In this paper I claim that perceptual discriminatory skills rely on a suitable type of environment as an enabling condition for their exercise. This is because of the constitutive connection between environment and perceptual discriminatory skills, inasmuch as such connection is construed from an ecological approach. The exercise of a discriminatory skill yields knowledge of affordances of objects, properties, or events in the surrounding environment. This is practical knowledge in the first-person perspective. An organism learns to perceive an object by becoming sensitized to its affordances. I call this position ecological disjunctivism. A corollary of this position is that a case of perception and its corresponding case of hallucination—which is similar to the former only in some respects—are different in nature. I show then how the distinguishability problem is addressed by ecological disjunctivism.

Este trabalho apresenta o legado deixado pelo professor e pesquisador Daniel Hogan (1942-2010) para o campo de estudos interdisciplinares, sobretudo no campo de população e ambiente. Os dados encontrados na pesquisa bibliográfica e documental indireta de trabalhos de sua autoria e de seus alunos e colegas, nos depoimentos pessoais, em análises bibliométricas e de genealogia acadêmica, além de observações diretas e participantes registradas em cadernos e diários, nos quais foram coletadas memórias e impressões acerca dos ensinamentos de Hogan, subsidiaram este trabalho. Trata-se de um recorte da trajetória acadêmica e pessoal, mostrando que Hogan foi um semeador de ideias e instituições, formou e influenciou gerações de pesquisadores, cultivou o diálogo e a empatia com seus colegas, trabalhando na fronteira da interdisciplinaridade e alinhado com os debates internacionais. Concluímos que o legado dele permanece vivo, mesmo depois de 10 anos de sua partida, e que os herdeiros intelectuais podem contribuir para perpetuar esse legado.

Entrevista com Eros Carvalho por Christiane Costa M. Fernandes, Deborah Moreira Guimarães, Taciane Alves da Silva e Fábio Candido dos Santos.

Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve her intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view and by showing how direct learning, seen as instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity.