Environment is Not in the Head: Why everyone is talking about 'affordances' with Harry Heft

A look into the ideas of ecological psychology with legendary Harry Heft. Known for his renowned contributions to environmental and ecological psychology, Heft discusses the concept of affordances, a term coined by JJ Gibson, and its application across various fields. Heft traces the intellectual lineage from William James to Gibson, emphasizing a relational rather than dualistic approach to understanding perception and action. The conversation spans affordances in cultural contexts, the significance of immediate experience, the importance of teaching and the dynamic relationship between humans and their environment.
Video here.
Show notes here.
00:00 Introduction to Relational Thinking
00:45 Affordances and Cultural Domain
01:20 Navigating Without Maps
01:42 Animacy and Historical Context
02:09 Welcome and Guest Introduction
02:54 Exploring Affordances with Harry Heft
07:25 Upcoming Conversations and Reflections
08:46 Harry Heft's Journey into Environmental Psychology
12:38 Understanding Ecological Psychology
21:08 Behaviorism and Perception
37:54 Affordances in Design and Interaction
40:59 The Power of Affordances in AI and Robotics
42:54 Affordances in Cultural Contexts
43:58 Wayfinding and Navigation: A Deeper Dive
47:04 Cognitive Maps and Perception
01:00:26 The Evolution of Gibson's Theories
01:12:30 Teaching and Environmental Awareness
01:17:30 Acts of Love in Teaching and Writing
Harry's book on James and Gibson
Affordances in the Body
"Prof. Heft has been on the Denison faculty since 1976. His graduate training was in an interdisciplinary program concerning the relationship between psychological processes and the environment. At Denison, he has been a recipient of the Charles A. Brickman Award for Teaching Excellence. He has also been elected as a Fellow in both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. Dr. Heft serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals “Environment & Behavior” and “William James Studies,” and he is the Book Review Editor for the “Journal of Environmental Psychology.” He teaches courses in environmental psychology, history and systems of psychology, and cultural psychology.'

Transcript

The Environment is not in the Head

Andrea Hiott: [00:00:00] how can we cut across this dichotomy of subjective and objective rather than choose between one or the other? 

Harry Heft: Gibson, I think on the shoulders of somebody like William James and a few others, I'll mention John Dewey as well really have offered a revolution in our thinking to think relationally, not dualistically.

 Immediate experience points both to the experiencer and that which is experienced. 

Harry Heft:  And when we use particular language we try to should try to be as clear as possible  

if you use a term in lots of different ways, before long the term has no meaning anymore. 

So what are affordances there? They're relational properties. Their properties of the environment defined relative to an act, an active organism. 

Let me just say one thing about the paper you mentioned, Affordances in the Body. The purpose of that was that back at the time it was written, there were several people writing about affordances who said affordances might apply to [00:01:00] grabbing tools and objects and glasses, but it has nothing to do with culture.

And that paper is completely to refute that argument. That we can extend affordances to the cultural domain and the meanings in the cultural domain while being consistent with the approach of ecological psychology. 

we perceive by moving through the world. So if we think about navigation as moving through the world, what happens is we detect information as we move through it.

we don't need a map to find our way. It can, it's a tool and it can help us. 

A map is, has great utility, but we don't need a map to find our way.  

Animacy is the most essential quality of living things. 

The problem historically is we've been stuck only in that second area. Think about how Descartes even starts his meditations, he's reflecting about himself. 

Andrea Hiott: It's not 

Harry Heft: reflecting on the world. 

the [00:02:00] environment is not in the head. 

Andrea Hiott: Hello, everyone. Welcome to love and philosophy beyond dichotomy. Where we look for the patterns that connect and explore spaces holding what might seem contradictory or irreconcilable. Holding paradox. And that word is a good word here. Paradox. But not as good as love. I'm glad you're here today. We have a really special guest named Harry Heft, who is legendary in circles in environmental and ecological psychology. What those terms mean we will talk about here with Harry. For those of you who are big JJ Gibson fans, you might be thrilled to learn that. Harry Heft knew Gibson and even drove him to work every day for a while when he was a student. I asked by Eleanor Gibson, by the way. another prominent scientists. And during that time they discussed today's topic, which is affordances. [00:03:00] That has a lot to do with the subject object meeting place that. Is beyond both subject and object, in these direct perception, ideas where perception and action can be seen kaleidoscopic. As one process. Or where navigation and making way might be understood as cognition, but before cognition was ever called cognition. Harry and I mentioned navigation, cognitive maps and way finding. And wayfinding is a specific term that's used in neuroscience and psychology. You could best understand it as ascertaining your position and then planning and following a route. And that's different from this term way, making which you might hear some times. Which is a more general term that I use just to mean moving through the encounter. It doesn't require planning or routing or anything can include that, but doesn't have to just embodied movement or movement in bodies. But that's a topic for another time. Today is all about Harry Haft and his amazing life and work. And it's connection to JJ [00:04:00] Gibson, but also to another person I've loved since I was a teenager, William James. Here's someone that really influenced Harry too. And in one of his books, he traces the the path from William James to Gibson. Actually for those of you, like these kinds of literary families, you can actually trace James to Holt to Gibson to Harry. If you really want to. Anyway. The term that we will talk about mostly here is affordances. I wonder for those of you who work in neuroscience or philosophy or some stem field. How many times you've heard the word affordances or used it yourself in the last week. It seems to be a term that expresses quite a lot for us these days. And Harry and I discussed whether it's overused. He's one of the first people to talk about affordances to bring it into popular discourse, so to speak scientifically. So it's interesting to hear his opinion about whether that word is still meaningful. 

If it still has the same meaning. If it's used in something like computational or technological context, if it still makes any sense [00:05:00] but the word itself is often defined as opportunities for behavior. For those of you who have knowledge that overlaps in other fields, and don't use this word a lot or don't use this word at all. It just means opportunities for behavior. So if you think of you're a human and a dog and maybe an insect walking in the forest on a path to the lake or something like that, they're all going to have different affordances, different opportunities of behavior in that same shared space. So maybe there's. A piece of wood. That's great for the human to sit on and rest. Maybe it's good for another creature there the insect, perhaps as a home maybe there's Moss growing on it. Also, the dog might perceive different affordances maybe he wants to drink water from the lake if that's okay there's also the trees themselves, which would have different affordances important point is that affordance is a neutral term. It can be good or bad for the position, the person, the creature. The embodied interaction or transaction that's going on. So in any case it's different affordances for everyone. according to their body and position. That's [00:06:00] a very general basic idea of this word, which we will try to get a better grip on. I also would highly recommend Harry's books, which I will link to, especially ecological psychology and contexts, where he talks about James Gibson and Roger. Barker and this legacy of William James. And also the paper that I talk about here with him about affordances, which I'm putting in the show notes. And you can not go all the way back to the eighties. I think even 1980 and read. An examination of constructivist and Gibsonia and approaches. To environmental psychology, which is by Harry. There's a lot that he's done relative to these themes. He's also done a lot of work in the lab and work with kids and work with landscapes andHis s a main inspiration as you'll hear him talk about here is environmental in an even bigger sense. He was first inspired to go into this. Because of earth day. That was just starting E a R T H earth day. And he wanted to to [00:07:00] understand how children and their environment interact. 

What are the affordances that are beneficial there? And this nests into bigger ideas of the environment itself. Humans as part of that environment and how we might be. Creating changing affordances for ourselves, but also at all these other nested. Levels. So we get into quite a lot of that here. I'm just really thankful for Harry and his work. And I hope you enjoy this conversation.

We're mid December now. So there will be one more. Conversation that I'll post that's going to be with Carl Freston seasoned screenings with Carl first-in Christmas with Garl whatever term you'd like to use as good for me. And then in the new year, Evan Thompson. One of my favorite scholars in the world I will post our conversation. Also most of, you know, I am very interested in Hegel and I have a wonderful conversation with Karen Ng. Who's a wonderful Hegelian scholar. She wrote the concept of life. [00:08:00] I'm going to post that early next year as well. Many conversations already coming . But just as a year winds down, I hope everything's going well for you. And it's not stressful. And you're looking forward to the holidays, whatever you're going to do. See family, or just read a good book, take a walk, something nourishing and with delightful affordances. I'm really glad that I got to know you this year or that we've come into contact this year. I appreciate you being here and listening and all that you do. Thank you for supporting this show and this research. Signing up for sub stack or youTube or whatever you do, even just thinking of it in a good way. Thanks for that. Here we go. 

Hello, Harry. Thank you for being here. It's really wonderful to see you today. 

Harry Heft: Yeah, thank you. It's nice to see you again. Thanks for the invitation. 

Andrea Hiott: Yes, it's my honor. I'm really fascinated by so much of your work, today we're going to focus on [00:09:00] this term affordance, which in many different fields I work in, I hear used all the time.

And Many of us in psychology and philosophy, know that word associated with your work and with Gibson, so this is where I want to start today. You have such an amazing reputation relative to ecological psychology, environmental psychology. For those who don't know these terms 

maybe we could start with what is environmental psychology or ecological psychology? Are these different? How would you approach those two words, disciplines, fields? 

Harry Heft: Yeah, Yeah, if I may, could I, may I start with just a little bit of autobiography to explain that? 

So I think most of us are products to the, of the times in which we grew up and when I was a early, well, when I was a student, a graduate student, it it was the time of the first Earth Days. And it was prompting attention to the relationship between well, human [00:10:00] activity and environmental quality.

And there were a group of psychologists then, uh, who were kind of late in their career, but they thought psychology needs to get engaged. In environmental issues, and they came together this and they started in a field called environmental psychology, which is a pretty big umbrella term. And that's that's what initially hooked me.

It was the. It was a time of environmental activism, and it's like, okay, this, this appeals to my late adolescent mind. Let's get engaged in this. And and so, it was a, it's a pretty sprawling field. I ended up going through a graduate program, which is an, was an interdisciplinary program on environmental studies and psychology and planning and so on.

And what I was interested in at the time was the the relationship between the quality of environments and, and human development, particularly child development. And because of the, my, my view at the time, which is kind [00:11:00] of the sort of sophomoric approach things is how can we make environments optimal for child development?

So starting there and within the umbrella of environmental psychology, I thought, well, let me see how. Psychology treats the environment. And that's when I became really frustrated because there, it, it leads to I think a couple of couple of directions which were not helpful for my applied interests and then ultimately for my theoretical interests, one of which when it's still, there's two, there's two threads, and they're both dominant and they're both, they're kind of related.

One is to define the environment in physical terms as, as a phys physical scientist might. Which has great value. There's no question about that. But then, you know, is that the best way to approach thinking about the environment for when it comes to psychological property problems? And I was doubtful.

And then the other thread, and it kind of comes stems from the first one is people [00:12:00] arguing that, well, we experienced the environment subjectively, you know, in the environment we experiences in our head. And the person person variables matter a lot. Well, the person I was studying with at the time who kind of helped shape my early thinking wrote this great essay to environmental psychologists with the title, the environment is not in the head.

Okay, you need to look, you need to look elsewhere. I mean, there's going to be connections but like how do we conceptualize the environment. And that's when he steered me in the direction of James Gibson's work. So, Gibson developed ecological psychology, which, which is different from environmental psychology for, for theoretical reasons.

Environmental psychology is somewhat A theoretical I mean it's it's sort of a it's it's sort of a grab bag of different approaches to try to see how we can answer a particular problem but Gibson was concerned about the [00:13:00] fact that indeed the environment is not in the head, his philosophical inclinations led him to think that the notion of indirect realism, that is that we each experience the environment indirectly.

By way of let's say mental representations was just not sound philosophically for one thing, and I know you, you're, this is familiar ground to you. It leads to a position of solipsism. And so we're all trapped in our own private worlds. And so when I went back to my initial question, well, how can we make environments psychologically more better for kids?

It can't be thinking about the environment as being in the head, but the environment that's, that's sort of a common ground for all of us. And that's exactly, and this is what Gibson did. And what he did was he provided the grounds for a direct Theory of [00:14:00] perception that is not perceiving the environment indirectly, but perceiving it directly and how do you do that?

And this is sort of the revelation and it really redirected all my thinking. I came across this in graduate school. 

Andrea Hiott: Do you remember when that happened exactly? Was it one of those moments where it's kind of what you've been looking for? 

Harry Heft: Absolutely. I mean, I could point the paragraph to the paragraph and in Gibson's 1966 book, I was sitting in my office as a graduate student and he just about fell on my chair.

It's like, Oh, this makes perfect sense. And it's really, I mean, I could, I didn't, he didn't explain it the way I'm going to bow to, but it's really pretty simple. I mean, if you ask, You know, how do, how do we hear and we can think about the model of like two tuning forks. If you set one tuning fork resonating, how does it resonate?

Cause the other one to resonate. And the answer is not very mysterious. Is that there, there are [00:15:00] vibrations that are set in the air, which travel from, from one place to another, that we've known that for centuries. But the question, but no one ever thought about applying that division. And so what Gibson did, uh, building on a few earlier ideas, is he, he developed the idea of a meeting, a medium, a medium.

For vision, that is to say that we can think about the the air in our room as filled with reflected light if we're not sitting in the dark, which we're usually, which we're not, we're not, neither one of us are right now, there's light coming from a radiant source like a lamp or something. And that light bounces off of all the surfaces in the environment and and create sort of the steady state of reflective light.

And then what Gibson then did is let's look at what the structure of that reflected light might be. Now, at this point, I won't go down a rabbit hole, but basically what he [00:16:00] showed is there's structure in reflected light, which allows you to detect a surface that at a distance from you. In other words, there's a possibility for directory alone.

And so when I went back to thinking about children, it's like, well, what are the environments that children are directly experiencing? And although my initial in my dissertation, I was looking at physical variables and other things. It became clear that the key to it was what is it that kids perceive adults perceive directly and Gibson answer to that question is they perceive affordances.

Okay. So what are affordances there? Briefly, I know they're relational properties. Their properties of the environment defined relative to an act, an active organism. 

Andrea Hiott: Before you go into affordance, because I think there's a lot to discuss there, I just want to try to think big picture about what we're doing or what this is.

So we're thinking about experience and [00:17:00] perception. Is it safe to say that the kind of main problem is how do we account for I think you say meaning in perceptual experience in, in in your work often. This word meaning, but really it's how is this happening? What's, what are we trying to do with all this? 

Harry Heft: Well, let me answer it, by sort of providing one of the piece of background. And this will be a moment, but what, but once I sort of had been working in Gibson's domain for a while, it was always very puzzling to me where this, these ideas came from. And and one day, I don't know, 30 years ago, I was talking to a colleague in philosophy and and I instantly saw where it came from. And it turns out for you philosophers that listening it comes from William James's radical empiricism. For you, for people who aren't philosophers, and you've read James, you've only read James's Principles of Psychology, probably, or Varieties of Religious Experience, but that's not where you're going to find this.

You're going to find it in his [00:18:00] last essays, where what he does there is reject dualism. He says that immediate experience points both to the, the experiencer and that which is experienced. So if we, if we perceive whether, and this is referring to an affordance with, if we perceive whether an object is graspable, We experience that in our immediate experience.

Now we can subsequently reflect that it has to do with the properties of the object, objective properties, or we can reflect after it has to do with my experience of grasping things and my body size. But that's not the immediate experience. Those are kind of post hoc analyses. The immediate experience is this object that I can do something with.

It's affordance, and it's, although William James does not use the term affordances, that's where radical empiricism begins. It's a complete rejection of [00:19:00] dualistic epistemologies. So, if, if anyone, if anyone wants to give, well, I have to say that I my book that was published in 2001, the first half of the book is really, uh, make, justifying that claim.

Andrea Hiott: There's a lot in there I would like to think about. First of all, it's interesting you mentioned James did Gibson study with James? 

Harry Heft: With 

Andrea Hiott: his student or something. 

Harry Heft: Yeah, the first part of my book was a historical treatment of that question, so James, James's student toward the end of his career was Edwin Holt. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, yeah, that's it. Okay. 

Harry Heft: Who was at Princeton, and Gibson was a graduate student at Princeton.

So there's a lot of circumstantial evidence which points to the fact that Gibson sort of came, was exposed to these ideas through Hole. 

Andrea Hiott: Okay, that's what I was trying to remember, because I knew there was really a direct connection, not only in ideas, but even in place and people being in similar learning environments.

And then you know knew [00:20:00] Gibson, which we'll get to, but to like this big picture, you were, you're talking about, childhood place and how, and a lot of your work, thinks about how to, what that is and how to understand that. We can think about what importance is lead to what sorts of paths and ways.

 I'm trying to think about this big picture of we're in the world, and it feels like everything is in our head, somehow, there's this idea that perception is in the head, I'm being very general or, it's a matter of something physical in the environment that's causing something.

So there's always been this either or it's either subjective, it's about me and my experience in my head, or it's objective, it's something happening in the world. And it's been very hard for us to hold those things as not opposites. And I think, What Gibson does, and in your work, and James, even though it might seem sometimes it's one way or the other, even radical empiricism can sound, really on one side, but if you really dig into it, from my perspective, it's actually showing a way that both of these are interacting in some kind of [00:21:00] dynamism.

 What, how do you think about that?

Harry Heft: And that's even that sounds too dualistic to me. 

Andrea Hiott: Okay. 

Harry Heft: Okay. So 

Andrea Hiott: good. Yeah. 

Harry Heft: So, let me talk, let me just say something about behaviorism, which has, which seems, which is not what some, some people take very negatively as being reductionistic, but there's another kind of behaviorism, which is sort of what organisms do as whole organisms.

So imagine, and this is just a hypothetical, you know, you put a child on the floor with a bunch of objects, they're going to crawl around, and that's important, I'll come back to that, but what they're going to do is they're going to interact with things that they can meaningfully touch or lift or grab.

 And so kids will grab objects that are compatible with their, with their, hand span and so on. In other words, they engage the world in terms of objects that have properties that, that are suitable, suitable and scale to their body and scale to [00:22:00] their skills. So in other, so the objects that they grab.

They are affordances because they point both to the object itself and to the possibilities for action of the individual. So, part of the difficulty for traditional philosophers is, okay, let's start with the mind, because that's where Descartes taught us to start. But a behaviorist of the stripe that I, Like says, No, let's begin with action with behavior.

And in fact, among philosophers, that's where Merleau Ponty starts. He starts about that with action. Yeah. So what it is, what is it that we're engaging and what are the properties of those things we engage and really Ponte didn't use the term affordances, but, but he and Gibson are really fit together quite nicely.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, yeah. There's so many terms in phenomenology that that fit very well with the idea of [00:23:00] affordance. And you bring that out actually in the paper which I think you wrote in 1989 is, and it's called affordances in the body. An intentional analysis of Gibson.

That one is really famous. I think everyone's read it and I encourage everyone to go and read it now, but okay. We, so It is a kind of phenomenological lived experience in the way you described it. The child is going to have a different experience of those objects on the floor than the dog or cat or the parent.

But at the same time, those objects on the floor are the environment. So we have both. And for some reason we feel like we either have to start inside or outside to try to describe it. But I feel like what you are starting to get at with that paper where you bring in Marylou Ponty is that it's both when you're talking about action, you're already talking about both somehow, the body, the situation. 

Harry Heft: Yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: if you 

Harry Heft: start, if you start with action in an environment that has things in it, you're, you're not starting inside. [00:24:00] You're starting if at the, at where, where the individual in the world meet. I mean, it, it's really a, if you will, a transactional concept.

I, I prefer transactional than interaction. Interaction. The reason is 

Andrea Hiott: that the work of the affordance right there, that almost synapsey kind of space of, because an affordance is also not a static thing. It is that relation that you described of the child and the object. We can't put it in the child or the object or how would you?

Harry Heft: Right. But, but there, but there are some constancies. So for example, the, I mean, the, uh, depending on the object, like, Oh yeah, well, I have my glass, get it in the camera. I have my glass right here. I mean, it has some, some fairly constant properties. And and one of it is it's width and it's weight and so on.

And at the, and I have some somewhat constant properties in terms of my hand, hands, uh, span and my strength, [00:25:00] but those are all, those are all changing, changeable at different timescales. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. There's patterns, there's regularities that would change with a consistency most of the time. We can say that, but yeah, there's not a static thing.

Harry Heft: Yeah. And the body changes over certain timescales. My my colleague Karen Adolph and, and New York University looks at how children's decisions about locomotion change as their body size changes, as their skills change. So there, the, the world is dynamically changing, but the thing we have to remember is it's cha in different aspects of it change at different rates.

So, so the glass on my desk is relatively stable. My body will be slowly changing, but things go, you know, entropy does win out in the 

Andrea Hiott: end. So when we're trying to understand what's happening, when we're trying to understand the meaning, and how we have meaning and , and how this happens, this amazing [00:26:00] life that we're living in affordances starts to do some work for us in a way.

And also thinking of it more ecologically, I in terms of ecological psychology, where we're not just looking at the brain or just looking inside or just looking outside. How would you start to think about what that's doing and how that's helping us with this problem? 

Harry Heft: Yeah. Well, well, let's me drag my prop in again.

So, uh, I have one 

Andrea Hiott: too. We we can cheers. Cheers. Yeah. 

Harry Heft: And that is because of its properties in relationship to My body, it's meaningful, it's graspable, it, it, if you will, it has the affordance of being graspable or graspability and the terms are getting a little clunky, although I guess it's not uncomfortable for German speakers to have these long extended words, in English, it gets a little weird, but, but there, yeah, but we can talk about what the, an object or a feature affords an individual. And so [00:27:00] some of the work that I did more, I I've dabbled a little bit with, in design and with some landscape designers and if we want to design a space where people might gather, we want to design a space where people can sit. So how high should you make these seats, or these ledges or these benches well. It should be relative to the body scaling of the people who are gonna sit there. So in other words, it afford these structures afford sitting on I'm sure we've all been in, in places where there are things that look like there's, you could sit on it, but they're too high or too small and or so on.

So, the, so the property of being the affordance of ness, if you will, uh, is defined relative to the person who's gonna be do this, doing the sitting. It's not in the person, it's not in the object, but it takes into account both individual, both parts of that, I would say duality, not [00:28:00] dualism. 

Andrea Hiott: So is it almost a practice of a different kind of noticing or a different kind of?

Sure. Coming at this problem or this project of looking for meaning and building for meaning and creating spaces that are meaningful. 

Harry Heft: I'll give you an, I'll give you an example. One of my closest friends here is a philosopher. And for years we kind of argued over what affordances were. And then he had, he and his wife had twins.

And then the twins got hold old enough to call around the house, and they started looking for like light sockets and cracks and sharp edges and the, and he called me and said, Okay, now I know what affordances 

Andrea Hiott: are. Can I ask what did he think they were before what was the argument.

Harry Heft: It's really been a long time but they just seem to be mysterious.

I mean, if you say to someone, well, this, there's this thing here, but it's neither in the person or in the world, it's like, well, what are you talking about? 

Andrea Hiott: Isn't that because we are kind of born into a dualistic framework? Not that the [00:29:00] dualistic framework is somehow ordained by God or something, but it's just the way we've built.

Our science and our language, not without good reason to try to understand it, but isn't that why it doesn't make sense because we think we have to put it in one of those boxes. Right. 

Harry Heft: It also goes back to to the influence of Judeo Christian.

Thinking that there's sort of the world and then there's the mind and in the world is sort of, not is not necessarily sacred. We can do things to the world. We can think big holes in it and blow it up. But the but the mind is, you know, next to God. So we we have this dualism that comes from a religious tradition.

And then Descartes for really good reasons tried to solve some problems and we've been stuck in that framework for a long time. So, I mean, Gibson, I think on the shoulders of somebody like William James and a few others, I'll mention John Dewey as well really have offered a revolution in our thinking to think relationally, not [00:30:00] dualistically.

Now, but, but I, I want to add one thing, and that is, and this of course is in James work, that we do, we do act in the world, you know, over time, but there are moments when we kind of step back from that action and reflect, and we reflect on it. We, we, we, we engage in cognition too. But, but it's important to distinguish between perceiving as a process in the course of perception action in time and reflection or cognition, which is kind of stepping out of time a little bit.

The, the problem historically is we've, we've been stuck only in that second area. So I mean, think about how Descartes even starts his meditations, you know, he's reflecting about himself. 

Andrea Hiott: It's not 

Harry Heft: reflecting on the world. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think it's almost like such a kind of [00:31:00] awe.

and mysterious experience that we, we have the experience of the world and then we can experience our experience of the world. Yeah. Which I think is continuous in a way, like even with your work and we can even understand that reflection as a kind of perception of our own perception and so forth. But I won't go down that, that rabbit hole, but, it is understandable that we get 

Harry Heft: kind of 

Andrea Hiott: amazed by it, yeah, 

Harry Heft: one other thing let's remember with Descartes is, I mean, he was really, he was interested in trying to get, get to the topic of, of, certainty and truth. He wasn't asking about the world.

He was asking about epistemology in those very influential essays. But things have gotten sort of balled up over time, particularly for psychologists, I think. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, there's a lot of assumptions that we all start with as if they're facts Without realizing that we do and a lot of this work ends up trying to call that into question, which I think is something that Gibson does just by offering another way to think about it.

But then that gets cartooned too, in the [00:32:00] sense of, well, it can't all be direct because yes, obviously we, there is something going on inside. But as you're saying it, the point isn't that there's not something going on inside. It's. How can we, he even says it in one of my favorite quotes, like, how can we cut across this dichotomy of subjective and objective, right?

How can we hold both those at once rather than choose between one or the other? 

Harry Heft: We do it all the time. I mean, when, when we're in the world engaging objects, when, when we're, and when we're talking to other people, we're not, the dialogue is happening between us. Now, and we're each bringing something to that dialogue, but the dialogue exists relationally.

Now we can step back and after our phone call, we can reflect on what we said, but that's not perceiving. I mean, that's, that's an act of reflection or cognition and that that's legitimate. 

Andrea Hiott: That's not perceiving yourself. I mean, this is something I [00:33:00] get confused about too, like with perception where everyone puts the limit on it.

Yeah. I'm thinking about what I said to you. I feel like I'm still perceiving my own habits or patterns in a way. 

Harry Heft: Well, yeah, but let's go back to my earlier comments about the medium. Yeah, I mean, so it's, it's the basis for our, our sort of existing in a common medium. that enables us to interact. And if we're talking about vision, that medium is reflective light, then we can talk much more specifically about the character of that.

Andrea Hiott: That's a good point in your paper. You say you, I think you quote Gibson about these poles of attention quote, which is just wonderful, right? Because that's what you're saying, right? The pole of attention shifts. From so called subjective to so called objective. 

Harry Heft: Yeah, or, or I, I, that's right.

Or I would say from sort of relational engagement to much more inward engagement. 

Andrea Hiott: [00:34:00] Yeah. Or relational with self engagement, . 

Harry Heft: Yeah, so I I mean we know a common complaint in relationships is that one, one person says, Well, you're really not listening to me. You're really thinking about what you're going to say next.

Andrea Hiott: You're listening to your own thoughts. Yeah, well that's, 

Harry Heft: that's, that's fine, but that's not dialogue. Is it real? Sure. Is it important? Sure. But it's not dialogue. So we really want to talk about this dynamic exchange that's, that goes on between us. 

Andrea Hiott: I'm trying to remember also in that paper when you talk about, because it's wonderful and, in the way that you show that relational is an alternative to this dualistic way of thinking, and I feel like one part of it that was really strong for me is when you're talking about the continuity.

And this gets into, Something I want to go into with you too, about how we confuse our maps for our territories or the maps for the process. But what I think, what I remember is when you're talking about relationality, you're talking about the continuity and that everything [00:35:00] is ongoing and moving in a process, but with the dualistic point of view, we always freeze it into little static parts and it's almost as if something starts and stops.

But all of this is always ongoing in a process. We never get to have a beginning or end. Isn't that part of when you're talking about relationality and the difference? Yeah, 

Harry Heft: but let me return to like, let's take something simple and that is like perceiving an object. So so if you walk into a room and there's an object on the table and you don't, Know what it is immediately.

What do you do? You walk closer to it. You walk around it. You take you look from different vantage points. From an ecological point of view, what you're doing is you're sort of isolating the The specifying information that tells you what that thing is. I mean, organisms move. I mean, frankly we, organisms didn't begin perceiving, they began moving.

Animacy is the most essential quality of living things. [00:36:00] Even single celled organisms, and then subsequently in evolutionary history, we develop these means to actually cease to detect things that are maybe at a distance from us, visually, auditorily, and also through smell. But we, we want to begin with animas, animacy, we want to begin with action.

And that leads me back to what I said a minute ago. We want to be good molar behaviorists, not reductionistic behaviorists. Just look at what an organism is doing. 

Andrea Hiott: The problem with behaviorism was they didn't take seriously that we have this subjective experience. this thing we call consciousness, which gets called a million things.

But behaviorism itself is kind of all of this, right? I mean, it got rejected with the Chomsky article and all that, but 

Harry Heft: right. But 

yeah. I mean, but just remember the, the behaviorism that most people have had been familiar with is that is a reductionistic one.

Let's go down to the most basic [00:37:00] unit of something, but that's not the kind of behaviorism I'm talking about. 

Andrea Hiott: That's what I'm trying to point out. Cause I think some people will hear that and that's what they think, but that's like the opposite of what you're saying. 

Harry Heft: No, go out to the neighborhood playground and watch the kids playing on the equipment.

You're a behaviorist. What are they doing? Yeah, and why are they doing what they're doing? And then if you're looking at them playing in the playground, you instantly see that, oh, they're engaging affordances. They're climbing on things and sliding down things. Yeah. So just sort of observing the world, which neither philosophers nor psychologists have been particularly good at you start to see action and affordances.

Yeah, they're right there in front of your face. In fact, you, you do it all the time. 

Andrea Hiott: It is. That's why I brought up this practice of awareness because it's almost like that's the most important part. I think we could say that about a lot of science and writing and philosophy, but there's there's two open threads here that I really want to explore.

And the first you brought up design, and I know that this term affordance is [00:38:00] become a huge thing in design and architecture and gosh, in every field, everyone's using the idea of affordance and, there's been some other work written about it. Do you, because in in that paper from 1989, you show that it's okay to think of affordance in a different way, so long as you're coming from it, from this intentional point of view, which connecting to what we were saying about Merleau Ponty is situating it in in the body.

And understanding the trajectory, so to speak, or the goal that we're assessing. But how do you feel about this word affordance? Because it's a word I hear all the time in all fields now in different ways. Do you feel like that paper and the way you lay out affordance is the way that it's still being used?

And if not, does it bother you? 

Harry Heft: Uh, Well, there, there are two points, but the main thing is, and I don't want to cast aspersions, but unfortunately, decades ago, someone in computer design decided to [00:39:00] apply the concept of affordances to what's generally called interaction design. Interaction design means how we engage with computer interfaces.

That was a huge mistake. Because it now it's using the term affordances in a very different way, and that's okay, you can use words anyway you want, but we have to be consistent, otherwise we're completely confused. So, what one of the things that I've been trying to do over many decades is to say, here's how we're going to use it in ecological psychology and, and I, and I kind of wish others who would use it in different ways would be much more careful.

And the reason why is not because I'm trying to be territorial about the term, but if you use a term in lots of different ways, before long the term has no meaning anymore. It has no value anymore. It applies to all these different things. And that's then, as a scientific concept, it's useless. [00:40:00] 

Andrea Hiott: Well, I think it relates to also meaning this word that I keep bringing up and that if we're really trying to understand the world and the meaning, that's part of what we're trying to do with psychology and philosophy and in a practical way, how do we, you talked about kids and the places that we grow up and how that's incredibly important, right?

To think about and look at and how are we going to structure that? But once we start using affordance in terms of , computer language and stuff. I don't think that it's necessarily wrong but the kind of, the activity that we were just describing of why this was an important new direction kind of gets collapsed, doesn't it?

Because we then have forgotten the body, the situatedness, the meaning. 

Harry Heft: Exactly. No, that's exactly right. Exactly right. I mean, until we, until robotics develops a lot, a bit further than it is, I mean, there's no body when we're talking about computer design. And so to use the word affordances in, in that concept, It just, it weakens the term.

Andrea Hiott: It also [00:41:00] strengthens it in a weird way in that context that they're using it because I think the reason we like that word so much is exactly because of this powerful connection to meaning and body and place and that's what it's carrying with it. And so I think what we want to do when we use that sometimes in, AI or computer programming or whatever, these other fields that are different is where we want to take some of that 

Harry Heft: inertia 

Andrea Hiott: into it.

Harry Heft: Well, we also want to look current and cutting edge. And you know, and it sounds like it's a buzzword. If it's a buzzword, it's not going to be much have much scientific value. Science, science can advance on buzzwords. It has to advance with terms that are well defined.

And I haven't defined affordances with greater precision today, because I don't want to go down a, you know, a side sidetrack, but it can be defined mathematically. At least in some cases it has been. [00:42:00] 

Andrea Hiott: Well, that kind of goes into something else I want to talk about before. I just want to say also that I think it is a very important word, even in this world of robotics, computer programming, because if we could use it the right way there, it's actually could really be very helpful because I think if we really think about affordance in the way.

situated towards a goal with a body, all these things. It actually solves a lot of problems there because then we realize actually the, there are affordances, but they're not to the robot or the computer. It's to the person who's doing the programming or so on and so forth. You can get to that place of a body in a situation and all of it.

And actually going through that could be really beneficial in the field, so I think there's even more of a reason to not just say don't use the word, but learn the history of the word because it could help you actually with what you're trying to describe and even philosophically to talk about it, 

Harry Heft: yeah, sure. Yeah, I'll be patient and see how it all develops. Let me just, let me just say one thing about the paper you mentioned, affordances in the [00:43:00] body. The purpose of that was that back at the time it was written, there were several people writing about affordances who said, well, affordances might apply to grabbing tools and objects and glasses, but it has nothing to do with culture.

And that paper, that paper is completely to refute that argument. That we we can extend affordances to the cultural domain and the meanings in the cultural domain without while being consistent with the approach of ecological psychology. 

Andrea Hiott:  And that's an incredibly important contribution.

And one reason that paper is made such a splash. And also I really could see that continuing on in this tradition of philosophy of technology or thinking of AI, but of course that would be a whole other discussion, but just for anyone who might want to follow that there's something rich there.

Harry Heft: Maybe. I'm going to be skeptical until I see something. I'm not going to see otherwise. 

Andrea Hiott: That's good. But, so there's two other [00:44:00] things, the idea of wayfinding and navigation and how this relates because we've talked about trying to understand place, trying to understand the affordances of place.

And all of this is how it's making meaning or how perceptual experience is meaningful. And you've talked about this as movement. And so how , how does, how do we relate this to your work with something like navigation and wayfinding? Because it's almost as if we just started to think of

our perceptual experience or even our life as a almost like a path or a exploration or a following of another path or how would you put those together? How did they come together for you? 

Harry Heft: Yeah, well, when I use the terms navigation or wayfinding, I literally mean moving from one place to another place.

Now we can, we can use wayfinding sort of metaphorically and talk about my search for meaning in life, but that's not how I use the term. I mean, literally, how do we get from here to there? And again, this goes back to what I said at the [00:45:00] very outside of our discussion. In environmental psychology, the way in which wayfinding or navigation was studied was assuming that we have maps in our head.

In fact, a recent Nobel Prize winner received, you know, received the award for his work on to saying that the hippocampus in the brain is a cognitive map. I don't doubt the findings about the hippocampus, but I am critical of calling it a cognitive map. I mean, talking about having maps in your head.

Removes us from understanding how we find our find our way in real environments how I get from my house to the grocery store three blocks away that I mean that's the navigation that I'm interested in now, and from a Gibsonian point of view which and I didn't stress this earlier. But it's perception actions, not just perceiving.

So we perceive [00:46:00] by moving through the world. So if we think about navigation as moving through the world, what happens is we detect information as we move through it. There's, there are features that are revealed as we move through it. And it's that information that I was most interested. This is, this is the work I did early in my career.

But, but again, it's information that's perceived over time. It's always over time, you know, we can talk about perceiving pictures, but that's a whole different universe. We're talking about perceiving dynamically over time. So that's where my work on navigation. started and Frank, well, I'll leave it at that for now.

Andrea Hiott: No, this is great because I don't think you know this. I don't think we talked about this, but I was in a lot of those labs that, that you're talking about. And I've had a lot of discussions with those same people about this subject, even on this channel. So it's interesting to think about the cognitive map, and here's [00:47:00] something that's really hard to talk about, but it's really related to your work and everything we've already been talking about. I think you would say there's no such thing as a cognitive, cognitive map, and others. Yeah. No, I, wouldn wouldn't.

Okay. 

Harry Heft: Well, I wouldn't say that. And, and let me, and this connects to something I was mentioning earlier. Mm-hmm . I, I told you way finding, I would, I would navigate from my house to the, to the go the market several blocks away. But I could sit in my chair and imagine how I can do that. I could, I don't mind calling that a cognitive map.

In other words, I'm withdrawn from engaging the world, and I can reflect on the world. And I can try, and I, and certainly we do that all the time when we're walking around cities, right? We're, we're, we're following familiar paths, but let's say a route that you're, that's familiar to you is, is, is blocked at the moment.

Then you might start reflecting on, oh, how else can I get around here? Well, I don't have any trouble with cognitive maps [00:48:00] used in that second sense. Okay. Thanks. But to say that cognitive maps is what it is, or what what drives online ongoing perception action, I think is problematic because a map, as you said, in a different context is static.

It's frozen. And even, you know, even GPS maps, they're, they're, they're limited in scope. So we want to keep the emphasis as Gibson and others have done and James did on. experience as being dynamic and over time. I mean, the main contribution of William Jameson is if the book that most people might know, the principle of psychology is, is, is, is, is the stream of thought.

It rejects the idea that there are frozen bits and pieces of images and in thinking, but that thought goes on that actually, that's, that's what he says, mental life goes on and you can [00:49:00] leap forward decades and that's Merleau Ponty. Same thing. But what Merleau Ponty does, which James didn't do, is he includes the body in trying to account for change over time.

Yeah, but, but yeah, we can have a cognitive map. I can sit still and sort of reflect on where, how I might get someplace. That's, that's an, that's an 

Andrea Hiott: interesting problem. Yeah, 

I think I disagree with, with both of, both sides of this in a way and agree with both sides of it, which I guess is fitting with this trying to hold the paradox of subject and objective.

Um, Because I, I do think there are cognitive maps, but they're not in our heads. There's a confusion that I feel is something we've been touching on between when we try to create representations externally, or what you might've think of as analytically maps or objects, languages, documents, things like this and the ongoing process itself.

 Do you see any confusion there between, for example, I think you've even talked about it, that From day one we are [00:50:00] thinking about maps, in our life we're encountering actual maps, whether it's on our phone or the old paper ones or even just diagrams and things like that.

So it structures the way that we think about the world and of course in that way we are mapping, but we don't have a cognitive map in our head. Do you see those as two different things or? 

Harry Heft: Well, I mean, And in some other things I've written there's there's culture, there's work in cultural anthropology on places where people don't have maps, and they find their way quite well.

So a map is, has great utility, but we don't need a map to find our way. It can, it's a tool and it can help us. 

Andrea Hiott: But the process, the pattern itself can be, I think, studied and understood in the way that you were describing we can physically find our way through the world, wayfinding from A to B, literally the body is moving.

But if you think of language in terms of something like a [00:51:00] landscape, a city is basically a collection of regularities that your body is patterning itself with as it's moving through it. 

But when we're in a thought space or when we're moving through something like a book or even memories, isn't there also a similar pattern 

Harry Heft: I wouldn't make that leap because I don't think, I don't think we know enough about what it, well, I, no, I put it a different way.

I don't think I thought enough about what it means to move through a book as opposed to moving through the world, but I thought a lot about what it means to move through the world. And, and it requires my body. It, it's an action. So I think, again, it's sort of similarly to what I was saying earlier about affordances.

We have to be careful with our terms. So we can say, oh, yeah, I'm navigating through a book. Well, is that the same thing as what I mean when I say I'm navigating through the city? I don't think so. So even though we're using the same terms, it doesn't mean [00:52:00] they're supported by the same underlying processes.

I think, again, the use of terms is absolutely critical. 

Andrea Hiott: I would say if you can separate the way that we're going to try to assess or measure it from the process itself the patterns might be in common, even though it's, a different thing. But we have to be very careful not to just take the metaphor and then put it to all the science that's been done it doesn't help anything, 

Harry Heft: I think it's important, and this is probably one of the things I most learned from Gibson. To be careful and consistent with the language that we use and when we use particular language we try to should try to be as clear as possible about it. So let me give you just one example in terms of a book I'm reading now.

So this book I'm reading now has time jumps. I'm reading it and then suddenly I'm back 20 years earlier than I was a minute ago. It's like, that's not navigation in a, in a terrestrial sense. You know, so I could say I'm navigating through this book that doesn't have a linear [00:53:00] narrative. Well, then that's something different.

And if I was a psychologist interested in reading, I would have to think I would like to know how I can do that. But that's not the problem. I think it would 

Andrea Hiott: happen the same way that if someone suddenly changed, if they could, if you were in a VR city or something, and they suddenly changed it to another city, you would have to re adjust, realign with the regularities.

Yeah. I don't think it's different from I think the patterns are very similar. And I actually think this is a way to do what Gibson wanted and overcome that dichotomy of thinking that something that's in the head is not, is somehow different than the physical. They do share similar patterns. But I agree we do have to be very careful because if you use certain terminology in a way, then whatever way everyone's heard that terminology before, they're applying to that. 

Harry Heft: But also, again, I mean, fundamentally, even this, some might not think of me this way, I am a scientist. And [00:54:00] so I want to say, okay, I want to talk about, okay, empirically, what, what do we know about this? Well, there's a very smart ecological psychologist at Brown, Bill Warren, Who works in this very large virtual reality space, and he's done studies where he has people go through wormholes.

They're like, they're in this enclosure and they're walking around and suddenly they go through a wall and they're at someplace completely different. Now, I'm not going to report on what he found, but I'm saying you can study these things empirically without saying, Oh, they're the same. I don't know that they're the same.

Andrea Hiott: Well, there have been studies. There have been studies on the hippocampus and of course it has a very big role in memory and also in navigation, and there have been experiments designed where you are literally moving through some kind of a virtual space or an informational space we do still see similar patterns to when you're moving through a physical space. Now that doesn't mean that it's the same but it does provide a bit of a link between [00:55:00] not thinking of, What's happening when we're thinking and remembering and having emotion, and what's happening when we're moving from A to B in the physical world and being physical as completely different, dualistic, right?

There might be a way that they're relational, that we just haven't been able to kind of widen our perspective to see yet 

Harry Heft: tested. I would say part of our problem is, and this is Actually a point Wittgenstein makes. We're, we're trapped with our pic, with pictures.

We, we think about things we're trying to envision. So I would say if you want to understand, let's say wayfinding or navigation, what, what the analogy should be listening to music. Because music is this structure that unfolds over time. And I think, and I would say navigation is similarly a structure that changes over time, although the difference is you move through the environment.[00:56:00] 

So, so you use the word memory, memory a minute ago. So when I'm, when I'm walking to this familiar store, not far from me, as I go, am I sort of relying on memory? I don't think so. Any more than when I'm listening to a very familiar melody. That every step in the way I have to think about Oh, what's where's this melody go next.

No, that's not it at all. It's the it's a relational structure that unfolds over time, and navigation, I would say, is that as well. So, Yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: I just, I would say that's already a cognitive act. I wouldn't separate that action from being and perception and cognition as if they're all separate things.

So yes, I think there's a difference when we are aware that we're. We're thinking about something, I'm remembering actively, there's different kinds of memory, the body, when you remember how to ride a bicycle, but you're not thinking about riding a bicycle there's all these different kinds of memory, and [00:57:00] I think when we move through the city, after we've moved through it many times, of course not, remembering it in that active sense of remembrance, like as if there's a subject, but we, our bodies engaging in, I would say, active memory.

That's, you know, I wouldn't distinguish those in a dualistic way, 

Harry Heft: but doesn't that indicate that we're used, we need to use the word memory with greater care. So it needs to be 

Andrea Hiott: thought of a lot different. So 

Harry Heft: when I'm, when I'm riding a bicycle, why even bring memory into it? What I'm employing is a skill that I've developed over a history.

And, , and I just sort of engage it. If you're, I mean, well, even going back to this classic paper written in the 40s by Karl Lashley, one of the famous neuroscientists there are certain things that happen too quickly, I think he talks about in the arpeggio that can't rely on memory in the traditional sense of sort of reaching back and pulling out something that occurred before.

It's actually in this paper he wrote called In Search of [00:58:00] the Engram, which is a term referred to memory. And he basically says in certain circumstances, there's no memory. It's that the body is sort of become, uh, has developed a pattern of skilled action. And I don't, I mean, I think using the term memory there just confuses.

Andrea Hiott: I don't, I think it might confuse, but it's a confusion we need to work through, I think even to go to back to Gibson and the idea of more direct perception and there's something like ecological memory and ecological perception. And I think the problem that we don't use those words and really think through it and change that, like that's the hard work of changing this framework and these patterns of dualism that we're all stuck in is we need to rethink that like cognition and memory aren't.

And they aren't just our thoughts and images that we have in this kind of way that we are aware of ourselves. They're very, for me, I mean, they're very much the way that the body is in the world. And [00:59:00] only later do we get to this point where we feel like we have memories in the sense that we attach them to words and images.

And that's a really hard thing to think about and it's really radical to start thinking about, ecological memory in that sense. But for me, it seems like the only way we're ever going to really get beyond these dichotomies that are shaping everything, because they are built in the language. And if we just don't use the language, then we just stay with them, you know?

Harry Heft: Well, I, I recommend, I mean, folks have thought about this a long time and we, we neglect classic works, uh, at our peril. So if, if you go back to the thirties, there's a wonderful book. Written by uh, Frederick Bartlett, British psychologist called Remembering. He basically says the same thing that you just said, but maybe in different words.

Bartlett, 

yeah, so I'm pretty, if, if you read my work, I'm almost always start with history in it, because I think that's where we need to begin as not as, not to stay there. [01:00:00] But to sort of build on the insights of, of, of others who have sort of made some progress in some area. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I really like that. I think that's connected to this continuity, right? That we really understand that everything is continuous and understanding where it's coming from. Absolutely essential to understanding how to use it or what it is. But we don't really take the time to do that, but I wanted to understand your biography a little.

And we've gotten into all these big ideas because Can we go back to before you wrote that 1989 paper and when you've you discovered this thing by Gibson and how did all those dominoes start to fall? Because I believe you got to know him well and were you teaching with him or something?

Or I have all these kind of ideas of how did all of that begin? And 

Harry Heft: Yeah. Well, I wouldn't say that he knew him well. I, I spent, uh, about a year at Cornell and I interacted with him, uh, quite a bit there. In fact what happened was [01:01:00] so after I finished my graduate work I was looking around for a job, and the only job I got was a crummy job I didn't want.

And I thought, well, why not try to spend some time with Gibson because I was just barely learning this stuff. So, and this is going to relate to navigation. So, so when, when I got up to Cornell and a bunch of circumstances, I'll make the short story short. It turns out. Well, 

it 

turns out that he was retired at that point, although he, he had a weekly seminar, but he was also teaching a course once a week.

At this other university that was 40 minutes away and and where where Cornell was is is a pretty in the winter is a pretty rugged area. So, so he was going to teach this. He was going to co teach a course at this other university during the winter months. And it was an evening [01:02:00] course. And so, his, his wife, who is just an eminent psychologist as he, Eleanor Gibson, approached me soon after I got there.

And she said, would, would you mind like being his driver to get to this course? And of course I said, well, yeah, of course I will. Because in fact, I, I didn't know much about his work and I thought, great, I'm going to have him in a car for two hours every week to talk to him. And so one of the questions that kept coming up for me in our conversations is how are we finding our way from Ithaca, where Cornell is, to this other city, Binghamton?

I mean, how are we even doing this? And that's kind of where my interest in navigation started. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, I love that. Did you talk to him about that? Did you? 

Harry Heft: Oh, sure. Yeah, because at that point, I mean, so if those listeners who maybe have read some Gibson will have only probably read his last book, The Ecological Approach of Visual Perception.[01:03:00] 

When I was there, that book was in manuscript form, and he had already written a bunch of stuff on this question. Which I hadn't seen yet. So yeah, so we talked about what he had written about navigation and wayfinding and he has yet So he was 

Andrea Hiott: literally working on that as you were having these, these talks.

That's quite a weird synchronicity. 

Harry Heft: Yeah, uh, I, my whole career is full of luck. And, uh, yeah, no, I, I saw him in his office and on the bookshelves are all the chapters sort of stretched across the way and I would I would read them and of course I didn't, I then I could ask him about him because I was really a novice at the time.

, and so my earliest publications once I got a faculty position was trying to test the ideas that are that were implicit in his writing about. Okay. Navigation and way of finding. So that's really the first 10 years of my career was mostly on that topic. 

Andrea Hiott: And you are a [01:04:00] scientist and you have done a lot of work that's scientific, but I wonder at that time, how was that considered? What was the, because now, where I am, there's a lot of love for Gibson, right? Or there's a lot of appreciation, even though there's also a lot of controversy. But I wondered then was, what was, had you just found someone that no one had heard of, or was he already, a big player, what was it like in that time period?

Harry Heft: Yeah. Well, it turns out that's really an interesting question where it leads. So Gibson published a book in 1950 that made a huge splash for a whole bunch of reasons, which we don't have the time to, I could do it, but we don't have time to go into. And then when he wrote his next book, which was published like 16 years later, he basically disavowed everything he had, most things he wrote in the first book. But in the meantime, the psychological community had embraced that first book and thought, Oh, he's, he's fantastic. He's brilliant. 

Andrea Hiott: Was the first [01:05:00] one the senses considered as perceptual? 

Harry Heft: No, that's the first one's called the perception of the visual world. 

Andrea Hiott: Okay. I didn't even know about that one. And when 

Harry Heft: he wrote the census as considered as perceptual systems, I mean, he didn't completely reject everything in the first book, but he basically moved away from it.

Was the 

Andrea Hiott: first one more traditionally? 

Harry Heft: Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So then the question becomes, well, how does this, how does the psychological audience now react to the second book? And most of them said at the time, and since they bought the first argument, Oh, he's, he's, you know, he was smart once, but he's kind of gone, gone off his rocker now.

And yeah, so for a long time, that the second book, which was really the main book, The Sense is Considered, 

was sort of treated as interesting, but kind of quirky. Yeah. And then over the next 50 years, people saw, oh no, wait a minute, this is really, this is really the heart of his ideas. 

So, so if you look at [01:06:00] mainstream psychologists, and I can, well, I can cite some examples, and you see, and if they cite Gibson, you almost always see that they cite his 1950, 50 book.

Which you gave up, which you gave up on. 

Andrea Hiott: I did not even know that. I only, that was the one that made the difference for me, the senses. 

Harry Heft: There's a parallel story to that. And that is during the time that Gibson was at Cornell, a new faculty member, a seasoned faculty member was hired, namely Ulrich Neisser.

And in 1967, Neisser wrote the book on information processing called Cognitive Psychology. It was like the Bible of information processing. And then he went to Cornell and started talking to Gibson. And he said I was completely wrong. And he, and he wrote a follow up book. So the same thing [01:07:00] happened.

I mean, it's like Gibson's work convinced Neisser to move away from most, not all, to be fair, but most of his earlier ideas. But but the audience of psychologists who read this work are really reluctant to let go of these old ideas. And why? Because they've done hundreds of experiments based on them.

They've built an entire career on them. Yeah, so change is slow. 

Andrea Hiott: And what is so different about the first book and the second book if you had to put it in? Yeah, if you had to say what's the, is it the directness or, 

Harry Heft: uh, no it's mainly that he, instead of the, so earlier on, I talked about ecological optics.

That is to say the information in reflective light. That's where, that's what comes up in the, that's, that's the, 

Andrea Hiott: yeah. 

Harry Heft: In the first book, he's talking about the visual image as largely static. He's, he's still largely talking about the retinal image. Okay. And so we have a, [01:08:00] although that's not completely fair, he tries to break away from it, but it's mostly still tied to the idea that we have a projection of information on our retina.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, I see. So it's it's the vision psychology that you're talking about, that, that sticks to that. Yeah. 

Harry Heft: Yeah. Yeah. And and so if you, if, if listeners know Gibson's work on texture gradients, which is really what was really very famous for, it comes at, and they're still valid, but it comes out of that first book.

But by the second book, he said, nah, forget about that. Because what I did wrong there is I really didn't talk about the active organism. He considered perceiving from largely, not completely, but largely a stationary point of view. But now let's think about individuals, animals moving around in the world.

How does that force us to change our thinking? And that's where the rest proceeds from. 

Andrea Hiott: Wow. It's amazing and I can understand how going so deeply as he did [01:09:00] probably to write that first book that he would be able to then see it differently, it's weird how that happens sometimes that you almost have to completely immerse yourself in what is.

 And then you see, Oh, actually, I don't know if you've had that experience. 

Harry Heft: You're absolutely right. Neisser did the same thing. It's really an act of courage because, you know, you, again, imagine you have this great reputation and we just, and you decide, no, wait a minute. That wasn't right. Let me try again.

That's really remarkable. And it doesn't happen in science very often. 

Andrea Hiott: No, it doesn't. And you've brought up time a lot here, and the time can be unfair in a way because all those ideas are important and making a lot of new, they're starting a lot of new things and have been for a long time.

Your work is one example, right? All that you've opened up because of that. But over time, he doesn't get to see that, so in that moment, it is really brave. But it might also just be a matter of clarity, because if you've really studied deeply, and you know [01:10:00] what you've studied, and you know what you're presenting, you don't have a choice. There's been a lot of scientists and people who've had that experience over time, where they just are like, okay, nobody's going to understand for a while, but got to do it. 

Harry Heft: Yeah, well, I mean, these ideas that led to this newer work were clearly gnawing at him for decades. Because let me explain what I mean by that.

The, the jerk transformation is to think about visual perception as you move through the world. That's, that was, and so in, in the 1930s, he published a book ca basically about how we drive an auto, how we drive a car, what's, what's the world look like when we're driving a car. And, and it's about perceiving over time.

In the 19, during the war, he, he worked for a, a, a division of the Air Force. And the main question was, how do pilots perceive the ground as they're coming in for a landing? [01:11:00] In other words, these problems of perceiving over time were always there, but it, it doesn't really come to fruition until 1966 and then the last book in 1979.

Andrea Hiott: I'm so glad you brought that up. I'd love to read that book about the car. I didn't know about that, but the, is it even out? Is it available anymore? Oh, it's not a book. It's an article. It's an article. Okay. Yeah. And I did know about the flight stuff because I think a lot of that, you can see a lot of that. If you look in the books of. he was really, uh, it's not just a thought experiment, it's, he was trying to understand the way things were happening. 

Harry Heft: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And, and so you, you give me far too much credit by the way, but um, I'm hopefully just trying to cherish. I 

Andrea Hiott: mean, I think, I mean, that papers made a big difference for a lot of people. And you know how much I care about this bridging of of seeming opposites, and that's definitely a really good academic example of [01:12:00] perspective shifting. So, these things matter, it's not just flattery. I just, I really think they matter over time. It's just, sometimes it takes so long for them to really be visible.

Harry Heft: Yeah, well, I mean, what's gratifying to me is that some of my younger colleagues are appreciating it now. I don't think my work was, Given all that much attention for a long time. So that happens. 

Andrea Hiott: Do you feel like you've understood better? I mean, I wanted to ask you why did you want to understand how to make place better for children?

 What, why was that so early? Because even some of your last papers, which I didn't get to talk to, but the ones in the last 10, 15 years where you do really interesting stuff in different collaborations about how children are in their environments or how they make them sustainable. I can't remember all the titles now, but you're still doing it and following through on that.

Where did that come from? And do you feel, how do you feel about that trajectory? [01:13:00] 

Harry Heft: Well, at the very beginning, Earth Day occurred when I was just finishing undergraduate studies. And, and environmental activism was really what people, well, anti, uh, environmental anti war and, and women's rights were But why kids?

Because you were 

Andrea Hiott: a kid still? Or 

Harry Heft: Say that again? Why children? 

Andrea Hiott: Why children? Why You just thought that's where it matters most? 

Harry Heft: Yeah. Because, because the early, what we've known within psychology for a long time is the early years are formative. And and now we, now the notion of brain plasticity is non controversial, but back then it, the thought was our kids kind of born and pre wired to engage the world in certain ways.

And, and, and there's a lot of skepticism at the time. And with the skepticism comes the question, well, do the environments then matter that kids are growing up in? Is it going to affect how they develop? So that's kind of where I [01:14:00] came in, but again I was interested in, well, how can we change, students of the 60s and early 70s is like, well, how can we change things for, to make them better?

And, uh, that went out of fashion for a long time, but it's, I think it's come back. now. So that's kind of where I started. 

Andrea Hiott: Now, do you think that affordances are phenomenological and environmental? I mean, do you think we can change our affordances through kind of attention in the way that we've been discussing?

Or have you seen it happen over the years? All these years, or 

Harry Heft: we can change, well, we, we change affordances all the time because we alter the environment and always happening 

Andrea Hiott: both ways, changes us and we're changing it. And 

Harry Heft: yeah, I mean, all, I mean, the concept that many of your, many people might be familiar with now, which is came up really about 10 years ago is the idea of niche construction that [01:15:00] organisms alter their habitat to better live in them.

All organisms do that. And so do we. And in doing that, what we do is we change the afford, the available affordances of the environment. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: So do you think in thinking about this problem of how we find meaning through perceptual experience, just by putting attention on this and understanding this process that we might, if we try to nest all of this in different ways it is a different kind of world and lived experience of the world.

At least I think of it like that. Do you? Do you connect the work you've been doing and these ideas to those, the bigger place where you started with something like Earth Day , and really trying to think of what self and earth are in a different way to use? Is that too sentimental or? 

Harry Heft: No, because what we haven't mentioned at all in this conversation, which was understandable.

It is what I've done with most of my time in the, over the past 50 years. I spent [01:16:00] 42 years teaching at an undergraduate college. 

Andrea Hiott: The same one since 1976. 

Harry Heft: Exactly. And teaching, and I saw teaching undergraduates is not only teaching some basic things about psychology and so on, but also making them aware of the world we live in, and hoping, hopefully making them more sensitive to the ways in which the environment is changing.

And like, 25 years ago, I had to argue with them to convince them that yeah, the climate's changing. Here's the data. And and, and there's a lot of resistance to climate change for reasons I don't have to go into. And now, 40 years later, uh, of course, it's changing. We've known this all along. Yeah. So teaching, teaching is crucial.

And, and, and in my, my, my role as a teacher, I I tried to inform my students about what what was going on in the world around them. In fact, frankly, [01:17:00] that was more important than teaching them psychology, because, again, they're undergraduates, most of them are not going to go on to have careers in psychology, but there are going to go on to to live as citizens.

In a country and as business people and you know, whatever and having an awareness of the dynamic changes in the environment is positive. So that was really my main commitment. And fortunately, I was able to squeeze everything else in around the corners. 

Andrea Hiott: I'm so glad you, you said that. And I mean, this is love and philosophy, and to me that feels like an act of love, 

I think that Gibson doing what he had to do and changing course is kind of an act of love too, but so many, and I've had a lot of discussions with a lot of famous people over my life, and they almost always end up saying it was one teacher who said one thing that sort of put them on that path so, I mean, yes, your papers are very important. They will pass on and on. And you're passing on the James and the Gibson tradition in a way. But [01:18:00] probably the most important stuff Acts of love that you did, was that right? Going to work every day and teaching and being, being able to kind of transmit that in little small moments.

Harry Heft: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't phrase it that way, but I think that's absolutely accurate. Yeah. I mean, I, I love teaching. I love being in the classroom and and even now that I'm not teaching, I'm, I'm writing every day it, these are acts of love. Be because that's what I do. Yeah, those activities. I mean, I could be doing other activities as acts of love.

I'd be cooking for my family and that would be an act of love, but I'm not a very good cook. I do these things. Those are my acts of love. 

Andrea Hiott: Well, I really appreciate it. And it's meaningful, right? Back to that word meaning and all this perceptual experience. And yeah, I don't, I think it's good to, at times, just call it out for what it is because it matters.

And young people seeing it, it's good to know that as you progress through your career, those are what [01:19:00] Matter, those moments and coming from that place, it might not be teaching, it might be teaching, but whatever it is that feels like that, you know, it still matters over time and space, I guess.

Harry Heft: Yeah, no, I think so. I think so. I mean, I do have students who I've been in contact with over many decades and And hopefully that had some impact on them. I have the impression that it did. So 

Andrea Hiott: it did. I was just with you in Spain and I saw for myself. So 

Harry Heft: yeah, thank you. 

Andrea Hiott: I've witnessed it firsthand, but Well, thank you.

I'll let you go. We already talked a bit over time, and it's been a kind of an intense talk, so I really appreciate you, and I really appreciate your work, and this has just been great, and 

um, 

Harry Heft: Thank you. I've had a great time. 

Andrea Hiott: All right. 

Harry Heft: Take care. I hope we can stay in touch. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, me too. I'd love to talk to you again sometime. There's, you know, you've got such a huge body of work that it's impossible to talk [01:20:00]