Centre for Philosophical Psychology, Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2021 May;16(3):577-589. doi: 10.1177/1745691620958005. Epub 2021 Feb 16.
By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal's activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of "affordances," the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.
通过分享彼此的世界，人类和其他动物相互依存。随着时间的推移，动物的一代代活动决定了它们的世界。相比之下，当前的心理学科学方法从动物活动之前世界已经确定的假设出发。这些方法似乎更关心对世界的不确定性，而不是人类和非人类动物所经历的世界的实际不确定性。由于人类的活动使其他动物的生活越来越艰难，这种全神贯注变得难以接受。本文介绍了一种生态心理学方法，以发展一种观点，即集中于共享世界的不确定性。具体来说，它发展了一种开放的“可供性”概念，即环境提供的行动可能性。可供性是这样一种过程：（a）物质世界邀请个体动物参与，而（b）参与同时以特定的方式继续物质世界。从这个角度来看，物种共同决定了世界。本文探讨了这种可供性观点在几个经验和方法上的意义。文章最后解释了生态视角如何将对共享世界的责任置于心理学科学的核心。
