Title: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Science {1}
Headings: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Science
An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Science
John T. Sanders
Polish Academy of Sciences
The Ecological Approach
Materialism
Why, Then?
The Brain as Controlling the Body
Conclusion: Organisms in Their Environments
References
Footnotes

Content: Much better, surely, to avoid such labels. The term "analytic" really does have a heritage that is opposed, with one degree of severity or another, to "holistic" approaches. That this problem deserves some attention, when thinkers on one side of the philosophical aisle are tempted to throw bricks at those on the other side, is demonstrated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be any contradiction in the expression "holistic analysis." In this context, anyway, the word "analysis" appears to be doing something like the modest work envisioned in our graduate student conclusions about our own noble selves: it invokes not the idea of any particular method of attack (the word "holistic" fleshes that out a bit), but rather just the idea that the work that is going to be done will be done carefully, or in detail, or something like that. [9] In any case, "ecological" approaches are like "holistic" approaches in that they urge (at the very minimum) that it is relatively more important to look at entire systems than to take those systems apart and look at the pieces. The difference between "ecological" and "holistic" approaches varies among the thinkers who are inclined to deploy such terms. They can be used in such a way as to be interchangeable. I personally prefer to use the term "ecological" to describe the approach I recommend for two reasons. [10] First, I like it because it seems to me to emphasize the importance of understanding the larger "wholes" that are to be looked at as being dynamic, as changing.