Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson

by James J. Gibson

Book

Genres: Nonfiction

449 pages, Loose Leaf

Published January 1, 1982

About the author

James Jerome Gibson is one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, best known for his work on visual perception. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and his first major work was The Perception of the Visual World (1950) in which he rejected behaviorism for a view based on his own experimental work.

In his later works, including The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), Gibson became more philosophical and criticized cognitivism in the same way he had attacked behaviorism before, arguing strongly in favor of direct perception and direct realism, as opposed to cognitivist indirect realism. He termed his new approach "ecological psychology".

Gibson’s legacy is increasingly influential on many contemporary movements in psychology, particularly those considered to be post-cognitivist.

Reviews

[Wangdo Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The theme of this book is Gibson's realism, his conviction that we can directly perceive the world as it is. For Gibson, realism was more than a philosophy; it was a demanding way of pursuing science. "The construction of a theory is most useful when the theory is vulnerable that is to say, when the future experiment can but do not disprove it."

[Jerry Balzano · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is EDITED by Edward S. Reed, with extensive introductions and notes. Reed does deserve credit here for bringing this book into existence and for the form it takes.