Ecological psychology, developed by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson, offers an alternative to cognitivism and behaviorism by emphasizing the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as the unit of analysis, and affordances as the objects of perception. The approach rejects the poverty of the stimulus and the passive perceiver, instead highlighting perceptual learning and development. This paper analyzes the philosophical and psychological influences—pragmatism, behaviorism, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology—and summarizes the main concepts and their historical development. The authors conclude that ecological psychology remains highly innovative, influencing contemporary embodied and situated cognitive sciences through the concept of affordance.
Neo-pragmatists hold that individual intelligence arises from social practices rather than the other way around, but this creates a problem: if intentionality depends entirely on social practices, how can the capacities needed to participate in those practices already exist? Radical enactivists distinguish two kinds of intentionality—directedness (ur-intentionality) and aboutness (content-involving intentionality)—and propose that biological functions enable social recognition and conformism, yet they do not explain how the transition from directedness to aboutness occurs. The author argues that combining ecological psychology with non-descriptive social normativity offers a non-representational account of the natural origins of content, solving the neo-pragmatist problem by showing continuity between the two kinds of intentionality.