Dear Heidi,
I am glad that you reviewed the literature on affordances and recognized as irrelevant several interpretation responding to your post.
You mentioned what seems to me most important that Gibson got the idea from his research project during WWII studying the perception of pilots. To me, his fundamental insight was that we perceive not things as they exist, nor is perception entirely an issue of the retina, a cognitive issue, as some contributors insist, or as Terry claims that Gibson neglected human biology. Perception is part of human beings interacting through a principally unknowable world with themselves, creating conceptions of the world we can handle.
Surely, there must be something in front of pilots trying to land an airplane. Such situations may be very complex but the pilot sees whether the plane is landable or not. You can say that Gibson proposed an epistemological shift from seeing objects that exist, complaining like Descartes did, that the mind is full of biases and Terry pointing to illusions or distortions of reality, to a view that we humans are making our world through what we can do with it. A chair affords sitting. Steps afford climbing, etc. From my point of view, his view can be traced back to Giambattista Vico, a contemporary opponent of Descartes.
What Gibson did not tackle well was the failure of perceiving affordances that are not met in the actions that perceptions suggest. This is what much of my "The Semantic Turn" is about and it is fundamental to any good design not to mislead users into believing that a design affords something it does not.
The perception of affordances may be wrong but generally does not cover all that something does afford. Think about using a truck to kill a lot of people. Conventionally, we do not think of a truck as a weapon, however some terrorists learned to perceive it as affording it and succeed in using it that way, unimaginable before it happened.
The lack of affordances are important in the evolution of concepts. There are a lot of ideas we have like God, that can hardly be tested. Evidently, the world affords beliefs in being guided by a higher power. On the other hand, as long as I do not act on my conceptions, they can't be proven unaffordable. I can tell everyone I am superman, but if I act on this self-perception, go on top of a skyscraper and jump, my conception is no longer reproducible. The point is that affordances need to be not only perceived but also enactable and corrected if they do not yield what I perceive to be afforded.
From a designer's perspective, I think it is important to not merely accept culturally standard conceptions of what something affords (is designed to support), but to explore all kinds of affordances, some are helpful to their users, some can kill them, some can lead to learn not to act in ways thought to be afforded, some are misleading, some limit the recognition of affordances, etc. The masses of users tend to bring an amazing array of perceptions to any design, find affordances that designers may not have imagined -- but should try to.
Klaus
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Heidi Overhill
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2018 10:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gibson, Gibson, Gibson, perception....
Dear Terence,
Many thanks for the reading references, though I am afraid from a brief introduction that Spinoza is not my cup of tea (I suffer from chronic allergic reactions to mentions of God).
I do like his assertion that "man" is necessarily a part of nature, and does not stand outside it merely by virtue of braininess. But, based on the Stanford entry, I appear to differ from Spinoza on the possibility of an "adequate knowledge" that "situates its object in all of its causal nexuses and shows not just that it is, but how and why it is. The person who truly knows a thing sees the reasons why the thing was determined to be and could not have been otherwise" [2.3 Knowledge]. I myself have never experienced of any such moment of intellectual adequacy, and find much more compelling Gibson's hint of a contingent and individually-limited awareness of an undeniable but ultimately unknowable external reality.
Your summary of Damasio is rich reading on non-rational aspects of designing, and design. I shall return to it again, and also plan to turn to the original (1999, p.8) to examine more closely the distinction between having an emotion, feeling it, and self-awareness of feeling it. This distinction is where I am thinking it might be possible to locate "thinking" or mental phenomena in terms of perception, which is the main question you raise. When you say: "There are many examples of a perception occurring without it being a perception of something in the real world. The literature of illusion and delusion describes many such situations." you appear to set up a non-Spinozian scenario in which mind is seen as something set apart from the world, so that the contents of the mind are not part of reality, even though the mind itself is both natural and real. Here, I would remind us that perception includes not just "exteroception" of the outside world, but also "interoception" of pain and hunger, and "proprioception," which is sensing the position of body parts. Clearly, feeling hunger is a perception of something not located in the mind (or so the stomach insists). That positions body as something that lies in the world, outside the mind, raising the idea that there might be some physical division between mind and body. This of course is an issue in the whole area of cyborg theory, in which it seems fairly well established that no such line can be drawn. Certainly the surface of the skin does not serve as such a line; eyeglasses, laser surgery and cataract implants all enhance vision regardless of how they orbit or penetrate the body.
My personal solution to the issue of mental illusion is thus to simply class it with other perceptions; with the noise of passing cars, itches in the toes, and sudden memories of Grandma. Who among us has not surprised themselves when an unexpected idea suddenly pops into one's head? Disregarding the biochemical or mystical origins of that idea, perhaps it can suffice for now to simply concentrate on the moment of its perception, when you think to yourself, "hmmm... interesting idea..."
Heidi
From: Terence Love <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2018 10:46 PM
Subject: Re: Gibson, Gibson, Gibson, perception....
Hi, Heidi,
Thank you for some great posts. I enjoyed reading them.
In your last post, you wrote,
"I guess that you can say that perception is an activity that takes place inside a mind, but since it must necessarily always be a perception of something, then without that something there will be no perception"
I suggest not.
There are many examples of a perception occurring without it being a perception of something in the real world. The literature of illusion and delusion describes many such situations.
One explanation of this is that everything we see is generated by the mind, and the input of the eyes only gives hints as to which things the mind should show to us.
This is easy to get personal experience of. Two examples come to mind.
If one creates a darkened space with objects in it such that it is dark enough that when we look we can see the firing of our individual light receptors, then if we adjust our eyelids to dim the light further, we can often see things that are not there. They are simply generated by our mind.
Another example, is to listen while spending time in a large computer server room. At times it is possible to hear snippets of music as if being played by the computers there. Again , the music is generated in our heads.
Gibson's work is limited in part because it is missing biological foundations that provide causal explanation and justification of Gibson's psychological claims. Antonio Damasio offers this part of the story to support Gibson in for example 'The Feeling of What Happens'. I did a precis of Damasio's findings for design researchers which may be still valid (or at least as valid in historical terms as Gibson's work). It is available at https://www.love.com.au/docs/2003/Damasio.pdf
Third, Gibson's work can be seen as a restating of the work of Baruch Spinoza. Much of what Gibson discusses is what Spinoza refers to as the human knowledge of 'reason' and the relationships between objects (including humans). - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/
May be interesting to note that Damasio's next book after 'The feeling of What Happens' is 'Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain'.
Best wishes,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love
CEO
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
[log in to unmask]
www.designoutcrime.org
+61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
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