ABSTRACT
The reaction against 19th-century Anglophone idealism took on two forms in early 20th-century American philosophy: new realism and critical realism. The new realists (Montague, Perry, and Holt) held that everything perceived is real—even illusions and hallucinations. The critical realists (Drake, Santayana, Roy Wood Sellars) insisted that misperception required that sensations causally mediate and guide perception. Wilfrid Sellars drew on both traditions in his call for an “adequately critical direct realism” as alternative to phenomenalism and idealism. I shall argue that James Gibson’s ecological approach to psychology should also be considered a kind of critical direct realism. Though it is widely acknowledged as direct realism (and as a descendant of Holt), it has not been noticed that ecological psychology counts as critical direct realism. This is because Gibson, rejecting a sensation-based theory of perception, shares the Sellarsian idea that perception essentially involves a non-epistemic component that is posited on scientific grounds. The key difference is that Gibson replaces the passivity of sense impressions with active sensitivity to environmental information. However, this is a move that Sellars should have welcomed.
