupies in the collective. But here

individual identity is deemed an objective rather than a subjective property. Pluralism is presumed

because no object loses its identity and remains distinct regardless of its interrelationships to other

objects. Objects differ but may be causally related without losing their individual identity. A real object

could be caused to appear in consciousness and still be independent of that relation and of the mind that

knows it.

A criticism of this view is that each appearance of an object creates a new object equally as real as

the first thereby violating parsimony. For some, this repeated violation of Occam’s razor provided a

reductio ad absurdum argument that fatally infirms the doctrine, just as the problem of how intentionality

originates and the cognitive paradox fatally infirm the competing Doctrine of Internal Relations (Pratt,

1937). We shall return to this criticism later.

Ridding Ourselves of Dualism

Dualism can take two forms: interactionism or parallelism. Neither helps the case of dualism

very well given the conundra they raise. Descartes was the most famous proponent of interactionism and

Leibniz for parallelism. The infamous fault of interactionism is explaining how substances of such

drastically different kinds as force-driven matter and forceless mind could possibly interact. Hence the

mind-matter/body paradox stands unresolved. The equally infamous fault of parallelism is explaining

how experiences and physical events that belong to separate series could possibly become coordinated,

and stay coordinated, so that one series is specific to the other.

Many who disdain mind-matter dualism do so because they cannot make sense of interactionism,

while others disdain it because they cannot make sense of parallelism. Knowing the world minimally

consists of a correspondence holding between physical situations and ones experiences so the latter is

specific to former. If we must reject both forms of dualism, then how is the requisite specificity relation

to be explained? How can our stream of experiences, in running its course, possibly remain coordinated

with the stream of physical events as they, too, run their separate way? (Bain’s solution was to imagine

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them running separate parallel courses as if following concentric circular paths, but he left the

coordination problem unresolved.)

Perhaps, the irresolvable problem has nothing to do with interaction or parallelism because there

is only one series, not two. There is no coordination problem of one series interacting with itself or

running parallel with itself. Direct realism offers just such a solution. It is no good rejecting this

hypothesis because it is not understood, for neither of the other two hypotheses is understood either. In

lieu of dualism, let’s consider the case for both old direct realism (e.g., Holt’s) and new direct realism

(e.g., Gibson’s).

The Direct Realism ‘Solution’

Both Holt and Gibson repudiated mind-matter dualism to avoid a ‘two-world view’—the bifurcation

of Nature that many, like Whitehead, dreaded because it foreclosed on unitarian hopes. William James

and his second-generation student James J. Gibson (through his mentor Holt) both set their sights on

unitarian prospects. James thought he recognized a growing trend toward a neutral worldview that

favored ‘double-barrelled’ terms that in one context ascribes an object of experience to the knower, while

in another context ascribes it to the object known (James, 1912/1976):

And since experience can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as

subjective and objective both at once. The dualism connotated by such double-barrelled terms as

‘experience,’ phenomenon,’ ‘datum,’ and ‘Vorfindung’ [anticipation] in philosophy at any rate, tend to

more and more replace the single-barrelled terms of ‘thought’ and ‘object’ (p. 7).

Gibson, in agreement with James, introduces his own ‘double-barrelled’ concepts to avoid the pitfalls

of dualism. Affordance, the most central concept of his ecological worldview, is such a ‘double-barrelled’

term; it replaces crass dualism with a balanced mutuality between the knower and the known:

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 subjective-objective and helps us to understand its

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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, to the environment and to the observer (Gibson, 1979, p.129).

Hence the solution that direct realism offers putatively overcomes the difficulties that make both

interactionism and parallelism so unpromising.

Direct realism is not a premise but a consequence that follows from James’s doctrine of neutral

monism—a doctrine that wends it way through Holt’s New Realism to come to rest anew in Gibson’s

program of ecological psychology. What makes neutral monism a remarkable solution is that it postulates

only one kind of ‘stuff’ to be conserved. Mind and matter only seem different because this neutral stuff

appears in some contexts as psychical and in other ones as physical.

Here is one way of viewing this claim: There is but one ‘stream’ consisting of the knower

experiencing the known—whether the knower is you, me, or someone else. This superordinate stream is

no more subjective than it is objective; for want of a better term, we might, as before, call it superjective.

The streaming cannot be divided into separate parallel streams, they are integral currents of the same

flow. When you are sailing a boat, the boat, the wind, the wake, and you partake of the same streaming—

are all mutually expressions of that streaming. Here neutral monism faces it own practical problem.

How does one determine the pairing of the innumerable psychical and physical items so they

might be counted as one and the same? The answer is the remarkable one that amazed Pratt: They require

no coordination by an extrinsic source since they are one and the same merely seen in different contexts.

One need not puzzle over how the front and back of a coin got coordinated; they just come that way. In

addition, clarifying this claim requires a theory of contexts. Gibson offers an entry-level theory of

contexts with his novel notion of an affordance-rich environment that informs actors about the actions

they might take.

New Realism and Ecological Realism however might each be undone if they entail the existence

of entities multiplied beyond reason (i.e., unlawfully) in defiance of Ockam’s razor. They could also be

undone if dualism cannot be legitimately repudiated, or, put differently, if science and logic should

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support indirect realism over direct realism.

Under the Doctrine of External Relations, New Realism requires that each new perspective

denote a new ‘object;’ so over all possible perspectives a chaos of new ‘objects’ are manufactured helter

skelter. Neither science nor logic has principled means for handling the resulting disorder; the

corresponding ontology would be a cosmic mess. It would be as if reality were a chaotic generator

randomly spewing out numbers rather than a number system generator whose outputs are carefully placed

within a lawful series.

A similar problem haunts Ecological Realism: If affordances are real and environments replete

with nests of them, what keeps their number within realistic bounds? What keeps an actor from being

frozen in place while processing limitless dross in search of the specifically relevant? For if affordances

are unbounded in this way, then this new realism cannot avoid committing the cardinal ontological sin of

‘multiplying entities beyond reason’—or what has been called the Meinongian fallacy.

The Meinongian Fallacy

Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), an Austrian philosopher at the University of Graz, and a pupil of

Franz Brentano, became known for his belief in the unbridled multiplicity of so-called inexistent,

intentional objects (e.g., mental images, ideas). Despite their indeterminate number, these ghostly objects

also had to be included along with ordinary existent ones if a realistic account was to be given for

perceptual experience (Findlay, 1963). Meinong’s claim in a nutshell was this: there is an object for

every mental state whatsoever—if not an existent then at least a nonexistent one. For example, “I see the

broom” is an assertion that entails an object of perception that truly exists unless I am hallucinating, then

the object of the hallucination is said to ‘subsist’ as a dependency on my idea of real brooms.

Bertrand Russell (1905) believed this a fallacy. It flies in the face of Ockam’s razor (see below)

that admonishes theorists not to multiply entities beyond necessity—a violation of the principle of

parsimony, which admonishes theorists to keep things as simple as possible (but not too simple!). New

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Realists, like Holt, had to fend off this serious complaint against their ontology. The indirect realists, like

Pratt (1937), argued that the New Realist’s approach illegitimate because it committed the Meinongian

fallacy.

Russell and others also realized that if Meinong’s fallacy was left standing, then no sensible theory

of denotation was possible without which, logically speaking, direct perception theory lacks solid

foundations. Some recent logicians, believing the Meinongian fallacy unavoidable, have abandoned

traditional logic and seek refuge in the unorthodox, possible worlds logics (David Lewis, 1986). Other

logicians, like Russell, believe avoiding Meinong’s fallacy is possible if all violations of Ockam’s razor

are removed from the theory.

Ockham’s Razor: Making Theories a Cut Above the Rest

A 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham, formulated a principle

of parsimony for evaluating theories that has become an integral part of the scientific method. Known as

Ockam’s razor (for cutting off unnecessary entities), the principle asserts all things being equal the

simpler theory is to be preferred over a more complex one. The principle censors not just inelegance but

provides a way to avoid bad theories. Among the worse are those that contain unavoidable infinite

regresses.

The term infinite regress refers to any iterative process that cannot do what it is meant to do until

it ends but which, unfortunately, never ends. This puts the business of the theory on hold indefinitely (as

when a program involves infinite looping). Say, a perceptual process that cannot end until the experience

is had; but since it depends on an endless interpolation of representations, it never ends. Reasonably,

regressive processes of this kind cannot be said to give rational accounts of how perceptual experiences

arise. This defect is so damaging as to warrant the theory’s rejection.

Any theory that embraces the Doctrine of External Relations is liable to this defect. Regresses are

sources of countless ontological entities and hence violate Ockam’s razor many times over. As its critics

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recognized, New Realism, with its assent to the External Relations Doctrine, is plagued by such violations

in three ways:

(1) Each perspective mediates between object on which the perspective is taken and the perceptual

experience of that object. As such, each object, each perspective, and each experience must be

counted and summed with all other real entities. But since there are uncountable places of

observation, and many different times observations might be made, the number of distinct

perspectives that accrue will be uncountable.

(2) Likewise, sensations detected through different sense modalities under different atmospheric and

lighting conditions must all be counted separately. Just to make matters worse, since all

perspectives might be taken through any sense modality, the count obtained under (1) must be

multiplied by the count taken here.

(3) Objects may assume different meanings in different situations, at different times. Since an untold

number of situations exist in which objects may be perceived an indefinite number of times, the

diverse meanings accrued are indefinitely many. With each new meaning another entity is

created that must be counted, so the count becomes outrageously large.

Obviously, in all these cases, the unmitigated count can grow without practical bound. Any theory

that introduces an unchecked infinity of mediators (perspectives, meanings, representations, or images)

requires a count that easily exceeds the bounds of reason.

Gibson’s Ecological Realism

Gibson’s solutions to all the New Realists’ problems turn out to be simply invariants, invariants,

invariants!

(1) Invariants over adjacently and successively ordered perspectives resolve their multiplicity into a

layout of coherent objects and continuous events, respectively. An observer’s movement through

the environment produces a global transformation over the optic array whose invariants specify,

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simultaneously, the environment’s layout and the person’s movement through it. Consequently,

rather than an astronomical number of snapshot perspectives to be counted there is an invariant

stream of information to be noticed. The advantage of Gibson’s new realism over the old New

Realism is that, through the use of invariants, it wields Ockham’s razor more efficiently.

(2) Invariants over the five kinds of sensory experiences allow the individual senses to be treated as a

perceptual system; thus the modal particulars become unified into an organically whole

experience. This drastically reduces the number of degrees of freedom from counting myriad

sensations to counting only a few invariants. Hence, instead of a sensation-based theory of

perception built up from very many elements, Gibson provides an integral characterization

differentiable into informational invariants. This systems strategy also does justice to Ockam’s

razor.

(3) Invariants over socially shared meanings, or affordances (actually, ‘invariants of invariants’),

offer all similarly situated creatures a democracy of action opportunities. Under the old realism

meanings existed as individualized and independent experiences that multiplied over all agents.

By contrast, under the affordance rubric they form equivalence classes that need to be counted

just once—a many-to-one reduction. Without doubt, Ockam would have been happy with this

radical lessening of things to be counted.

Both the British and American New Realists overlooked these fundamental invariants that might have

saved their program from sinking under its own ontological weight. Gibson didn’t.

During the New Realists era invariance solutions had not yet filtered down from physics and, so, were

unavailable as means to resolve the Meinongian nightmare. Still one marvels at the simplicity of

Gibson’s direct realism strategy. Indirect realists however cannot adopt this strategy since it works only

on existents, directly perceived. It fails when applied to subsistents acting as mediating representations.

To avoid the Meinongian fallacy and argument from illusion, perception must have direct access to real

objects in all their differentiable fullness of meaning.

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The role of abstracted invariant information may reduce what needs to be counted, then, in three

fundamental ways: first, with regard to perspective taking; second, with regard to sensations produced by

different senses; or, finally, with respect to the super-abundance of meanings that accrue over changes in

contexts. But these perception-based arguments alone are inconclusive for banishing mediating

constructs. An additional argument is needed.

Why Direct is Better than Indirect

Here are some reasons, other than parsimony, for favoring direct realism over indirect realism:

• Where real objects are dense in meaning, presenting endless layers of perceivable detail,

representations have just one meaning—and that is borrowed from something else.

• Real objects afford innumerable actions in and of themselves; representations afford only the

action (of representing) assigned them ad hoc.

• A representation is a vehicle for information but not a source of information. A source is a

plenum; a vehicle is only an item.

• Where direct perception depends on noticing; indirect perception depends on interpreting.

Noticing is a primitive, unanalyzable act of knowing by direct acquaintance, interpreting is

knowing indirectly by description or inference—an act with many parts.

• And, finally, where direct perception of a real object tells us much about what it is, direct

perception of a representational object tells us nothing about what it represents. For instance, you

might point to my plate and say, ”Henceforth, in our discussions, let these mashed potatoes

represent Socrates;” after lengthy and careful scrutiny of the mashed potatoes, I shall discover

nothing more about Socrates but I shall come to know the potatoes quite well.

A major problem with mediation theory is that we have no idea how it could work. Although the idea

of mediating processes appear self-evident, scientific prima facie evidence for them has not been

forthcoming. There is much talk about representations but no scientific theory of how they are created,

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where they are based, how they correspond to whatever they represent, and how having them helps in

perception. In short, mediation theory is still too facile and hypothetical to be accepted as anything more

than a rough sketch of an undeveloped idea.

In particular, we do not know how representations are instantiated in the nervous system, their causal

substratum is, at best, vague, at worse, mysterious. Lashley’s classical criticism of ‘engrams’ in the

1920’s is still as valid today as it was then: representations still do not seem to be single patterns localized

in the brain but more like holograms distributed over a vast number of neuro-electro-chemical brain

events (Pribram, 1991)—perhaps, seeded at the quantum level (Jibu and Yasue, 1995).

Forget the instantiation problem; Chalmers (1996) was right to label it the ‘hard’ problem. What can

we say about them functionally? Are representations the objects of perceptual experience in lieu of the

corresponding real-world objects? Or, is the process of making them how we experience them? If so,

who does the perceiving? Answers to these questions are still lacking.

Is this an objective opinion? Or just one reflecting the biases of an alternative worldview? Let’s see.

Has the Case for Representations Proven Sound?

Today, the major purveyor of representational realism has to be cognitive science. Might not

representations pass muster here? It seems not yet. Cognitive science gives the game away because it

assumes that which it tries to explain—representations. This is why, perhaps, we find in two recent

reviews of the cognitive science literature the authors conclude that questions about representations go

unanswered—often even unaddressed. Consider the following appraisals by these reviewers who

themselves are cognitive scientists:

In a book entitled The Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Dietrich (1995) says:

Currently, no one has a definitive, detailed answer to the fundamental problem [of representations] . . .

Indeed, for the most part, cognitive scientists do not know how minds represent (nor how brains represent).

However, certainly the big picture [worldview] is set. Brains represent by storing information in the

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patterns of activation of their neurons . . . Minds represent by using data structures of various sorts . . . It is

widely agreed that, for both brains and their minds, a causal story is needed about how information from

the environment flows into the cognizer (and vice-versa). The details remain to be worked out, and the

work is difficult—nevertheless, progress is being made (p. 3).

The candor of this reviewer is refreshing, for scientists too often are blind to the shortcomings of their

own views. Perhaps, given the seductive nature of ones chosen worldview, this is to be expected,

although it adds nothing to our science while detracting from it.

Has the prospects for a scientific theory of representations gotten any better in the decade and a half

since the above review was written? Apparently, not. In a more recent review in a book with the telling

title Foundational Issues in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science: Impasse and Solution, the

authors Bickhard and Terveen (2007) state even more baldly the shortcomings of the cognitive science

worldview:

In summary of the architecture arguments to this point, we have: Contemporary conceptions of and

approaches to representation are not only wrong, they are logically incoherent. They universally assume

that representation is some form of correspondence (isomorphism) between a representing element or

structure and the represented, but they do not and cannot account for how such correspondence is supposed

to provide representational content, ‘aboutness,’ for the animal or agent itself. They are, universally,

analyses from the perspective of some observer of the animal or agent, and therefore are intrinsically

incapable of accounting for the cognitive processes and capacities of such an observer per se (p. 314).

Is there room for optimism? Could representational realism get the better of direct realism? On the

contrary, the problem of interest to direct realists is not how representations are made, what they are made

of, or even how they are used. The problem is that if they exist at all, then the knower is not in contact

with substantial real-world existents but only with diaphanous subsistents whose intrinsic nature and

origin are unknown. Hence representational realism is anathema to direct realists, for an agent knowing

its world would be impossible if in any epistemic stage it had to depend on mediators—an impenetrable

batting insulating knower from that which needs to be known.

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We recognize that the argument from illusion has traditionally dogged direct realism, what may

surprise some is that it is the bane of representational (indirect) realism as well. They also, necessarily,

have an abiding problem with error.

The idea of error and the idea of representation go hand in hand. To represent the world as being a certain

way is implicitly to allow a gap between how the representation says the world is, and how the world

actually is (Crane, 2003, p. 208).

Therefore any argument from illusion or error that casts doubt on direct realism must also cast doubt

on indirect realism (of the reductive sort). However, not only does indirect realism get hung up on

representations, it is stymied unless it assumes a logically prior direct perception that gives the standard

for how the world really is by eradicating the ‘gap.’ It seems that indirect perception cannot function

without direct perception. The presence of the world to be perceived does not depend on the having of a

representation but the presence of representation does depend on having the world. We are back to

Locke’s cognitive paradox.

Another worry for indirect realism that direct realism avoids is the ineluctable presence of infinite

regresses. The argument usually goes like this: Psychological explanations in terms of mental entities,

such as ideas or representations, are generally defective. By appealing, say, to representations and their

supporting processes, nothing is explained, rather the focus of explanation is simply deferred to another

level—where the issue was how people perform cognitive tasks (e.g., visual recognition, memory,

inference, imagination, etc.), it now becomes how do the representations work. For instance, trying to

explain that a man recognizes his wife by matching her form with that of the stored representation

becomes, then, the problem of how the man recognizes the mediating step when some representation

matches his idea of his wife. (This sounds suspiciously like Berkeley in the dialogue with Hume reported

earlier.)

Thus if a man’s idea of his wife is to have meaning, he must know when his idea of his wife

corresponds to what he sees. But understanding how he can know this is just as difficult to explain as

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how he knows, in the first place, that he is seeing his wife. Any attempt to explain this with yet another

idea precipitates an endless regress.

It would seem that direct realism is left standing after indirect realists have taken their best shots.

Ordinarily the indirect realists argue as if their worldview is unassailable and that the onus is on the direct

realists to prove their case. In actuality, the shoe is on the other foot.

Final Remarks

To wrap up this chapter, let’s allow two prominent direct realists, James Gibson from the American

school and Bertrand Russell from the British school, to have the last words. Their words are worth

bearing in mind whenever debating contrasting worldviews: Gibson (1979) summed up his worldview’s

opposition to dualism this way:

There has been endless debate among philosophers and psychologists as to whether values are physical or

phenomenal, in the world of matter or only in the world of mind. For affordances, as distinguished from

values, the debate does not apply. Affordances are neither in the one world or the other inasmuch as the

theory of two worlds is rejected. There is only one environment. Although it contains many observers

with limitless opportunities to live in it (Gibson, p. 138).

With his usual perspicacity, Russell (1903) offers insight into what is really at issue in debates over

worldviews:

All depends, in the end, upon immediate perception; and philosophical argument, strictly speaking, consists

mainly of an endeavor to cause the reader to perceive what has been perceived by the author. The

argument, in short, is not in the nature of proof, but of exhortation (p. 130)

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