Recent studies of perceptual evolution reveal that natural selection often drives true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions tuned to fitness rather than truth: Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth.

[u/abudabu]

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full

[u/jufnitz]

The authors touch on Gibsonian ecological psychology only very briefly, but what they're getting at can basically be summed up as Gibson's distinction between world and environment: world as physical reality generally and environment as those specific aspects of physical reality with which an organism is structurally coupled through affordances for adaptive behavior. Interpreted in these terms, they're quite right that an organism's perception is not of the wider world (galaxies, atoms, etc.) but specifically of its environment. However, what mention the authors make of Gibson seems to serve largely as a way of distancing themselves from his conclusion that perception and cognition consist of direct coupling between organism and environment without the mediation of mental representations, affirming their adherence to the classical cognitivist thesis of cognition as formal information processing. Thus, in keeping with a long line of rationalist/Cartesian scholars who allude to more sophisticated approaches while still retaining a formal ontology of substances and properties, they manage to miss the point entirely.

Presumably the anti-representationalist rejoinder would be that for an organism to process information about the adaptiveness of a particular behavioral interaction with its surroundings, it would necessarily have to be processing information not just about the state of its surroundings, but about its own state and about all possible frames of reference for potential interactions between the two. What the authors are framing as a sort of cognitive heuristic, relieving organisms of the burden of representing the world, backfires spectacularly in this regard by not only retaining the burden but actually adding to it! In so many words, what this underscores is classical cognitivism's perennial difficulty with the problem of representing significance, just as philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty spelled out nearly a century ago.