The ecological approach to perception-action, in the tradition of the late James J. Gibson, sees psychology as continuous with the natural sciences (and, in fact, rather than being reserved as a special case for applying scientific principles, living systems embody the more general case as is argued near the end of this page). Just as the behaviors of natural, nonliving systems at the very large and very small scales are approachable in terms of very general principles so, too, are the behaviors of living systems at the intermediate ecological scale. In its broadest sense, ecology is a multidisciplinary approach to the study of living systems, their environments, and the reciprocity that has evolved between the two. The organism-environment system is treated as the primary unit of analysis, as is necessitated by a philosophical foundation (aligned with objectivism) of eschewing the pervasive dualisms that impose a fragmented view of reality along with the reductive tendencies that arise from varied attempts to carve up reality in procrusten-fashion or to "resolve" these false dichotomies with conveniently oversimplifying monisms. The basic orientation of this approach is to the primacy of existestence where the environment to be perceived is the starting point for any intellectual pursuit in the problems of perception-action. This perspective carries implications not just for psychology but for our broader understanding of the natural world; the task of identifying general principles at the ecological scale challenges traditional methods, necessitating novel interdisciplinary strategies.

Ontological And Epistemological Foundations:

At its core, the ecological approach is grounded in two foundational and intertwined pillars which elevates its explanatory power well beyond just organism-environment dynamics:

1. Ontological foundation: At the heart of the ecological approach lies the logic of reciprocity, which articulates an inherent complementarity found throughout nature. Reciprocity emphasizes that reality is fundamentally relational and impredicative, characterized by mutual entailment across systems and scales, where no entity exists independently of its ongoing participation in reciprocal relations with other entities.

   Organisms and their environments, for instance, are not merely juxtaposed entities but co-define one another as distinguishable yet mutually supportive realities of a unified system. Reciprocity is most evident in the ecological interface, where both organism and environment each structure one another in turn; wherein neither the organism nor the environment can be understood in isolation, embodying complementarity rather than division. The term environment means a surrounding, thus the concept implies something surrounded; the environment is ontologically relative to the perceiver and there is no dichotomous sepration of mind and matter or perceiver and world. Neither the perceiver (or perception) nor the environment is understood atheoretically, for each pair of the reciprocity is selectively investigated and described involving concepts or assumptions regarding the other member of the pair. Affordances, exemplifying this mutual structuring, are not inherent in objects or organisms alone but scale systemically, (embedded) as those possibilities for interaction structured at the scale of their intersection and throughout their ongoing engagement—viz, as relational properties at the ecological scale of organism-environment reciprocity. They exist only as opportunities for action specific to an organism's capacities, and they shape, in turn, how the organism engages with its environment.^[1]

   Reciprocity permits us to move beyond the rigid separations and the reductive tendencies of dualism and monism. It necessitates a radical rethinking of ontology; what we can term "Dynamic Differentiated-Holism" (DDH): a framework where parts and wholes are co-realized within a heterogeneous and seamlessly packed, interpenetrating web of nested natural units^[2] (see F.note2 for a great concretization of this). One of Gibson’s strongest and unique contributions was a reconciliation of whole-part dualism, without attempting to relegate to a derivative status either wholes or parts. Reality is not composed of indivisible building blocks, isolated entities, or an abstract, undifferentiated whole that subsumes its parts; differentiation and holism are inseparably intertwined. Any part is itself (a relational whole) inherently complex and possesses some activity peculiar to it (law of causality). Any part itself has parts. There is no formless matter, no simple (unanalyzable) elements on which more complex entities are built (but only propertied things). The parts are necessary, but they are not identified with the causal power or identity of a thing; rather, it is their reciprocal alignments (how their properties---not parts---co-condition one another in a nonlinear fashion). DDH not only rejects the elementarism of the Newtonian world view but also its “inert” or passive view of entities; entities are not “moved about” by external forces nor by each other because there is no such thing as mechanistic causality. Ultimately, DDH completely rejects Newton’s ontology of discrete inert elements contained in absolute empty containers of "space" and "time," replacing it with nested natural units of a dynamic, self-organizing structure wherin reciprocity (distinguishible yet mutually supportive, co-realizations) is the essential nature of reality itself.

   If this organism-enviornment reciprocity is understood not to be merely contingent but entailed, following necessarily from maximizing the global rate of entropy production, then perception-action for all organisms is a phenomenon to be understood in terms of lawful regularities and symmetry principles defined at the ecological scale. The theory's cornerstones are as follows: (1) maximum entropy production (thermodynamic fields will behave in such a fashion as to get to the final state—minimize the field potential or maximize the entropy—at the fastest possible rate given the constraints); (2) the inexorability of order production (order production is inexorable because order produces entropy faster than disorder); (3) evolution as a global phenomenon (the earth system at its highest level evolves as a single global entity); and (4) the ecological information hypothesis. In the coordination of self organizing dynamics with ecological information, access is provided to otherwise inaccessible opportunities to produce ordered flow and to dissipate, thereby, the geo-cosmic potential at faster rates. (Full context on this: Thermodynamics of life). The co-evolution of organisms and their environments emphasizes that the organism–environment system, as an integrated and dynamic whole, is the key unit of analysis for all cognition (knowing about), surpassing the reductivist focus on subpersonal systems of agents (like the circulatory, digestive, or nervous systems.)
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2. Epistemological foundation: Implicit within any ontology is a theory of knowledge— its source(s), its nature, and its form. An epistemology of direct realism requires that perception-action is a direct process; viz., in this case, one of ongoing resonance (and systemic attunement) to ecological information, a law-based property of real states of affairs. This information inherently specifies the source of its environmental structure (this proposed relationship does not exist because “stimulation causes perception", but rather because perception is an active process of resonance to ecological information). The basic premise here is: for perception to be direct, there must be something available to the organism that (unambiguously) specifies the environment's surface layout and affordances without mediation. Patterned energy distributions, ambient to the organism, are hypothesized to be lawfully generated by environmental properties and specific to those properties at the ecological scale; manifesting as information-bearing structures.

   Energy dispersals, governed by the first law of thermodynamics (law of invariance; energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed) and the second law (law of change; energy disperses over gradients, following symmetry principles), are inherently information about their sources in the most direct sense. These dispersals are not amorphous but exhibit transitions across multiple scales—from minute transitions across seconds of arc, more global transitions at the level of minutes, and still more global differences at the level of degrees—forming what Gibson would term specific “structure” in the ambient arrays of the environment (since the array consists of transitions, constrained by gradients of specificity across spatiotemporal scales, it has specific “structure”). Information involves structure and structure involves relationships: besides structure, the two other central concepts in Gibson’s description of the ambient array are invariants and transformations. What should be stressed is the logical reciprocity between the general concepts of invariance and transformation. An invariant can only be defined over a change. The concept of invariance means something which remains the same (under transformation); and viceversa, where there is a transformation there must also be something invariant. Simply stated, where there is change there is permanency, and where there is permanency there is change.

   Crucially, these ambient ecological arrays are not simply passive stimulus fields but are structured so^[3] and, thus, require active engagement by the perceiver. The cycles of perception-action, then, are continuous, overlapping, and non-sequential processes of detecting, attuning to, and refining the pickup of: ecological information. The organism continuously (and inexorably) samples a multiply (increasing) series of ambient arrays of an open-ended set (rejecting multiple fallacies encompassed by the muddle of anticipation), as it orients itself with the environment, not passively but actively, creating new stimuli by exploring the ambient arrays of the environment to identify relations, ratios, grades, viz., invariants of the patterned energy distributions under varied transfomations, e.g., the activity of visiual perception includes accommodation of the lens, eye movements, head adjustments, and selective fixation.^[4] These actions enable the perceiver to continually refine their attunement to the structured energy (information) flows; the invariants of a multiply series of ambient arrays require exploration to become separated from what is just unique to any one given position or path of observation for the ambient environment. Perception-action must include both the organism's sensitive organs and coordinating, exploratory, and selective activities of overt attention. Perception-action is not a unidirectional process where environmental inputs act upon a passive "perceiver," it is reciprocal: the environment structures the energy distributions in ways meaningful to the organism's interactions, while the perceiver actively engages to detect and make use of its ecologically significant information.

   The ecological information hypothesis (that specificity is characterized by a mutual entailment, where ecological information simultaneously entails and is entailed by its source) has three critical implications: (1) ecological information is unalterable by psychological and neural factors, they are transparent to ecological information; they engage ecological information frankly, without pretense or distortion. (2) Nonlocality further emphasizes ecological information is such that the systematicity of perception is coordinate with the systematicity of environment, body, and environment-body relations. Perception is not limited to the instantaneous present. Perception cannot be confined to local "sensory inputs" because it is informed by the whole system's dynamics. This resonance to ecological information enables life's agency; not through guesswork or prediction, but through lawful coordination with affordances of the environment to be percieved. (3) The foregoing implications, incorrigibility and nonlocality, taken together (and so, too, the ecological approach) demands an ontologized epistemology where perceptually-based knowledge of environment, body, and environment-body relations, is grounded in, and acquired through, the specificity of ecological information to environment, body, and environment-body relations. In sum: at the ecological scale of organisms and their environments, "information" is a term that refers to macroscopic patternings of lower-energy fields (e.g., optical, acoustical, chemical, etc.) that are generated lawfully by higher-energy fields (e.g., the layout of potentials and reflective surfaces) and by the displacements of living systems relative to these fields. Because they are generated lawfully, these macroscopic spatial/temporal patternings will, under normal conditions of life, specify the layout of potential sources and reflective surfaces and the displacements relative to them. The macroscopic, lawfully generated patterns envisaged by Gibson carry, in their topological form, properties that are specific to components of change and components of persistence in the living system-surround relation, and they are meaningful because they define gradient values with respect to the living system's internal potentials. The conceptual promise is that the ecological information borne in the evolving, causal geometry of energy distributions can be information about the living system's dynamics (internal potential layout) relative to the environmental dynamics (external potential layout). It is not an empty ambience, but a differentiated surround that sets the terms of life's existence. Energy reverberates through the differentiated ecosystem, thus surrounding organisms with a differentiated energy ambience; significantly, the structure within this energy ambience is a consequence of both the surrounding environment and the surrounded perceiver.

These two pillars, reciprocity and direct realism, do not merely coexist but reinforce one another in a synergistic relationship. Together, they establish a framework in which organisms as complex, embodied perception-action systems are seamlessly integrated into the broader ecological dynamics. Now, we will shift to (for the rest of the page) a broader discussion on J.J. Gibson's revolutionary approach.

J.J. Gibson's revolutionary approach:

Gibson used the term "ecological psychology" to emphasize organism-environment reciprocity for the study of problems of perception and behavior. He believed that analyzing the environment to be perceived was just as much a part of the psychologist's task as analyzing organisms themselves, and hence that the "physical" concepts applied to the environment and the "biological" and "psychological" concepts applied to organisms would have to be tailored to one another in a larger system of mutual constraint.

The word ecology comes from the Greek oikos, a house, and Gibson’s ecological description focuses appropriately on the floor plan, composition, and furnishing of the house of life. It would be a mistake to attribute a teleological interpretation to Gibson’s description of the environment, as if the environment was created to furnish animate life with what it needed to exist. The environment, according to Gibson, had a potential existence prior to life filling its niches, viz., its opportunities for dissipating the planet's free-energy resorces. The harmony between the environment and life is due to the latter developing abilities which exploit those opportunities potential in the former. Yet the level of analysis selected and those features of the environment emphasized clearly assumes organisms and their varied "ways of life". The theoretical study of the environment cannot logically precede the study of organisms and in functional actuality the environment exists because of organisms (and vice-versa of course). I would also add that organisms create new opportunities by their very presence. It is noteworthy that much of our environment involves the presence and effects of other living forms; and, evidently, that many ecologically significant features of our environment have been constructed by us.

The concept of evolution is relevant to our understanding of the compatibility and reciprocity of the organism and the environment. If nature shows harmony and order, how do we explain this fact? One explanation is that organization ultimately derives from an organizer, be it God or the human mind. Conversely, evolution offers an explanation that order arises within nature, rather than being imposed. Evolution rejects the dualistic split of order and particulars (stemming from Platonic thought). Gibson accepts the theory of evolution, but with one significant qualification. The order found in the environment is tied to life. An environment only potentially exists prior to life, and though to a degree life creates new environmental order, it is always implicated in the order existing in the environment. Since his psychophysical period (such as in his earlier book "The Perception of the Visual World"), Gibson was concerned with the "veridicality" of perception, viz., perception for him was of something real and objective. Yet for Gibson the term “objective” took on a new meaning in his ecological approach (starting with "The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems"). The environment is not a “ding-an-sich” or intrinsic substance; it is understood relative to the ways of life. Its reality, objectivity, or “invariant” characteristics exist embodied within an ecosystem involving life. The environment and the organism are reciprocal and evolution in reality has been an ecological fact, rather than simply a fact of “life.” It is ecosystems that have evolved.

Gibson’s main interest throughout his life was visual perception and it was as it pertained to the perceiver and its environment that Gibson initially applied the principle of reciprocity; Gibson’s magnum opus, "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception," involved describing vision as a fact of the organism-environment system, rather than just a fact of physiology or the mind. The term ecological signifies organism-environment reciprocity. Later in his career Gibson extended the principle of ecological reciprocity to cover all of psychology. Further, in his developing understanding of the organism-environment system, Gibson reconceptualized such fundamental ideas as permanence and change, whole and parts, knower and known, and even space and time as reciprocal pairs. Over a 50-year period he came to challenge both organism-environment dualism (and its many forms; see: Barriers to Ecological Realism) in his ecological theory and the epistemology of indirect perception in his direct realist epistemology (see: Indirect Vs. Direct Perception).

The crux of Gibson’s theory of organism-environment reciprocity is to overturn the cartesian program and the subsequent dualistic doctrines in psychology, by functionally interrelating each member of the orgnism-environment system. What environtmental conditions afford perception and behavior? What must perception and behavior be like given the environment within which life exists? For percieving-acting, differentiated rigid surfaces supporting a relative homogeneous transparent medium are necessary. The medium provides paths of locomotion and paths of observation. Surfaces support behavior and are the source of stimulation. In general, the environment is described in terms of meaningful affordances that are functionally related to the capacities of organisms. It is within this global level of ecological organization that all the basic features of perception-action are nested.

Gibson’s introduction to his ecological approach is an elaboration on the idea of reciprocity founded on an ecological description of ambience grounded in his theory of ecological optics. Ambient light is a consequence of an ambient ecology, and the dynamic structure in light is a consequence of the dynamic structure of the ecology. Information is ecological for ambient energy structures bear a “concurrent specification” of both the perceiver and the environment. The concept of ambience implies something surrounded and something surrounding and "information" pertains to this ecological reciprocity. Gibson in the 1960s became dissatisfied with traditional optics, especially its reductionistic and ecologically irrelevant nature. Gibson contends that light as such is never seen although a radiant source may be seen; radiant light is an inadequate starting point for vision, for it does not possess the higher order structure necessary for vision and it is not ambient to a perceiver. In effect, the optical starting point for ecological vision is a dynamic structured ambience, viz., the ambient optic array. Life literally exists in an engulfing sea of energy. Ecological optics involves a level of analysis (differentiation) and order commensurate with the meaningful ecology of life.

The ecological approach is clarified by the concept of ambience because traditionally, psychological explanations begin within the animal mind or neurophysiology. Gibson begins outside, yet always with reference to the organism, describing the ambience in which life exists. The environment is a frame of reference both theoretically and psychologically but he avoids reductionistic environmentalism and physicalism by finding the appropriate level of analysis for the environment and functionally tying the “physical” ecology to animate life. “What is perceived” follows from his ecology. Instead of the standard list of qualities, such as depth, color, shape, size, motion, and so forth, Gibson substitutes places, surfaces, events, attached and detached objects, substances, and the medium. The starting point is a description and explanation of the ecological support for life. Its functionalism is tied to the idea of a surround or ambience which is necessary for behavior (e.g., locomotion, manipulation, communication) and ambient ambulatory perception. Its holistic orientation is tied to the same concept—the organism is not separated from the environment, but supported (surrounded) within the whole. "What is percieved" is, in fact, an ecological reality, involving both “subject” and “object.” The terms “subjective” and “objective” take on relative, reciprocal meanings in Gibson. Further, a description of “what” is perceived cannot be done independent of an explanation of perception. The ideal of a presuppositionless description is a mistake, founded upon an absolute separation of theory and fact. Ambience then has a different quality for organisms than for inanimate objects because over time, organisms share the same surround. The objectivity of the surround is due to the motility of organisms realized over time. Ecological objectivity is this shared engulfing permanence, yet it should be emphasized that it can only be defined by assuming the existence of life. Ambience, though the ground of objectivity, pertains to a relational or ecological property vis-à-vis living creatures.

He rejects classical physics, especially Newtonian mechanics. Providing a description of nested natural units as the building block units of physics, geology, chemistry, etc. Ecological motions, whether pertaining to the organism's behavior or other events, are not reducible to Newtonian motions. Places, surfaces, events, objects, substances, and the medium are described in terms of higher order properties relevant to perception and behavior. In effect, Gibson sketches out an ecological geometry of surfaces and an ecological physics appropriate to the ecological scale of interactions and ecological chemistry for substances and events that exhibit the meaningfulness of the world in which life exists. As he continued to elaborate and systematize his ecological theory of the environment. He was especially interested in supplanting the standard physical ontology of objects or atoms "in" space and traditional solid and projective geometry. Due to the fact of occlusion, the optic array cannot be seen as a simple projection of the environment. Occlusion occurs because most surfaces in the environment are opaque rather than transparent. Consequently, an opaque solid geometry is needed to describe ecological structure. Gibson, in critiquing the “objects in space” ontology, draws a three-fold ecological distinction between objects, substances, and surfaces. (Substances have surfaces, and if a surface closes around itself, there exists an object). It is opaque surfaces (whether they are of objects or not) that occlude. The fundamental ecological concept is "surface layout" rather than objects "in" space.

Reductionist science give the smallest units of analysis an absolute reality (e.g., sensations, atoms), sharply contrasting such “ultimate” particulars with relationships between particulars. Such an ontology is dualistic. Gibson describes the structure in the optic array in terms of “visual solid angles,” and each angle or unit itself is divisible into smaller nested units indeterminately downward in scale. There are no absolute elements, indivisible and homogeneous, out of which the array is constructed. Instead, there are multiple “levels” (interpenetrating) of structure and the so-called individual "rays" are no more or less real than any higher level units. It is historically noteworthy that although Gibson is an extreme empiricist epistemologically, he rejects elementarism, the ontological cornerstone of modern empiricism, in favor of holism, an ontology historically associated with rationalism.

According to Gibson, classical physics leads one to treat organisms as no different than rocks or machines, subject to the abstract laws and descriptive concepts of mechanics. As mentioned previously, behavior is not analogous or reducible to mechanical motions. An organism orients to the environmental frame of reference and controls their behavior relative to what they perceive. Behavior is elastic, intentional, and multinested in complexity; it cannot be reduced to rigid translations through empty "container" space; in fact, there are no behavioral atoms, and control is not through physical forces but by means of resonance to ecological information. Further, organisms control, manipulate, and modify the environment in various ways. Animate behavior is not reactive motion to independent external causes. Behavior should be described as coordinative in organization and function. Both traditional stimulus-response psychology and mechanistic physiology view psychological processes as purely dependent reactions within a causal chain; animals are objects that are moved. Gibson opposed this Cartesian-Newtonian model in his Ecological Approach which opts for an intentional and modulatory theory of behavior, where behavior is seen as controlling and adjusting. Behavior both varies as a function of the ecological situation and changes the situation to achieve the organism's ends—embodying the reciprocity of perciever and enviornment to be percieved.

Traditional scientific paradigms often treat causality as a linear, event-to-event process, implying that perception must follow a sequence of stages from stimulus to response. Gibsonian theory, however, introduces a broader understanding of causality rooted in the perceptual system's continuous activity. Perception is not a series of discrete events but an ongoing resonance to ecological information and systemic attunement to invariant ecological structures. Nonlocality further emphasizes that ecological information is not confined to a single point "in space" or "in time" but spans the spatiotemporal interrelations of the observer and the environment. This view aligns perception with an ecological realism that rejects the reductionist tendency to isolate perception as a purely mental or physiological event and instead situating it at the ecological scale of organism-environment reciprocity. Substituing the flawed notion of "information-processing" with "process-informing". As such, the brain acts not as the seat of consciousness or generator of perceptual content but as part of the coupled system (see: What Are Nervous Systems For?) that resonates with the dynamism borne of the environment’s differentiated-holistic structure.

Plato separated the knowing mind with its capacity to apprehend eternal and universal truths from the fluctuating, individualized world of matter. Within the Scientific Revolution (1550-1750), matter and energy (especially light) were progressively reduced (or analyzed) into an impoverished structure of localized particles and lines; while mind was elevated to a detached and ethereal creator and manipulator of abstractions, generalities, and ideas. With the rise of reductionistic biology (1650-1850), neural and sensory physiology was analyzed into independent, simple elements. Monistic trends inspired by the success of materialism and elementarism in science attempted to reduce and/or eliminate the mind. Instead of becoming more intelligible, perceptual experience, as well as other psychological phenomena became increasingly unintelligible and divorced from the supposed real (elementaristic) world of physics, chemistry, and biology. Reflecting these earlier intellectual trends, the standard modern explanation of perception ran as follows: beginning from an order-imposed world of localized elements in an instantaneous present, lines of energy are transmitted through space to a physical mosaic of sensory receptors. In turn lines of energy are transmitted along neurons to a brain where organizational processes transform this “blooming, buzzing, confusion” into a spatial-temporally ordered experience. The resultant experience is qualitatively and ontologically distinct from the world at the beginning of this chain of events.

Aristotle logically distinguished the knowing mind (or “subject”) from the known “object,” but stated that in reality the two were inseparable. Aristotle saw knower and known united in a functional interdependency. Reflecting an Aristotelian heritage, the “dynamic holism” of process ontology, functionalism, organicism, and related theoretical perspectives such as systems theory attacked the analytic, static, and segmented science and philosophy of previous centuries. Drawing upon these newer ideas, Gibson put spatial and temporal order back into the environment of matter and energy. The structures and capacities of organisms were described relative to their ways of life within an environment; in turn, the environment was described relative to the ways of life of the organism. An explanation of perception involved a functional interdependency of organism and environment. Gibson’s epistemology is direct realism, as was Aristotle’s—the “object” of perception is the real world, viz., the environment. Perhaps the most difficult and unique point to grasp is treating perception as an ecological phenomenon rather than a mental or physiological event, yet Gibson’s direct realism only follows if perception is defined ecologically. Perception does not reside in the brain or the mind any more than life resides in cells or in some inexplicable living spirit. Neither mentalism nor behaviorism is correct. Perception, as well as life, is ecological; perception exists at the reciprocal interface of organism and environment within a dynamic system.

Gibson’s systematic approach to psychology begins with the conception of a dynamic animal-environment reciprocity. As noted in the foregoing paragraph, this view places Gibson at odds with mental monism, physical monism, and mind-matter (body) dualism. Gibson states that he sees the mind-body problem to be a false dichotomy (EAVP, p. xiii). The environment, not being reduced to organism-neutral physical variables, is tied to the organism ontologically. The organism, equally so, is more than its molecular or cellular parts. Gibson also rejects treating the mind as a thing, distinct from the body, in which thoughts, precepts, and affective states occur. Gibson, due to his Gestalt background, rejects reductionism, and proceeding from his functionalism background, he sees the importance of relating together knower and known, subject and object. “Mind” involves global functions of the body with respect to the environment. Mind-matter dualism ontologically split the universe in two and epistemologically faced the tremendous problem of connecting them together again. ^[5] Gibson’s insight into the multi-nested and multi-ordered nature of reality offers a way of understanding the relation of the functioning mind to the body. The reciprocity between the organism and the environment undercuts both dualism and reductionism, for the “matter” of the environment and the “mind” of the body are ontologically and epistemologically connected through the structural-functional reciprocity and informational unity of the organism-environment system. One could also state that the perceiver is not simply mental for it perceives with its perceptual systems, and the perceiver exists within the ecosystem. Complimentarily, the environment is not simply physical in the traditional dualistic sense, for it possesses affordances and is meaningful to the organism-perceiver. Organism and environment are not treated as disjointed entities; consequently the linear chain model of causation, e.g., in S-R psychology is inappropriate. The perceiving-acting organism and the environment stand in a dynamic reciprocal relation where neither instigates the life processes. It is a circular, mutually supporting reciprocity. The organism does not organize an unordered physical input because order and organization exist in the ecosystem. According to Gibson, psychology is concerned with varied ways of life, a distinctly ecological definition for a way of life occurs in an ecosystem within some niche. The “world” the organism perceives and behaves within is commensurate to that organism in spatial and temporal scale but most importantly in terms of its affordances; the set of affordances available for the living process of an organism constitutes the environmental niche. The dynamic-functional complementation of the environment to the organism is the set of the environment’s affordances. Complimentarily, the psychological facts of the organism are functions ecologically tied to the affordances of the environment.

Two noteworthy facts of the environment especially relevant to the topic of affordances are tools and other organisms of the same species. Humans are not the only animals who make or use tools, but we appear to be far more advanced than any other species in this regard. Tools have affordances, but, interestingly, these affordances are constructed into the tools. Tools are produced with affordances in mind. Through the production of tools and complex instruments, the affordances of the environment are increased and refined to better suit human life. Other humans, possessing a wealth of social affordances, are also understood in terms of the concept of reciprocity. Human interaction is seen in terms of dynamic complementation involving behavioral loops; the basic circular model of causal interdependency is applied in the social ecosystem as it was in understanding perceptual processes.^[6] Gibson, therefore, hopes to integrate the social-technological spheres into his general theoretical framework of ecological reciprocity. A praxeological understanding of interpersonal relations and the development of technology and instrumentation can both be assimilated within the theory of ecological reciprocity. By applying the ecological approach's insights into reciprocity and embeddedness, Austrian Economics can adopt a richer methodological framework (see Conditions of Exchange for an application of this approach to austrian catallactics). This allows for the analysis of "human action" not only in its formal logical structure but offers significant potential for illuminating the contextual embeddedness of human action in its environment.

Understanding epistemic, intentional systems and, thereby, knowing about, will demand a dramatic, and far from obvious, overhaul of our fundamental orientations, physically and philosophically, toward living things, their surroundings, and their interrelations. Minimally, the overhaul requires the transformation of physics into the science of complex systems. For the past two-and-a-half centuries, the various sciences of living things have sought to interpret their subject matter by the extension of laws inferred by physicists from the study of simple systems and mechanisms. We can regard that historical enterprise as a matter of putting the cart before the horse. The simple systems studied by classical physics, such as gases and planetary orbits, are the special cases. Complex systems—for example, all the various living things exhibiting perception-action—represent the general case.

The conventional doctrine would have us believe that the material systems that express perception and action are too special an aspect of nature to yield universal generalizations. The doctrine should be turned on its head; that is: material systems of the kind that express perception-action are more general in respect to the principles that underlie them than the material systems traditionally addressed by physics. The disquisition of epistemic, intentional systems can be expected to disclose nature’s most general principles. George Gaylord Simpson (1964) had stated the forgoing notion aptly (especially if one permits substitution of “psychology” for “biology”):

[L]iving things have been affected for . . . billions of years by historical processes . . . The results of those processes are systems different in kind from any nonliving systems and almost incomparably more complicated. They are not for that reason necessarily any less material or less physical in nature. The point is that all known material processes and explanatory principles apply to organisms, while only a limited number of them apply to nonliving systems . . . Biology, then, is the science that stands at the center of all science . . . where all the principles of all the sciences are embodied . . .

The ecological approach demands a reorientation of scientific inquiry, from the study of simple, isolated systems to a science of complex systems that accounts for the interdependencies of living organisms and their environments. This reorientation embodies a fundamental shift toward Dynamic Differentiated-Holism as an overarching framework.