Abstract

Agency, the ability to negotiate one’s surroundings to bring about changes, is the defining feature of animacy. Because agency is embodied in each individual’s self, inquiry into agency is necessarily an inquiry into selfhood. William James divided selfhood into the self as “I” and the self as “me” with the I self being, in essence, an active agent responsible for thoughts and actions. In Gibson’s ecological paradigm, self plays a central role, being co-perceived with the environment. Neisser (1988 Neisser, U. (1988). Five kinds of self-knowledge. Philosophical Psychology, 1(1), 35–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515088808572924[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), an advocate of Gibson, classified self via 5 different forms of self–knowledge, each portraying a different aspect of self. Of these, the ecological self is an agent that regulates its encounters with the surroundings based on affordances the environment offers, whereas the interpersonal self is an agent that interacts with conspecifics based on the mutual affordances their interactions offer. For interpersonal selves to interact effectively with each other necessitates that their shared environment becomes common knowledge to all participants, based on information determined in accordance with the principle of ecological optics (in particular, information about occluding edges, reversible occlusion, and opaque and non-opaque substances). We suggest that Gibson’s principles of ecological optics be extended to the social domain, as he envisioned.

摘要

能动性，即通过协商周围环境来带来变化的能力，是活力的决定性特征。因为能动性体现在每个人的自我中，所以对能动性的探究必然是对自我的探究。威廉·詹姆斯将自我分为作为“我”的自我和作为“我”的自我，“我”本质上是一个对思想和行动负责的积极代理人。在吉布森的生态范式中，自我起着核心作用，与环境共同感知。奈瑟（1988 奈瑟，U.（1988）。五种自知之明。哲学心理学，1 (1), 35 – 59。https://doi.org/10.1080/09515088808572924 [Taylor & Francis Online]  , [Google Scholar]），吉布森的倡导者，通过 5 种不同形式的自我知识对自我进行分类，每种形式都描绘了自我的不同方面。其中，生态自我是一个根据可供性环境所提供的，而人际自我是一个根据同种人的互动所提供的相互可供性与同种人进行互动的代理人。为了使人与人之间有效地互动，他们的共享环境必须成为所有参与者的共同知识，基于根据生态光学原理确定的信息（特别是关于遮挡边缘、可逆遮挡以及不透明和非透明物质的信息）。我们建议将吉布森的生态光学原理扩展到社会领域，正如他所设想的那样。