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
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 neorealists 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:
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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 (19041979) resounded with a new and revised version of New Realism. The aim of this chapter is to reveal the
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.
(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.
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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
(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.
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.
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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!
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
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.
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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 mindmatter/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 (18321920) 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
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
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.
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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
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.
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
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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
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, neurophysiological 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, twoperspective 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.
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.
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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.
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 (18421910), 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
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
11
‘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
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
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
12
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.
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
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.
13
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
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.
14
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
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-tomind connections) fail because continuity is lacking over their connections; indeed, such a connection is
15
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
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
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
16
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
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
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
17
‘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
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
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
18
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,
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.
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
19
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,
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
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
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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.
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.)
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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
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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