# \]J. Speer

**URL:** <http://discourse.iapct.org/t/j-speer/12914>\
**Category:** CSG1994\
**Created:** [April 10, 1994, 10:58pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/j-speer/12914 "1994-04-10T22:58:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![AveryAndrews](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/779978/32.png) [@AveryAndrews](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/AveryAndrews)\
**Post date:** [April 10, 1994, 10:58pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/j-speer/12914/1 "1994-04-10T22:58:44Z")

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I've been silent on csgnet due to having to do 13 years worth of house  
maintenance in about three months, but I couldn't resist taking a  
poke at Speer on sci.cog:

....

\>\> From what I have been told, his theory seems to bear relations to Gibson's  
\>\> (1979) concept of "affordances", Ballard's (1991) animate vision paradigm and  
\>\> Heidegger's concept of "Dasein" (cf. Chapman, 1990).  
\>  
\>If you're looking for CLOSE relations to the foregoing theories / ideas, I  
\>think you're in for a disappointment. Powers' view, I have always thought, is  
\>insufficiently constrained to count as a theory. A "meta-theory" or research  
\>program, perhaps.

Do you think that Power's approach is less constrained that Gibson's or  
Chapman's? (I'm not familiar with Ballard's). It seems to me that the  
reverse is true: Chapman & Gibson tell you to look for dynamics and  
relationships between the organism and its environment, while Powers tells  
you more about what kinds of dynamics and and relationships to look for:  
organism/environment relationships that don't change in the presence  
of events that would lead you to expect them to change (one tries  
to pour the the tadpole out of the jar, but it turns and swims against  
the current and stays in), and the dynamics of feedback systems controlling  
these surprisingly constant relationships.

Perhaps these directions will prove to be not particularly useful, but I'd  
see this as an issue of true vs. false, rather than unconstrainedness.

Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au