Publication
Title
Ecological neuroscience : from reduction to proliferation of our resources
Author
Abstract
In one common view, human activity is explained by neural processes, because these implement psychological functions that underlie overt behavior. In the ecological approach, such accounts are taken to be nonexplanatory, because they reify the phenomena they wish to explain. We argue that ecological psychology offers an antidote to such reification with concepts such as resonance, attunement, and anticipation, if they are considered as relational, world-involving activities. Our main claim is that we can understand our scientific explanations of neural phenomena as itself an attunement to sociomaterial practices. This allows us to understand neuroscientific processes as conditions that enable a resonating organism-environment system. In this view, neuroscientific and psychological phenomena are usually found in widely different sociomaterial practices. But we can occasionally achieve coordination between those practices. Establishing that a dependence of a psychological phenomenon on neural events holds is an achievement of a novel practice that we developed and to which we resonate. Thus the more we want to understand what happens inside the nervous system, the more we also need to scrutinize the sociomaterial environment in which we do so.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Ecological psychology / International Society for Ecological Psychology. - Hillsdale, N.J.
Publication
Hillsdale, N.J. : 2019
ISSN
1040-7413
DOI
10.1080/10407413.2019.1615221
Volume/pages
31 :3 (2019) , p. 254-268
ISI
000475397500008
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (open access)
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Project info
Thinking in practice: a unified ecological-enactive account
Facing the interface. Investigating whether and how contentless perception can interact with belief and knowledge.
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 01.08.2019
Last edited 02.10.2024
To cite this reference