ABSTRACT
Representationalism has become identified with the new cognitivism, along with its computer analogies. Representationalism has also been subject to serious criticism over a similarly long period. The primary purpose of James Gibson's work was to challenge just one of the main justifications for representationalism, the supposed "poverty of the stimulus." Gibson's ambivalence about his "intellectual debts" also applied to E. B. Holt, who had taught Gibson at Princeton in the late 1920s. Gibson, like Holt, was a leading member of the twentieth-century psychology's "awkward squad." Holt could understand the attractions of dualism: Dualism is ever a compromise. Holt went on to point out that the apparent advantage of representationalism in explaining misperception is entirely spurious, simply because it is unable to explain anything else. Despite the combative tone of Gibson's writings, representationalism, as such, is seldom the target of his polemics.
