Events and Affordances: Ecosocial Time Scales and the Two Orders of Language

摘要

The theory of event perception and affordances developed by James J. Gibson poses a number of problems for an ecological theory of language. In the tradition of ecological psychology, the difference between events and affordances is a crucial one. The ecological approach to event perception inspired by Gibson (1986) has viewed the distal event as having an invariant and physical relationship of causal necessity to the proximal information that the animal detects in the significant patterning in the optic, auditory, chemical or other array. The issue of time scales has long been crucial in this tradition in the study of action-perception cycles. However, the physics-based assumptions obscure the links between ecological psychology and the cultural-historical resources that people draw upon and enact in their culturally saturated interactivity with each other. This paper will examine some recent and not so recent attempts that take issue with the theory of direct perception. Gibson insisted upon the continuity of perception and memory. His key insight helps to show the power of phonetic gestures to evoke virtual experience through their capacity to redintegrate cultural-historical experience and thus to integrate the time scales of first-order languaging and second-order language.