history and philosophy of ecological psychology
Article from Frontiers in Psychology at this link. From the Introduction:
“Ecological psychology is an embodied, situated, and non-representationalist approach to cognition pioneered by J. J. Gibson (1904–1979) in the field of perception and by E. J. Gibson (1910–2002) in the field of developmental psychology. Ecological psychology, in its very origins, aimed to offer an innovative perspective for understanding perception and perceptual learning that overcomes the traditional psychological dichotomies of perception/action, organism/environment, subjective/objective, and mind/body.”
“The first source of inspiration that J. J. Gibson took into account for developing the ecological approach to cognition was American pragmatism and, in particular, the ideas of James on radical empiricism and neutral monism. […] According to pragmatism, practical consequences should be taken as more relevant than abstract principles to explain scientific practices, ethics, and cognition.”
“J. J. Gibson’s approach has been said to parallel the work of Merleau-Ponty. […] There is reason to believe that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of body schema was also influential for J. J. Gibson. Merleau-Ponty’s approach to phenomenology was quite unique at the time: he believed that the structures that allowed for cognition were not cultural or purely mental, but bodily structures. Perceiving is the primordial way of knowing, but in this view, perception is the result of comporting toward the surrounding objects in a meaningful sense. Thus, in this view, dealing with the environment is an exploratory activity of the agent… Read more »