Cognition and Action

Meanwhile the development of cognitive research has lead to the appearing of a principally new strategy. It is connected with a drastic revision of the main pre­supposition of studying cognition and knowledge, which philosophers, psycholo­gists, specialists in cognitive science considered as indubitable: the idea that the content of consciousness is the only that is known and which is certain.

Already in the first half of the 20th century G.E. Moore suggested to refuse this idea. Consciousness refers not to oneself, but to the world, as it is “open” to the world, he maintained. Consciousness is “transparent”, and any attempt to describe a mental content becomes a description of the world outer to consciousness. So it has no sense to invent “proofs of the existence of the outer world”, which were called by Kant “a philosophical scandal”. Because this problem doesn't exist. Ordinary intuition about the existence of the real world is “built in” the structure of consciousness and cognition and is more evident than theories of the world, which are constructed by science. G. Moore in his famous article “Proof of the External World” asserted that statements: “Here is my left hand”, “Here is my right hand”, accompanied by corresponding gestures, express genuine knowledge (Moore 1959).

At our time a conception appeared that refuses the traditional understanding of mental processes and states and formulates a principally new, revolutionary para­digm of cognitive research, proceeding from ideas of epistemological realism. It is called “ecological approach” to visual perception, elaborated by the famous psy­chologist D. Gibson. Researchers who develop the principal Gibson's ideas— gibsonians and neogibsonians—call their approach in cognitive science “embodied, situated and inactive” (Gibson 1979).

D. Gibson has based his theory on investigating visual perception.

Empirical sensualism and intellectualism in understanding perception are oppo­site to each other. But both of them share a common presupposition. It includes two points.

The first one. It is supposed that in the process of perception a subject deals with phenomena of consciousness and is closed in the field of the latter (although it is understood in the first case as a more or less passive register, and in the second case as an active constructor). The outer world is considered as a trigger. It acts on sense organs as a cause, creates certain “prints”, and later is excluded from the game. Consciousness (and therefore the brain) deals only with these “prints”. But if perceiving is such—and it seemed that it cannot be otherwise—it is impossible to understand how a cognizing subject can deal with the outer reality.

The second point. “Prints” were considered as ideal entities, on the base of which another ideal entity arises: “percept”. The latter is “projected” to reality in some way which is incomprehensible.

D. Gibson refuses both these points. He proceeds from the idea that perception is not a manipulation of “prints”, but an interaction of a perceiving agent with the outer world. Perception exists only in this interaction. It is not an ideal entity in the “inner world” of consciousness, not a thing, but a process, not a “percept”, but perceiving.

consciousness or brain (although it is impossible to perceive without a brain), they are real actions of an agent in relation to the outer world (perception is “inacted”). So a process of perceiving includes not only consciousness, and not only a sensory systems and a brain, but also the body of an agent (perception is “embodied”) and a part of an environment, which participates in this process (perception is “situated”). Perceiving is not simply a phenomenon of consciousness. It is an event in the real world, a necessary part of life.

Extracted information—in distinction from sensory signals, which according to old conceptions of perception create separate sensations—says about the features of the real outer world, and it is those features that are correlated with demands of a cognizing agent and with possibilities of its actions (Noe 2004).

There is another important idea in Gibson's theory. For understanding, for example, visual perception one should use not those theories which are elaborated in physics and geometrical optics. Because in the case of real visual perception (not as it was studied in traditional psychology) a cognizing agent deals with objects compat­ible with the dimensions of a body and included in activity. It is not a physical world, but the immediate surroundings. For a human being they are what is recognized by naive realism: trees, mountains, rivers, seas, buildings, other people, a colored and sounding world. It has its own ontology, distinct from the ontology of physics and even specific laws of the spreading of light: it is then so called “ecological optics”.

Reality must be understood as multilayer.

Naive realism and ecological realism are not in mutual opposition. Their objects are at different levels, which don't exclude, but presuppose each other (a similar idea concerning real referents of theoretical objects in the process of theory change has been elaborated by Agazzi (2014).

D. Gibson asserts that his conception can solve in particular the old problem of “primary” and “secondary” qualities. So called “secondary qualities” (for example, color) are not features of corresponding light waves and are not determined by the specific nature of sense organs, but features of surfaces and structures of objects of the surrounding world, about which a cognizing agent is informed through spreading of light stream, understood from the point of view of “ecological optics”. (Gibson 1967, pp. 169-170).

D. Gibson stresses that each living being selects out in the world what affords its actions. These affordances exist objectively, in the surrounding world itself, but are selected by living and acting beings differently depending on their body dimen­sions, demands, and the specific features of their actions. So the reality not only has different levels. It is manifold, and a cognizing agent deals with only some of its features. For example, a person who is sitting at a table, a dog which is close to its host near a table, and a cucumber which is moving around a table's leg, perceive the same real object—a table.

But there is a problem in this connection. If living beings select in the world only those objects and features that correspond to the specific nature of their sensory systems and possibilities of actions, then it seems that different beings live in different worlds, which not only don't intersect, but can exclude each other (Chemero 2003, pp. 181-195). For example, colors and forms of things, which we see, don't exist for a bat, which doesn't have visual organs and orients itself in the world with the help of echolocation (Nagel 1974, pp. 435-450). But if one thinks that different cognizing agents live in such worlds, this position is equal to acknowledging that there is no common real world, that it is better to assert that there is not a selection of different aspects of a common world, but a construction of different worlds according to the specificity of agents. It is the position of F. Varela and his co-authors in the famous book (Varela 1992), which was a starting point (together with works by D. Gibson) for the development of “embodied”, “situated” and “inacted” approaches in contemporary cognitive science. F. Varela refuses the thesis of idealism that a cognizing being deals only with the content of its own consciousness. But he doesn't agree also with an idea of realism that features of the world don't depend on the process of interaction between it and a cognizing agent. F. Varela asserts that actions of a cognizing being determined by its bodily nature construct a world in which this being lives and which it cognizes.

But the genuine nature of the embodied approach to cognition can and must be understood in another way. Different cognizing beings live in the common world, although they select out its different aspects. But these ones are objectively con­nected with others, which are not fixed by some living beings. So an acting and cognizing being in the process of interaction with those parts of the surrounding which are accessible to it interacts at the same time with those aspects of the world which it doesn't perceive in a direct way. For example, a cucumber, which is moving around a table's leg, fixates only a small part of a leg's surface that is in its visual field. But features of this surface depend on the form of the leg as a whole and on how the leg is connected with the table. So a cucumber is really interacting with the same table at which I am sitting, although I perceive it in other way than it. As to the human being she/he goes out of the limitations of her/his own sensory systems and can perceive with the help of instruments what she/he cannot perceive directly, and can with the help of scientific theories understand how a bat or a cucumber cognize the world (Lektorski 2013).

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