In this paper I claim that perceptual discriminatory skills rely on a suitable type of environment as an enabling condition for their exercise. This is because of the constitutive connection between environment and perceptual discriminatory skills, inasmuch as such connection is construed from an ecological approach. The exercise of a discriminatory skill yields knowledge of affordances of objects, properties, or events in the surrounding environment. This is practical knowledge in the first-person perspective. An organism learns to perceive an object by (...) becoming sensitized to its affordances. I call this position ecological disjunctivism. A corollary of this position is that a case of perception and its corresponding case of hallucination—which is similar to the former only in some respects—are different in nature. I show then how the distinguishability problem is addressed by ecological disjunctivism. (shrink)

The problem of rational prediction, launched by Wesley Salmon, is without doubt the Achilles heel of the critical method defended by Popper. In this paper, I assess the response given both by Popper and by the popperian Alan Musgrave to this problem. Both responses are inadequate and thus the conclusion of Salmon is reinforced: without appeal to induction, there is no way to make of the practical prediction a rational action. Furthermore, the critical method needs to be vindicated if one (...) pretends that its application is suitable for the preference of a hypothesis. I argue that the nature of this vindication is such that it may be applied also to induction. Thus, to be a popperian is a good reason also to be an inductivist. (shrink)

Rob Withagen radicalizou a distinção entre affordances e solicitações em dois aspectos: (i) affordances deixam de cumprir um papel explicativo do comportamento do organismo, apenas solicitações o fazem; (ii) solicitações não são apenas affordances relevantes afetivamente carregadas, elas abrangem também percepções errôneas afetivamente carregadas. Argumento que Withagen foi longe demais. Se entendemos as affordances como uma relação entre as habilidades de um organismo individual e o seu ambiente, então já temos recursos suficientes para incorporar a afetividade. Afetos tanto constituem habilidades (...) perceptuais quanto modulam o seu exercício, de modo que não há percepção de affordance completamente livre de afetividade. Estados afetivos são cruciais para dirigir a nossa atenção para as possibilidades de ações que são relevantes para a ativida¬de em que estamos engajados e para nos dar um senso da qualidade da nossa relação com o ambiente. Palavras-chave: Affordances. Psicologia ecológica. Afetividade. Percepção direta. Rob Withagen. (shrink)