And that's that. Laudable and vital (though perhaps still a somewhat subtle!) call to arms from Ludger van Dijk.

A recognition that scientific perspective brings to the fore different aspects of the world, and that choice of perspective is not without ethical weight.

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"Perspectives that put materially organized activity inside the head, from experiencing a flame or making inferences to feeling
responsible for the lives of cultures, systematically shift
our attention away from the world at large—away from the very same indeterminate world that may yet afford us ways of improving it. Such a view of psychology risks relegating human responsibility"

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"Conceiving of the world as codetermined in action may
help psychology to foreground the responsibilities that come with the place humans have taken up in the world and the space we hold open for other animals."

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"If we are serious about understanding what “the head
is inside of,” psychology benefits from collaborations with fields that make worldly responsibility visible and show worldly connections across generations or species that psychology currently is not registering (e.g., Tsing, 2015; Van Dooren, 2014)."

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"Precarious and indeterminate features of the world are much harder to, well, determine. But that, I have argued, is no reason to exclude them from our considerations (Costall, 2004;
Dewey, 1958; Van Dijk, 2020). An important implication
going forward is that ecological psychology, and psy-chology in general, cannot afford losing track of the indeterminate aspects of the shared world."

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Affordances are managed and maintained through various social practices...

"Participating in the maintenance of the material organization of grocery stores thus actively contributes to the way one should act there."

I can't help but think that the coordinate disruption of norms in society is a major part of how fascism takes advantage of the openness/vulnerability of our society.

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Openness and vulnerability are complements of one another.

"The downside to this openness is that such a world is also fundamentally exposed. The very open-endedness of affordances that allowed the vultures’ way of life to emerge can also invite the activity that breaks it down (Van Dooren, 2014)."

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A species is a “way of life” (Gibson, 1979, pp.7, 128, 143; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Van Dooren, 2014). These ways of life may well be characterized by...genetic resemblance across generations, morphological or anatomical features, or geographical range. ... But with the ecological approach these characterizations are quantifications derived from the way animals live (Gibson, 1979; Oyama, 2000).

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"Affordances describe the process by which invitations and materiality concurrently take shape. Affordances are then temporal reciprocities in that invitations and materials codetermine each other while also unfolding across different timescales."

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"Species and animals do not interact; that is, a species is not a determinate thing that causes
an animal or vice versa (see Oyama, 2000). Animals and
their species are rather processes that codetermine each other across different timescales. Species and animals are temporally reciprocal. So too, I argue, the world gains a temporally reciprocal structure as it gets infused with life.

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"Having both an individual and species-relative conception makes affordances well suited for focusing on the stabilities of the world: the material resources that are reliably available across generations and the immediate relevance of the individual’s surroundings. Few conceptions, however, have attempted to foreground their more indeterminate, open-ended character. "

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"Stimulus and response are small yet extensive processes unfolding within a larger scale coordinative activity. Neither the two smaller scale processes nor this larger scale coordinative activity is fully determinate at a single point in time. They rather codetermine over time. That is, the stimulus develops as the response develops (Shotter, 1983)."

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There is some discussion of the potency of Darwin's impact on philosophy and psychology, and that the ecological approach is vitally Darwinian.

Van Dijk doesn't cite him here, but I think Eric Charles's piece on this is really good.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2017.1330120

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"The main question this article aims to answer is how to equip psychological science with a perspective that captures the precariousness of life in a world that animals determine together."

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Representationalist accounts of mind:

"Taking the world to be a (hidden) cause of stimulation suggests a view according to which, at any point in time, the world is in a definite state...It is not the world that is uncertain. It is rather *we* who are uncertain about the world."

But:
"A world infused with life is not fully determinate at any point in time but is instead *determining* over time."

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Here's one that has been sitting in the 'to read' folder for way too long. (Of course, the 'to read' folder is about 1GB at this stage....)

van Dijk, L. (2021) Psychology in an indeterminate world. Perpsectives on Psychological Science.16(3), 577-589.

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https://web.archive.org/web/20210529073835/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691620958005