Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Representational views of the mind traditionally face askeptical challenge on perceptual knowledge: if ourexperience of the world is mediated by representations builtupon perceptual inputs, how can we be certain that ourrepresentations are accurate and our perceptual apparatusreliable? J. J. Gibson's ecological approach provides analternative framework, according to which direct perceptionof affordances does away with the need to posit internalmental representations as intermediary steps betweenperceptual input and behavioral output. Gibson accordinglyspoke of his framework as providing “reasons for realism.” Inthis paper I suggest that, granting Gibson his reasons forperceptual realism, the Gibsonian framework motivates anti-realism when it comes to scientific theorizing and modeling.If scientists are Gibsonian perceivers, then it makes sense totake their use of models in indirect investigations of real-world phenomena not as representations of the phenomena,but rather as autonomous tools with their own affordances.