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Category: Project

Description: At the start of his final book, James Gibson makes a distinction between two different senses in which there is a world outside the animal. First, there is a physical world consisting of matter which is structured prior to any animal's experiencing it. Second, there is the animal environment, where the "environment" is what surrounds a living animal, the two terms making up a complementary and indecomposable animal–environment system. A problem with this is that what Gibson termed the "animal environment" remains ambiguous: in talking of the environment here, are we referring to the typical surroundings that are shared by all members of a species, or are we referring to the specific surroundings of a particular individual organism, where those surroundings are meaningful relative to that organism's personal abilities and history? Call the first sense the “habitat” of a species and the second the "Umwelt" of a given animal. We argue that it is necessary to keep these two senses of environment separate, and that doing so allows us to resolve several long-standing areas of tension in the field, namely over the concepts of: affordances, information, learning, and the social.