The texture of mystery

the long version

Perception theory sits at the heart of all our educational assumptions, whether acknowledged or not. Are we all simply running around like mice in mazes, automatically responding to stimuli? Is learning basically salivating like Pavlov's dog? Or perhaps each of us is solipsistically creating the world as we project the buzzing, blooming flotsam of reality in the theater of our minds. Such descriptions of learning are rooted in Enlightenment assumptions about perception, and are challenged psychologically, philosophically, and theologically in this book. Touring through the works of major theorists in modern western history of perception theory, from Kepler and Descartes through Kant and Hume; through Bretano, James, Dewey, Watson, and the Gestaltists for example, the author describes a set of tensions and competing directions in perception theory. This book relies upon the revolutionary work of James Jerome Gibson and his ecological approach to perception in order to reconstruct some basic assumptions about sensing, knowing, and learning. Instead of a closed system, Gibson's work can be understood as corresponding to an open-systems universe. Learning has to do with how bodily-perceptive systems attend to the inexhaustible and inherently meaningful reality in which we discover ourselves.