Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its ‘pick up’ in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be “RECtified” so as to explicitly resist (...) representational readings. In this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified. (shrink)

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both challenge representationist cognitive science, but the two approaches have only begun to engage in dialogue. Further conceptual clarification is required in which differences are as important as common ground. This paper enters the dialogue by focusing on important differences. After a brief account of the parallel histories of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism, we cover incompatibility between them regarding their theories of sensation and perception. First, we show how and why in ecological theory perception (...) is, crucially, not based on sensation. We elucidate this idea by examining the biological roots of work in the two fields, concentrating on Gibson and Varela and Maturana. We expound an ecological critique of any sensation-based approach to perception by detailing two topics: classic retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The second main point emphasizes the importance of the idea of organism-environment mutuality and its difference from structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior. We point out how ecological - phenomenological methods of inquiry grow out of mutualism and compare Gibson’s idea of visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body. Third, we conclude that Ecological Psychology and varieties of Enactivism are laying down different paths to pursue related goals. Thus, convergence of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism is not possible given their conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization is possible and desirable. (shrink)

Ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that the best explanation for a large share of cognition is nonrepresentational in kind. In both ecological psychology and enactivist philosophy, then, the task is to offer an explanans that does not rely on representations. Different theorists within these camps have contrasting notions of what the best kind of nonrepresentational explanation will look like, yet they agree on one central point: instead of focusing solely on factors interior to an agent, an important aspect of (...) cognition is found in the link or coupling between an agent and the external world. This link is fluid, dynamic, and active in a variety of ways, and we do not need to add any internal extra something in the perception-action-cognition process. At the same time, even devout defenders of ecological psychology and enactivism recognize that plenty happens inside an agent during cognition. In particular, no one denies that the brain plays an important role. What, then, is the role of the brain if it’s not in the game of representing the environment? One possible option is to describe the brain as a resonant organ instead of a representational organ. In this paper we consider the history of resonance in more detail. Particular focus will be placed on two different sets of approaches that have developed the concept of resonance: a representational reading of resonance and a nonrepresentational, dynamic account of resonance. We then apply these accounts to a case study on music performance, specifically in the context of standard tonal jazz. From this application, we propose that a nonrepresentational resonance account consistent with both enactivism and ecological psychology is a viable way of explaining jazz performance. We conclude with future considerations on research regarding the brain as a resonant organ. (shrink)

In this book Harry Heft examines the historical and theoretical foundations of James J. Gibson's ecological psychology in 20th century thought, and in turn, integrates ecological psychology and analyses of sociocultural processes. A thesis of the book is that knowing is rooted in the direct experience of meaningful environmental objects and events present in individual-environment processes and at the level of collective, social settings. Ecological Psychology in Context: *traces the primary lineage of Gibson's ecological approach to William (...) James's philosophy of radical empiricism; *illuminates how the work of James's student and Gibson's mentor, E.B. Holt, served as a catalyst for the development of Gibson's framework and as a bridge to James's work; *reveals how ecological psychology reciprocally can advance Jamesian studies by resolving some of the theoretical difficulties that kept James from fully realizing a realist philosophy; *broadens the scope of Gibson's framework by proposing a synthesis between it and the ecological program of Roger Barker, who discovered complex systems operating at the level of collective, social processes; *demonstrates ways in which the psychological domain can be extended to properties of the environment rendering its features meaningful, publicly accessible, and distributed across person-environment processes; and *shows how Gibson's work points the way toward overcoming the gap between experimental psychology and the humanities. Intended for scholars and students in the areas of ecological and environmental psychology, theoretical and historical psychology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime (...) trails that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: Fultot, Nie, and Carello are correct that enactive researchers should be more aware of the research literature on ecological psychology, but their charge of mental construction is off-target. Enactivism and ecological psychology are compatible frameworks with different, complementary, emphases.

This chapter evaluates which approach within 4E cognition is in a better position to offer a research program and a scientific framework for the embodied and situated cognitive sciences that could outcompete cognitivism once and for all. The main thesis of this work is that ecological psychology is in a better position to develop that scientific framework. This is because enactivism can be defined as a philosophy of nature rather than a scientific framework with its own research program (following (...) Gallagher, 2017). This means that enaction did not develop its own scientific methods, models, and metrics for human in vivo experimentation, which are key aspects in order to offer a whole new scientifically feasible foundation of a new science of the mind from a purely embodied and situated perspective. Although I agree that a philosophy of nature is a necessary aspect for any general theory of cognition, it is not enough: we also need a research program and a scientific framework in order to establish a fully-fledged science of the mind. Ecological psychology, as I show in this work, includes a philosophy of nature and a research program, which makes it suitable to settle the foundations for a fully embodied and situated cognitive science. In conclusion, I think that everyone working on embodiment and situated cognition should follow the ecological lead. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing (...) to the history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one and the personal one. If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology. (shrink)

I argue that any approach to affordances that stays close to the letter of the law is not able to account for human agency and meaningful experience….

This paper considers some foundational concepts in ecological psychology and in enactivism., and traces their developments from their historical roots to current preoccupations. Important differences stem, we claim, from dissimilarities in how embodied experience has been understood by the ancestors, founders and followers of ecological psychology and enactivism, respectively. Rather than pointing to differences in domains of interest for the respective approaches, and restating possible divisions of labor between them in research in the cognitive and psychological sciences, we (...) call for a deeper analysis of the role of embodiment in agency that we also undertake. Awareness of the differences that exist in the respective frameworks and their consequences, we argue, may lead to overcoming some current divisions of labor and responsibility, and contribute to a more comprehensive and complementary way of dealing with a broader range of theoretical and practical concerns. While providing some examples of domains, such as social cognition and art reception, in which we can observe the relative usefulness and potential integration of the theoretical and methodological resources from the two approaches, we demonstrate that such deeper synergy is not only possible but also beginning to emerge. Such complementarity, as we envisage, conceives of ecological psychology that allows felt experience as a crucial dynamical element in the explanations and models that it produces, and of an enactive approach that takes into consideration the ubiquitous presence of rich directly perceived relations among variables arising from enactments in the social and physical world. (shrink)

Although it is a common claim in the ecological psychology literature that our perception of the environment’s affordances is influenced by socio-cultural norms, an explanation of how this is possible remains to be offered. In this paper, I outline an account of this phenomenon by focusing on the ecological theory of perceptual learning. Two main theses are defended. First, I argue that to account for how socio-cultural norms can influence perception, we must pay attention not only to the education (...) of attention but to the education of intention too. Consequently, I offer some ideas about how intention can be socio-normatively educated. Secondly, I hold that the education of intention occurs via the acquisition of habit-based preferences for particular actions. I claim that once we understand how these habit-based preferences relate to socio-cultural norms, the hypothesis that norms must be represented in the individual’s mind for them to influence affordance perception is no longer needed. If this hypothesis is on the right track, we can have an explanation for how perception can be normatively shaped and direct (non-mediated by internal representations and inferences) at the same time. (shrink)

According to ecological psychology, agency is a crucial feature of living organisms: therefore many ecological psychologists maintain that explaining agency is one of the core aims of the discipline. This paper aims to contribute to this goal by arguing that an ecological understanding of agency requires an account of intention. So far, intentions have not played a dominant role in ecological accounts of agency. The reluctance to integrate a notion of intention seems to be motivated by the widespread assumption (...) that intentions should be understood as internal states with representational content. This assumption goes against two main tenets of ecological psychology: its anti-representationalist stance and its claim that perception is direct (in the sense of not being mediated by inferential processes). Ecological psychology thus needs a different answer to the question what intentions are. In this paper, we aim to show that Elizabeth Anscombe’s theory of intention can be fruitfully brought to bear on an ecological theory of agency. We will argue that Anscombe’s account can meet the two challenges of bringing intentions into the framework of ecological psychology: firstly it can explain what intentions are, if not representational states; and, secondly, it can show how our perception of affordances is guided by intention without undermining the idea of direct perception. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: The authors of the target article seem on the one hand to want to reprimand enactivists for not embracing ecological psychology, and on the other, to criticise them for taking on board some - but not all - of the principles of ecological psychology. In this commentary, I argue that the claim that enactivists have not embraced ecological (...) psychology is false, and that it is coherent for enactivists to take on only some of the principles of ecological psychology, as the two research frameworks have different overall projects. Furthermore, I argue that there is an enactivism-friendly stream of ecological psychology research that is currently yielding exciting results that both broaden the depth of ecological psychology research and bring it into dialogue with enactivism-inspired approaches to understanding perception and experience. (shrink)

"It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of extant school-solutions. The dissatisfactions with these seems due for the most part to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic. Life is confused (...) and superabundant, and what the younger generation appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical rigor and formal purity." - William James (1904). -/- Abstract: The study of model-based reasoning (MBR) is one of the most interesting recent developments at the intersection of psychology and the philosophy of science. Although a broad and eclectic area of inquiry, one central axis by which MBR connects these disciplines is anchored at one end in theories of internal reasoning (in cognitive science), and at the other, in C.S. Peirce’s semiotics (in philosophy). In this paper, we attempt to show that Peirce’s semiotics actually has more natural affinity on the psychological side with ecological psychology, as originated by James J. Gibson and especially Egon Brunswik, than it does with non-interactionist approaches to cognitive science. In particular, we highlight the strong ties we believe to exist between the triarchic structure of semiotics as conceived by Peirce, and the similar triarchic stucture of Brunswik’s lens model of organismic achievement in irreducibly uncertain ecologies. The lens model, considered as a theory of creative abduction, provides a concrete instantiation of at least one, albeit limited, interpretation of Peirce’s semiotics, one that we believe could be quite fruitful in future theoretical and empirical investigations of MBR in both science an philosophy. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: We examine whether there are any irreducible contradictions between ecological psychology and radical enactivism. We concentrate on two points of contention between the two approaches: the relevance of neural structures in understanding perception and the use of semantically loaded concepts in theorizing about perception.

This article presents a developmental ecological approach to the emergence and development of metaphor in children, based on the ecological psychology tradition following the work of J.J. Gibson, and its extension into developmental research and theory, as developed by E.J. Gibson and others. This framework suggests that a basic compatibility and meaningfulness exists between the knower and the known, based on the direct perception of affordances. To build an ecological understanding of metaphor we need to clarify how this metaphysical (...) ground plays out in acts of knowing that involve metaphor. In this endeavor, it is important to understand the ontogenesis of novel insightful metaphors and the role of perception. Developmental ecological psychology has repeatedly shown that infants can perceive meta-modal invariants that specify persistence of qualities. Early metaphors are consequences of the process in which invariants over naturally occurring kinds are perceived. Thus, novel metaphor production is an act of situated and experience-dependent perceiving and acting in the ecological world of socially shared meanings. Examples from previous experimental and qualitative research are reviewed to substantiate theoretical claims. (shrink)

This study explores the primacy of interrelating and its ecopsychological significance. Grounded in evidence from everyday experience, and in dialogue with the phenomenology of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we discover that humans are inherently relational beings, not separate egoic subjects. When experienced intimately , this realization may transform our interrelationship with the beings and presences in the community of nature. Specifically, interrelating is primary in three ways: 1) interrelating is always already here, transpiring from the beginning of (...) the human species and human culture, from the beginning of every infant's life, and from the continuously arising beginning of every presencing moment; 2) the quality of our interrelating is truly what matters most, the most important expression of and facilitator of health, compassion, and justice for humankind and the rest of nature; and 3) interrelating is the ever-present path via which we discover/create and carry on our existence. Interrelating is an existential given—indeed we are our interrelating—yet we are summoned ethically to cultivate our way of interrelating so as to serve others and the non-human natural community. Thus interrelating is our essence, our calling, and our path. (shrink)

A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we offer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specific perceptual-motor habits. Such habits (...) play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent's conscious attention to the affordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for affordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (flexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them. (shrink)

Baggs and Chemero (2018) propose that certain tensions between enaction and ecological psychology arise due different interpretations about what is meant by the “environment.” In the enactive approach the emphasis is on the umwelt, which describes the environment as the “meaningful, lived surroundings of a given individual.” The ecological approach, on the other hand, emphasises what they refer to as the habitat “the environment as a set of resources for a typical, or ideal, member of a species.” By making (...) this distinction, these authors claim they are able to retain the best of both the ecological and the enactive approaches. Herein I propose an account of the individuation of habits that straddles this distinction, what I call a compatabilist account. This is done in two parts. The first part teases out a host of compatibilities that exist between the enactive account as developed by Di Paolo et al. (2017) and the skilled intentionality framework as developed by Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) and Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014). In part two these compatibilities are brought together with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to develop the notion of enhabiting. Enhabiting describes a set of ongoing processes by which an umwelt emerges from and is reproduced within the relationship between an embodied subject and their habitat. Thus, enhabiting points toward a point of intersection between enaction and ecological psychology. To enhabit is bring forth (to enact), within (to inhabit). (shrink)

In this paper I argue that when behaviorism began to wane and cognitivism became the more dominant framework in psychology, ecological psychology was also strongly suggested at two different levels. First, ecological psychology, considered in light of evolutionary theory, promised to handle three serious philosophical challenges to behaviorism. Second, this ecological approach promised to explain several anomalies in behavioral research. Ecological psychology, then, although largely overlooked, was and still is a viable alternative to internalist frameworks — (...) such as cognitivism — as a fruitful framework for studying behavior. (shrink)

Located at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of biology, this thesis aims to provide a novel approach to understanding the strong continuity between life and mind. This thesis applies the Free Energy Framework, predictive processing and the conceptual apparatus from ecological psychology to reveal different manners in which the organizational processes and principles underlying life have been enriched so as to result in cognitive processes. By using these anticipatory cognitive frameworks this thesis unveils different forms (...) of cognition at work in surprising places and considers how such expressions of cognition are ultimately driven by various forms of environmental complexity. Importing the concepts of affordances, environmental information and perceptual medium from ecological psychology into predictive processing and the Free Energy Framework, an empirically grounded account of cognition as an anticipatory process that allows living systems to adapt to various degrees of uncertainty in their environments at distinct and yet overlapping timescales is argued for. In doing so, this thesis attempts to identify both the explanatory limits of ecological coupling accounts of perception and action, and the possible environmental conditions under which the predictive brain evolved from its decentralized non-neural predecessors as a solution to uncertainty. In contributing to a novel approach to constraining the mind, the various concepts deployed in both philosophy and cognitive science are sharpened, furthering the current debate on what cognition is and how it is related to life. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the evolutionary role of affordances, that is, the possibilities for action available in our environments. There are two allegedly competing views for explaining the evolutionary role of affordances: the first is based on natural selection; the second is based on niche construction. According to the first, affordances are resources that exert selection pressure. The second view claims that affordances are ecological inheritances in the organism’s niche that are the product of a previous alteration of the (...) environment. While there seems to be a mutually exclusive definition of affordances in each of these views, I argue in this paper that the views are not competing but, rather, complementary. In this sense, affordances play the role of either resources or ecological inheritances depending on the temporal stage of the evolutionary process. I make this argument by analyzing how natural selection and niche construction affect each other even when they function independently from each other. In this light, if these two evolutionary mechanisms exert their power in parallel but at two different stages in the evolutionary history of a given econiche, then there is room to claim that affordances can be understood as both resources and ecological inheritances. This dual aspect of affordances shows their evolutionary role. (shrink)

Since its origins in the mid-Twentieth Century, Cognitive Science has almost exclusively operated within the philosophical frames provided by Cartesian Representationalism. In recent years, alternative, phenomenological and pragmatist, frames have served as a resource for the emergence of non-representational approaches to mind and cognition. These have been gathered under the label ‘4E cognition’, indicating their Embodied, Extended, Enacted and Embedded nature. This chapter examines one version of 4E cognition, which builds upon Ecological Psychology, and argues that it fails to (...) pass the Evaluation Test: it cannot account for the central role of normativity and evaluation in our responsiveness to loci of significance in the lifeworld, while failing to provide an argument for the exclusion of evaluative and normative aspects. (shrink)

The ecological realist concept of information as environmental specification is discussed. It is argued that affordances in ecological realism could, in principle, rest on a notion of partial specification of environmental circumstances. For this aim, a notion of Gestalt quality as a hierarchical structure of affordances would have to be adopted. It is claimed that such an account could provide a promising way to deal with problems of intentionality in perception and action, awareness and problem solving.

Norman's identification of a ventral system embodying a constructivist theory of perception is rejected in favor of an ecological theory of perception and perceptual learning. We summarize research showing that a key motivation for the ventral-constructivist connection, percept-percept coupling, confuses perceptual and post-perceptual processes.

Shifting the focus from fear, guilt, and indignation related to deteriorating environmental quality, the authors hypothesized that people who see greater potential for restorative experiences in natural environments also do more to protect them by behaving ecologically, as with recycling or reduced driving. University students rated a familiar freshwater marsh in terms of being away, fascination, coherence, and compatibility, qualities of restorative person-environment transactions described in attention restoration theory. They also reported on their performance of various ecological behaviors. The authors (...) tested a structural equation model with data from a randomly drawn subset of participants and then confirmed it with the data from a second subset. For the combined subsets, perceptions of the restorative qualities predicted 23% of the variance in general ecological behavior. As the only direct predictor, fascination mediated the influences of coherence, being away, and compatibility. (shrink)

Unlike most other sciences, psychology has no true core theory to guide a coherent research programme. It does have James J Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception, however, which we suggest should serve as an example of the benefits a good theory brings to psychological research. Here we focus on an example of how the ecological approach has served as a guide to discovery, shaping and constraining a recent hypothesis about how humans perform coordinated rhythmic movements (Bingham 2004a, b). (...) Early experiments on this task were framed in a dynamic pattern approach. This phenomenological, behavioural framework (e.g. Jeka & Kelso 1989) classifies the behaviour of complex action systems in terms of the key order parameters, and describes the dynamical stability of the system as it responds to perturbations. Dynamical systems, however, while a valuable toolkit, is not a theory of behaviour, and this style of research is unable to successfully predict data it is not explicitly designed to fit. More recent work by Bingham & colleagues has used dynamical systems to formalise hypotheses derived from Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and action, with a particular emphasis on perceptual information. The resulting model (Bingham 2001, 2004a, b; Snapp-Childs et al. 2011) has had great success with both the phenomena it was designed to explain as well as a wide range of empirical results from a version of the task it is not specifically designed to explain (specifically, learning a novel coordination). This model and the research programme that produced it stand as an example of the value of theory driven research, and we use it to illustrate the contemporary importance the ecological approach has for psychology. (shrink)

For two decades, the integrated causal model of evolutionary psychology (EP) has constituted an interdisciplinary nucleus around which a single unified theoretical and empirical behavioral science has been crystallizing – while progressively resolving problems (such as defective logical and statistical reasoning) that bedevil Gintis's beliefs, preferences, and constraints (BPC) framework. Although both frameworks are similar, EP is empirically better supported, theoretically richer, and offers deeper unification. (Published Online April 27 2007).

This commentary describes the use of ecological priming methods to address the limitations of the correlational research discussed in the target article. We provide examples from our own work on cultural tightness–looseness to illustrate how we can bring ecological and societal conditions into the laboratory in order to study the impact of ecological threats on psychological processes experimentally.

Moral judgment and behavior are uniquely resistant to psychological analysis because morality generally is defined in terms that do not admit of psychological predication. Principal among these is the idea of freedom. An agent can act morally only on the condition that it is also free to do otherwise. The respective theoretical premises of C. Sunstein and E. Brunswik are contrasted in order to suggest that Brunswikian theory constitutes a distinct and highly promising new approach to the psychology of (...) moral judgment. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The two target articles agree that processes of cultural evolution generate richness and diversity in music, but neither address this question in a focused way. We sketch one way to proceed – and hence suggest how the target articles differ not only in empirical claims, but also in their tacit, prior assumptions about the relationship between cognition and culture.