 |
 |
On 17/5/18 7:15 am, Don Norman wrote: > our disagreements were based on the fact that I > wanted to understand the underlying brain mechanisms whereas he argued for > pure "information pickup," without any internal processing. I still don't > understand what he meant by that This may or may not help: The difference between you and Gibson, as I see it, are profoundly philosophical. To use the vernacular of professional philosophers: you view the world through the lense of empiricism, Gibson, in his latter work, viewed the world through the lense of realism. Put VERY simply, you look to empirical evidence for the proof of whether or not something exists. Gibson looks to what he regards as the reality of the environment in which we live to define what exists. I have just read Keith Russell's response which more or less says, much better than I do, what Gibson was about. I will add just a small bit. Instead of seeeing us as independent from our environment, Gibson sees us as creatures of our environemnt, evolved over time to deal with the enevironment in which we move, avoid harm, collect food, make things etc. To do these things as succesfully and as economically as possible our ancestors, back to single cell organisms, progressively internalised the consistent characteristics of the environment through which we moved in such a way that we did not need to constantly anaslyse the environment, but rather internalised its characteristics. To use a modern metaphor, the charcteristics of our environment (affordances) are hard wired into us, but not at the plastic neurological level, but at the biological structural level. Our eyes, as an example, are the way they are and where they are in our anatomy not because of neurological features, but because of the way they have evolved in a REAL environemnt to deal with that environment. Gibson thus moved from Empiricism to Realism. This marks out a significant and radical difference between what I surmise is your way of thinking and that of Gibson. You seem to be asking for a 'mechanism' such as information processing to explain how we percieve. Gibson is saying, there is no mechanism, it's just the way we are because we have been formed by our environment: look to the environment for an explanation, not into our brains. Of course, the weekness of Gibson's view is that you stll have to explain how you 'look to the environment'. I don't know if Gibson was familier with Heidegger or Wittgenstein which might have helped him push the argument further, but his views are predicated on the theory of evolution which provides pretty powerful grounds for his argument. I hope this helps. It does, at least help me explain to me why you and Gibson could not agree. Best wishes, David ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------