Ecological perspectivism: understanding perspectival realism through ecological psychology

Perspectival realism claims that scientific knowledge is always situated into a vantage point. We argue that ecological psychology offers a suitable framework to develop perspectival epistemologies. Ecological psychology stresses that perception is focused on affordances, i.e. the possibilities of interactions afforded by reality given the abilities of an organism. We call the integrating view as ecological perspectivism. It claims that science offers knowledge of reality in terms of affordances, which are relational to the instruments and abilities of scientific communities. Cognition is of affordances, and what a domain affords for scientists depends on which skills and technologies they avail. We connect this proposal with the main arguments for perspectivism. First, regarding instrumental detections, ecological perspectivism offers a realist account of perception that treats the use of instruments as tools that scaffold and extend embodied cognition. Second, regarding model pluralism, ecological perspectivism supports an artifactualist account of modelling as embodied cognition extended by tools. Such tools can be representational by receiving semantic interpretations that associate them with targets through the use of linguistic skills. Third, we promote Michella Massimi’s account of Natural Kinds with a Human Face. It treats kinds as open-ended groupings of phenomena with salient nomological dependencies. However, ecological perspectivism suggests that the realist content of scientific perspectives must be cashed out in terms of affordances, thereby reinterpreting the metaphysical notion of ‘phenomena’.