Abstract

In one common view, human activity is explained by neural processes, because these implement psychological functions that underlie overt behavior. In the ecological approach, such accounts are taken to be nonexplanatory, because they reify the phenomena they wish to explain. We argue that ecological psychology offers an antidote to such reification with concepts such as resonance, attunement, and anticipation, if they are considered as relational, world-involving activities. Our main claim is that we can understand our scientific explanations of neural phenomena as itself an attunement to sociomaterial practices. This allows us to understand neuroscientific processes as conditions that enable a resonating organism-environment system. In this view, neuroscientific and psychological phenomena are usually found in widely different sociomaterial practices. But we can occasionally achieve coordination between those practices. Establishing that a dependence of a psychological phenomenon on neural events holds is an achievement of a novel practice that we developed and to which we resonate. Thus the more we want to understand what happens inside the nervous system, the more we also need to scrutinize the sociomaterial environment in which we do so.

摘要

在一种普遍的观点中，人类活动是由神经过程来解释的，因为这些过程执行着明显行为的心理功能。在生态学方法中，这种考虑被认为是非解释性的，因为它们使他们希望解释的现象得以证实。我们认为，如果生态心理学被认为是与世界相关的关系活动，那么它们就可以通过共振，协调和期待等概念为这种改造提供解毒剂。我们的主要主张是，我们可以将我们对神经现象的科学解释理解为对社会物质实践的一种调和。这使我们能够将神经科学过程理解为使生物与环境系统产生共振的条件。根据这种观点，神经科学和心理现象通常存在于广泛不同的社会物质实践中。但是我们有时可以在这些实践之间达成协调。建立一种心理现象对神经事件的依存关系，是对我们开发并引起共鸣的一种新颖实践的成就。因此，我们越想了解神经系统内部发生的事情，我们也就越需要仔细研究这样做的社会物质环境。