Notes on the Gibsonian Variant of Behaviorism

Gibsonian psychology has become what Karl Popper called a haunted universe metaphysical doctrine, no longer subject to empirical refutation or correction. Once novel terms became circularly defined in such fashion that they support a position based upon the philosophical doctrine of phenomenalism: an epistemology that cannot separate the knower (or actor) as agent from that which is to be known (or acted upon). Fearing an alleged monster, "dualism," it promotes an untenable approach (direct realism, which reduces to naive realism) that cannot address how science makes use of fundamentally abstract conceptual explanatory entities (which are not "given" in "directly" perceived in phenomenal experience). Embracing the phenomenalistic umwelt conception of organism-environment "mutuality" (to avoid "dualism"), Gibsonians abandon actual realism and the framework of evolution while claiming to defend both. Eschewing discussion of the nervous system playing the fundamental active role in creating the "phenomenal experience" an organism has, proponents dismiss neuropsychology, learning history, memory, and cognitive factors for the affordance structure of the ambient array as the causal source of behavior and subject matter of psychology. Such accordion words arbitrarily cut the causal theory of perception from its roots in physical science realism, trying to start psychology at the level of a restricted, purely functional analysis of already given meanings (affordances) somehow directly "picked up" from the umwelt. Unable to do so due to the problems of stimulus equivalence, the abstract (thus nonphenomenal) concept of "invariants" was introduced to make abstract entities somehow "directly" perceived. The quest for hard science "laws" in psychology has been defended, ignoring arguments from the last few hundred years about the differences between physical identical objects that can be ratio scaled, and the inevitably always very different functional subjects or agents that cannot be so scaled or measured, found in the realm of the life "sciences." Thus, Gibsonians fail to understand why realism must be representational and not direct, what constitutes perception-action relations, the ambiguity of action (and affordance), the nature and role of meaning in life and understanding, the nature of mensuration and its role in science, the nature of anticipatory systems, fundamental limitations of dispositional accounts, the epistemic necessity of separating the knower fr