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Acting in a populated environment: An ecological realist enquiry into speaking and collaborating Ed Baggs I V N E R U S E I T H Y T O H F G E R D I N B U Doctor of Philosophy Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation School of Informatics University of Edinburgh 2015 Abstract The thesis seeks to develop an account of collaborative activities within the framework of ecological realism—an approach to psychology developed by James J. Gibson in the course of work on visual perception. Two main questions are addressed; one onto- logical, and one methodological. The ontological question is: given that collaborative activities take place within an environment, what kinds of structure must this envi- ronment contain? The response emphasizes the importance of relations which exist between entities, and which connect a given perceiver-actor with the other objects and individuals in its surroundings, and with the relations between those entities. It is held that activities take place within a field of relations. This description draws on the radi- cal empiricist doctrine that relations are real, are external, and are directly perceivable. The present proposal insists that, in addition to being directly perceivable, relations can also be directly acted upon: throwing a ball for a dog is acting on a relation between dog and ball in space. The relational field account of collaboration naturally extends to an account of speaking: people, through their history of acting in an environment populated by other speakers, come to stand in a set of relations with objects and events around them, and these relations can be directly acted upon by others through the use of verbal actions. Verbal actions serve to direct the attention of others to relevant as- pects of the environment, and this allows us as speakers to coordinate and manage one another’s activity. The methodological question is this: granting that the environment may be struc- tured as a field of relations, how are we to conduct our empirical investigations, such that we can ask precise questions which lead to useful insights about how a given collaborative activity is carried out in practice? The central issue here concerns the concept of the task. Psychologists are in the habit of using this term quite loosely, to denote the actions of an individual or a group, in a laboratory or outside. This creates confusion in discussions of collaborative phenomena: who is the agent of a ‘collabo- rative task’? The definition offered here states that a task is a researcher-defined unit of study that corresponds to a change in the structure of the environment that has a characteristic pattern and that is meaningful from the first-person perspective of a par- ticular actor. On this definition, the task is a tool that allows ecological psychologists to carve up the problem space into specific, tractable questions; the task is the equivalent i of the cognitivist’s mental module. Task-oriented psychology encourages us to ask the question: which specific resources is the individual making use of in controlling this particular activity? The methodology is developed through an examination of the alarm calling be- haviour of vervet monkeys, which is explained in terms of actions on the relational field, and through an analysis of corpus data from a laboratory-based collaborative as- sembly game. The relational field model promises to provide a way of studying social and collaborative activities on ecological realist principles. The concluding chapter identifies two particular areas in which the model might fruitfully be developed: in the study of learning, and in the theory of designing objects and spaces for interaction. ii Lay summary The thesis attempts to develop an account of how some animals, including hu- mans, are able to engage in activities together. I approach this question not by asking about features of the actors’ brains, but by noting that the environment surrounding a given individual is populated with other actors, and by seeking relevant features of that environment that may support action. I outline, first, a scheme for describing the environment surrounding a given actor, and, second, a methodological programme for studying the behaviour of actors in populated environments. In the descriptive part, the environment is conceived as a richly structured network of relations in which the intentions of one’s fellow actors can be perceived over time in the unfolding of the activities in which those actors are engaged. I use this scheme to outline an account of language learning in which young children learn to speak by first attending to the consequences of the sounds that they themselves make, and specifically to the effects of those sounds on the behaviour of other actors in the child’s environment. I relate this account to existing research on spoken dialogue. The methodological part of the thesis proposes that in order to study behaviour in complex multi-actor settings it is first necessary to clarify the notion of the ‘task’. I propose that a task is a unit that is defined by a researcher for the purpose of being able to study it. A task involves a reproducible structured pattern that appears in the environment of an actor and that is meaningful to that actor. On this definition, the task is a tool that allows psychologists to carve up the overall problem space into smaller, more manageable units. It allows us to ask not, ‘What explains the actor’s behaviour in general?’ but ‘What precise structure is the actor using to control this particular action in this specific context?’ I identify two particular areas where the model developed might be fruitfully applied. First, in education, where learning can be understood in terms of a learner’s developing ability to make use of structure inherent to a particular, well-defined task. And second, in design, where user experience can be understood in terms of the task structure that arises whenever the actor tries to achieve some particular outcome (e.g., the experience of vehicles approaching from a distance that arises when a pedestrian attempts to cross a road). iii Declaration I declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is my own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified. (Ed Baggs) iv Table of Contents Prefacex Acknowledgements xiii I Ontology: how is a populated environment structured?1 1 A brief introduction to ecological realism2 1.1 The ecological approach to perceiving and acting........... 3 1.1.1 The animal-specific environment v. the physical world.... 4 1.1.2 The concept of the invariant.................. 5 1.1.3 Ecological optics v. physical optics .............. 8 1.1.4 The concept of information................... 10 1.1.5 The concept of affordances................... 11 1.1.6 The role of learning: the doctrine of the new ball . 13 1.2 The radical empiricist ontology..................... 15 1.2.1 The reality of relations..................... 17 1.2.2 The animal in a field of relations................ 18 1.2.3 The animal as a builder of its environment........... 19 1.3 Summary ................................ 21 2 Ecological realism socialized: Acting in a populated environment 22 2.1 Against ‘joint action’.......................... 23 2.2 Acting in a populated environment................... 26 2.2.1 Soccer.............................. 26 2.2.2 Chimpanzee pack hunting ................... 28 v 2.3 Growing into one’s environment: lessons from Holt and Vygotsky . 30 2.3.1 Holt and the recession of the stimulus............. 30 2.3.2 Vygotsky and the zone of proximal development . 32 2.4 Summary ................................ 34 3 An ecological realist guide to speaking 35 3.1 Does ‘language’ exist? ......................... 37 3.2 Reconciling speaking and ecological realism.............. 39 3.3 Speaking as acting on the relational field................ 45 3.3.1 Action controlled with reference to relations.......... 48 3.3.2 Hearing: acting or being acted upon? ............. 49 3.4 An outline of a theory of language learning .............. 51 3.5 Putting the relational field model of language to work......... 57 3.6 Postscript: Columbus crosses the ocean ................ 57 II Methodology: studying activity in a populated environ- ment 60 4 The task-oriented approach in psychology 61 4.1 The task as an epistemological device ................. 63 4.2 The acting animal and the task-seeking psychologist.......... 65 4.3 The task as a reconfiguration of resources............... 66 4.4 Acting with other actors......................... 68 4.5 Rationale for the task-oriented approach................ 70 4.6 Final definition: what is a task?..................... 72 5 A relational field–based account of referential communication games 75 5.1 The structure of referential communication games........... 78 5.1.1 The extended conduit model.................. 79 5.1.2 The field model......................... 85 5.1.3 A note on roles and repertoires................