Ed Baggs

Frontiers | Picturing Organisms and Their Environments: Interaction, Transaction, and Constitution Loops Changing conceptions of the relation between organisms and their environments make up a crucial chapter in the history of psychology. This may be approached ...

Right. I was a reviewer for this paper of his that makes the same distinctions. I found the distinctions a bit unclear there, as I remember. www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

I haven't read that one. Looks ambitious. Why do you ask?

Really enjoyed this discussion on Brain Inspired. We talk about how EP is currently showing up in the mainstream, and how it might be done better. We also talk about neuro developments within the ecological community itself. Thanks for leading us through it, Paul @braininspired.bsky.social!

This is not necessarily an obstacle to applying ecological psychology to animal psychology or to sports, but it is an obstacle to applying it to human social psychology, which is what I've always been interested in.

The issue with collapsing the environment of the individual and the environment of the species is that it implies some standard or average body that is representative of the whole species. Whose body?

I've never experienced what the world looks like from a woman's body but I am persuaded that it would not be exactly the same as what I experience. I've never had to rely on a wheelchair to get around but if I ever do I imagine I will notice things I hadn't noticed before.

Alternatively, the environment didn't change, only my body did. But then in what sense are the two terms codefining?

As a child I used to like climbing ropes and crawling under tables. Now I don't like bending down. Did my environment change? If the environment is codefined by my body then it must be the case that my environment changed.

Gibson also says animal and environment are codefining terms, which is profound and challenging. What he glosses over is that our bodies change over time, and other people's bodies are different from ours.

"It's important for Gibson that the environment of the species and the environment of the individual actually just be two ways to talking about the same actual thing." Agreed, that's definitely important for Gibson. His solution, though, is cakeist. He simply declares them to be the same thing.

It's about why we Gibonians can't seem to agree on our definitions for basic and supposedly central concepts. I still think Gibson's ambiguity about the environment explains much of our subsequent confusion.

I agree with much of this. Would love to read your further thoughts on the chapter.

Personally I gave up on the umwelt term and I'm skeptical about the project of unifying ecological psychology and enactivism.

The Third sense of environment chapter isn't about enactivism, though.

Dynamical Cognitive Science! Wherefore Art Thou? How has dynamical systems theory—especially the dynamical hypothesis—influenced the cognitive sciences since the 1990s? This topic brings together informatics, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, ...

Luis Favela and I just finished editing a special issue on dynamical cognitive science for topiCS. The great contributors of the issue talk a little bit about what happened in the last 30 years, where we are now, and where we are heading to.
Here's the intro (open access): doi.org/10.1111/tops...

New book with more Chomsky-bashing. The website says March 2026, but it is available now.

cup.columbia.edu/book/intertw...

The real question: What comes after post-anti-representationalism?

First ICPA in a zoo?

ICPA - ICPA 2026 Welcome to the 2026 International Conference on Perception and Action (ICPA). This year, we meet in Omaha, Nebraska, bringing the international ecological psychology community together in a setting th...

Call for papers: 2026 International Conference on Perception and Action (ICPA) in Omaha, NE, June 23–26, 2026 icpa2026omaha.com (please RT!)

The Social Class of Things: Object Perception from an Eco-Social Perspective - Topoi Object perception is usually regarded in cognitive science as a matter of classification, in which we represent objects as belonging to a certain class that provides them with semantic content. The ma...

The last paper in the collection: David Sanchez discusses the problem of object classification for ecol psych. Gibson said that to perceive an affordance is not to classify an object. So how to explain object classification? Sanchez argues it's an embodied social practice doi.org/10.1007/s112...

We're hosting a PhD school in Odense, 7-9 January 2026 on Cognitive processes in social settings (will be in English!).

Deadline for registration extended to Friday 19 December at noon.

www.conferencemanager.dk/kognitivepro...

A little bit of spam, but this one is honestly one of my favourite papers I've participated in.
I still think there's a whole dissertation to be written on this topic--ecological psychology & epistemology.

Cognitive Technologies and Their Histories Cognitive technologies are socially acquired and culturally evolved systems whose primary function is cognitive. There is a tremendous untapped opportunity for a broad range of disciplines across the...

At last, the final publication in 'Cognitive Technologies and their Histories': the editorial introduction to the issue in TopiCS, by myself and @helenamiton.bsky.social. 4.5 years since our initial @cogscisociety.bsky.social panel. Free access! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Toward a Theory of Direct Insight - Topoi While James Gibson is often seen as rebelling against the Gestalt psychologists of the Berlin School, he shared their “phenomenological attitude”: the commitment to taking a rigorous description of di...

Jonathan Bowen re-examines Köhler's classic studies of insight problem solving in apes. He suggests that while the Gestalt psychologists held that insight requires mental re-organization, it's possible that the re-organization really occurs at the ecological scale

doi.org/10.1007/s112...

A Remedy against Cognitive Load: Creating Playful Complexity in Activity and Inquiry-Based Learning - Topoi Critical thinking and inquiry are considered cornerstones of 21st-century skills that must be taught via our education systems. Two growing approaches to teaching these skills are activity-based learn...

Christian Kronsted asks how embodied cognition theory can inform education. He argues that an understanding of affordances can inform classroom activities that promote "playful complexity"

doi.org/10.1007/s112...

2026 Conference Call for Papers: Science and Technology in the Anthropocene April 2 – 3, 2026 A conference about human experience in a world with non-biological intelligent systems and the environmental prob…

Call for abstracts for the first conference of our new Center for Humanities and Technology. Please share!

uchumanitiestech.org/2026-confere...

"meaningful affordances"
"bio-mechanical affordances"
"mental affordances"
"non-representational affordances"

Please stop. Stop with the adjectives. It makes no sense. Thank you.

Aesthetic Experience in Light of Affective Affordances - Topoi Among the most pressing questions in aesthetics is that concerning the role of emotions in aesthetic experiences. In this article I try to provide an answer to this question by exploiting the explanat...

Marta Benenti discusses the potential role of affordances in aesthetic experiences, e.g. joy induced by listening to music. She suggests affordances can be "opportunities for emotional regulation" of the body

doi.org/10.1007/s112...

Radical Enactivism and the Neo-Pragmatist Problem of the Origins of Content: A Radical Embodied Intervention - Topoi Neo-pragmatists claim that individual intelligence derives from socio-normative practices and not the other way round. However, this leads to the neo-pragmatist problem of the origins of content, whic...

Radical enactivists distinguish between basic minds and content-involving minds. Manuel Heras-Escribano challenges this two-storey story about minds. He thinks its possible to treat these two kinds of minds as belonging on a single continuum

doi.org/10.1007/s112...

Radical embodied memory - new preprint from Robyn Wilford and Mike Anderson osf.io/preprints/ps...

A Radical Embodied Account of Responsibility - Topoi In this paper, we argue that radical embodied cognitive science implies an ethics of responsibility that prioritizes what we refer to as taking collective responsibility. By taking responsibility, we ...

New paper out today with Zach Peck, “A radical embodied account of responsibility”. Not open access alas. Hit me up if you want a copy.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

@edbaggs.bsky.social, @valtour.bsky.social, Sarah Bro Trasmundi, and yours truly teach a Ph.D. course on Cognitive Processes in Social Settings - at Syddansk Universitet – University of Southern Denmark, January 7-9, 2026.