Coalitions as models for Ecosystems: A Realist Perspective on Perceptual Organization

Gestalt theory essentially claims that perceptual organization is dictated by the organization of the central nervous system (Wertheimer’s principle of isomorphism). this is shown to be a phenomenalist’s account of knowing, where the objects of perception are treated as distinct from the objects of the environment. Such a view encounters many logical and empirical difficulties that are avoided by an alternative style of scientific inquiry based on pragmatic realism offered by the American pragmatists Peirce, Dewey, and Bentley. In the realist’s view, the objects of perceptual knowing are functionally ascribed directly to objects in the knower’s environment. The realist’s account offered by the pragmatists derives from the observation that successful scientific theories (e.g., Einstein’s) necessarily go beyond explanations in terms of (causal) interactions to explanations in terms of (acausal) transactions, defined as a reciprocity of mutual constraint existing between phenomena and their contexts. Although the transactional approach is an improvement over traditional interactional ones, it nevertheless fails to avoid “run on” explanations that regress toward ever-more-encompassing contexts of hidden constraint. Still a further improvement is the ecological style of scientific inquiry originally proposed by J. J. Gibson and extended by the authors; although in many ways consonant with the transactional approach, it 344avoids the context regress problem by introduction of the concept of “coalition” to model the organization of perceptual systems. A coalition is a superordinate system (relational structure) consisting of eight pairs of subsystems (with 1024 states) nested at four exclusive “grains” of analysis (bases, relations, orders, values) and closed at each grain under a (duality) operation that specifies how the two complementary subsystems act as reciprocal context of mutual constraint. Finally, a coalitional model is applied informally to express the symmetry of constraints in an (epistemic) ecosystem that necessarily exists between animals and their environments. In this formulation, the organization that perception takes co-implicates the organization that action takes and is not defined at the scale of animals (i.e., is not an achievement of the nervous system) but only at the scale of ecosystems.