ABSTRACT
James J. Gibson’s Senses is a functional approach to perception, but equally, it is an evolutionary approach. The central theoretical concept of Gibson’s Senses is the perceptual system. Gibson’s evolutionary approach to vision is emphatically antianthropomorphic. Gibson’s starting point in the Senses is an ecological description of the environment; it is ecological because the environment is understood relative to animals. Perception is functionally distinguished from proprioception for perception is knowledge of the environment. Gibson distinguishes five basic perceptual systems: The orienting, auditory, haptic, taste-smell, and visual systems. Turning to the auditory system, the sense organs are the ears, but the perceptual system involves the muscles of the neck that orient the head toward sounds. Besides the anatomical overlap of perceptual systems, there also exists functional overlap. There exist “natural specificities” for shape, texture, or location that can be registered through either the visual or haptic systems.
