Costall on Gibson's Attack on Cognitivism

James Gibson engaged in a sustained attack upon cognitivism over many years, from the thirties until his death in 1979 (Costall, 1984, p. 110).

This is interesting, since I think many cognitivists date the cognitive revolution from the publication of Chomsky's review of Verbal Behavior.  I don't want to insist that cognitivism began in 1959, but I do wonder what Costall had in mind by "cognitivism" such that it would have been a view Gibson was attacking in the thirties.  I don't know that much about psychology in those days.   Anyone have references?  Else I might have to do research myself ...  Or, maybe Costall's idea is that Gibson's work began to undermine the cognitivist approach before cognitivism was even born.

Costall too fears Cognitivist Homunculi

In his review of Gibson, 1979, Costall also writes,

Interestingly enough, here there is no appeal to the usual argument for the ambiguity of perception. Here we find the uncritical retention of another aspect of the Cartesian scheme, the notion of a mind lurking within the body, in direct contact only with the body and not with the environment itself. This notion, as Reed has recently argued, derives from the Cartesian hypothesis of corporeal ideas (Reed, 1982). Gibson's own criticisms of this assumption-for example, in his discussion of the visual control of manipulation-echo the important arguments Skinner has voiced over many years concerning the persuasive myth of the "inner man" (e.g., Skinner, 1938, chapter I):

The movements of the hands do not consist of responses to stimuli .... Is the only alternative to think of the hands as instruments of the mind? Piaget, for example, sometimes seems to imply that the hands are tools of a child's intelligence. But this is like saying that the hand is a tool of an inner child in more or less the same way that an object is a tool for a child with hands. This is surely an error. The alternative is not a return to mentalism. We should think of the hands as neither triggered nor commanded but controlled. (Gibson, 1979, p. 235)  

(Costall, 1984, p. 114).

Homunculi and "Cartesianism", I've found, are a big concern of EPists.  I guess I have imbided enough cognitivism to think that it doesn't lead to homunculi.  It seems to me that computers do image processing without homunculi, so why not humans?  Indeed, if cognitive processing is a species of computation, then why humans not do image processing without homunculi?

Or, put the matter another way.  I think a cognitivist could be perfectly happy with Gibson's idea that we should think of the hands as neither triggered nor commanded but controlled.  They are controlled by cognitive processes within the brain.

Costall on EP and Behaviorism

In a review of Gibson, 1979, A. P. Costall wished to draw attention to some similarities he perceived between EP and behaviorism.  Among them, he mentions the following:

The ecological approach and operant psychology share a good deal more than mere disenchantment with the status quo. Both insist that behavior presents a primary datum for psychology which is not to be treated as a mere symptom of underlying structures of either the cognitive or physiological kind. They recognize that the description of behavior is nevertheless difficult, and they promote a molar and functional classification of behavior rather than muscle-twitch psychology or classical reflexology. In rejecting the S-R scheme, however, they insist that behavior is nonetheless subject to lawful description and that these laws refer to an irreducible organism-environment relationship. Finally, they each have special contributions to make towards a proper psychology of cognition-a psychology, that is, concerned with truly mediated modes of behavior. (Costall, 1984, p. 114).

I'm intrigued by the comment that behavior presents a primary datum for psychology which is not to be treated as a mere symptom of underlying structures of the cognitive kind.  I guess I do think that behavior is a product of, among other things, cognitive processes, but then again I am not sure what he alternative is.  Is it that there are no cognitive processes; instead there is cognitive behavior which is just a type of behavior?

I've recently had my suspicions that, e.g. Gibson and some of the EC folks just don't have the picture of the cognition/behavior relation that I do, but I don't know what the alternative is.  I just don't have the background on what behaviorists or EPists have said about this kind of thing.