The Agent–Environment Interface: Simon’s Indirect or Gibson’s Direct Coupling?

A fundamental problem for ecological and cognitive psychology alike is to explain how agents are situated, that is, functionally coupled to their environments so as to facilitate adaptive actions. Herbert Simon (1969/1996) argued that such coupling is artifactual (rule governed), being mediated by symbol functions and necessarily involving information processing. An alternative to this computational approach is offered by James Gibson’s (1979/1986) view that the interface is natural (law governed), being a direct informational coupling rather than a symbolically mediated one. This latter view necessarily involves the agent’s awareness, whereas the former, being mechanistic, does not. I review the coupling problem from historical, logical, and semantic perspectives. I give arguments that the computational approach provides an inadequate account of situated adaptive actions and founders on the symbol grounding problem, whereas the ecological approach does a better job on both. Personal comments are interspersed throughout, providing an autobiographical perspective on issues germane to these topics.