![]() ![]() Complex organisms are not passive reactors to stimuli, but rather they actively pursue goals (or other pro-attitudes) and use perceptual feedback of the results of their actions to make ongoing adjustments as necessary. As the pragmatists already knew, the linear causal structure of stimulus and response, as propounded by behaviorists, is not up to the task. My hypothesis is therefore that, beyond simple perceptual and action capabilities, the type of agentive organization characteristic of a species determines the types of experience it is capable of having.Ĭharacterizing the different types of agency requires a particular kind of theoretical model. And those agents that operate with an executive level of functioning also attend to their own goal-directed actions-so that they can monitor them and intervene as necessary-which could then be considered a part of their experiential niche as well. Specifically, complex agents direct (or even plan) and control (or even executively self-regulate) their own actions (Tomasello, 2022), and this requires them to attend to particular kinds of experiential situations that are relevant for this kind of decision-making. ![]() Thus, single-celled organisms have a fairly direct connection between perception and action, both effected by the same set of cilia, whereas more complex organisms are organized in more flexible ways cognitively. This is the general point about experience made by Mead ( 1934, p. 245) when he says that “The individual organism determines in some sense its own environment by its sensitivity.”īeyond straightforward action and perception, an organism’s ability to understand more general things about its environment cognitively and to make inferences about those things in acts of thinking, broadly construed, are also attuned to what it needs to do behaviorally. Thus, one species of bird perceives and attends to the likely habitats of worms in tree bark while another does not, and of course the worms themselves live in a completely different experiential niche. ![]() If each species lives in its own ecological niche as determined by what it needs to do to survive and thrive, and if experience is structured by action, then we may also say that each animal species lives in its own experiential niche: those parts and aspects of the environment that it is perceptually and cognitively equipped to experience so that it can do what it needs to do to survive and thrive (a modern version of von Uexküll’s, 1934, concept of “umwelt”). This is basically a modern version of the most fundamental tenant of classical American pragmatism that ”knowing the world inseparable from agency within it” (Legg & Hookway, 2020, p. 1). ![]() Nature selects for effective action production, and the underlying psychology involved – including how the organism experiences the world as a way of directing its actions – evolves in, and only in, this action-structured context. First, my theoretical assumption is that organisms are built by natural selection to experience just what they need to experience in order to act effectively in the environment. I begin with two assumptions, one theoretical and one methodological. ![]()
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