¹ See Gibson, James J., The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1986)Google Scholar, and Lewontin, Richard C., Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993)Google Scholar. Bateson, Gregory's application of ecological ideas to the interpretation of human psychology in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972)Google Scholar also has substantial overlap with my own analysis.

² This is important when considering Stuhr's question whether the practices of the hockey goalie can be adequately analyzed using the notion of immanent norms (about which, see below). Stuhr's analysis of the goalie's situation treats him as responding to various things under the public definition of those things; looked at in this way, Stuhr can indeed make a case for the role of external norms. Within the goalie's experience, however, things are not engaged under their public definition, but under their definition within his particular “system” of experience. This means (1) things have meanings embedded in them that can be quite at odds with the public interpretation of those things, and (2) these things do not have strictly separate identities, but are more or less systematically and more or less hierarchically integrated into the goalie's more or less total orientation to his world. A norm which appears external to the publicly defined thing in isolation can very well be immanent to the goalie's overall world-orientation. This notion of the contextualized definition of the thing-insituation also speaks to Christman's concern about the notion of objects as repositories of memory. While it may be true that the publicly defined thing, or the thing construed as a metaphysically isolated and independent thing-initself, is not informed by memory, the thing-in-situation has its very identity as a reflection of our values. It is this thing—the thing as I experience it—that is a repository of memory.

³ Plato, , Republic, 6.510c–511c.Google Scholar

⁴ An excellent discussion of this notion of philosophy is Kates, Joshua, Essential History: Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 1.Google Scholar

⁵ Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. chap. 2Google Scholar. See also Noë, Alva and O'Regan, J. Kevin, “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness” (The Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 24, 5 [2001]: 939–73)Google Scholar, for an especially strong argument for the rootedness of “knowing-that” in practical “knowing-how,” here at the level of developing the skill of coherent vision.

⁶ Piaget's classic studies of childhood development offer rich material for these notions. A corrective to Piaget's overarching conceptual/intellectualist interpretation in these studies is found throughout Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception, (translated by Smith, Colin [London: Routledge, 1962])Google Scholar, and Gibson, , An Ecological Approach to Visual PerceptionGoogle Scholar. On the idea that we learn how to interpret ourselves as functioning agents within our environment through the process of learning a language, see Cablitz, Gabriele, “The Acquistion of an Absolute System: Learning to Talk About Space in Marquesan,” in The Proceedings of the Thirty-First Stanford Child Language Research Forum (Space in Language: Location, Motion, Path, and Manner), http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/CLRF/2002/Pp_40-49,_CABLITZ.pdf (2002; accessed 02 16, 2004)Google Scholar; Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen, “Frames of Spatial Reference and Their Acquisition in Tenejapan Tzeltal,” in Culture, Thought and Development, edited by Nucci, L., Saxe, G., and Mahway, E. Turiel (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), pp. 167–97Google Scholar; and Mishra, Ramesh, Dasen, Pierre, and Niraula, Shanta, “Ecology, Language and Performance on Spatial Cognitive Tasks,” The International Journal of Psychology, 38, 6 (2003): 366–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ The notion that our body provides us with “schemas” for basic tasks through which, by “assimilation” and “accommodation,” we are able to adapt ourselves to higher-order tasks is central to Piaget's “genetic epistemology.” In Human Experience I emphasize this “upward mobility” of our behavioural schemas—I call this the “self-transcendence” of our bodily capacities. These schemas, however, by providing the matrix within which higher tasks become possible, also leave their mark on our approach to those higher tasks, and this I call the “figured” character of bodily learning. Morris, in his contribution, has an excellent explanation of my use of this term. On the role of our bodily capacities in opening up the possibilities for meaningful engagement with the world, and especially for the crucial, and “figured,” role of habituation in the development of these powers, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's use of Aleksandr Luria's notion of “kinetic melodies” in her “Kinaesthetic Memory” (Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 7, 1, [2003]: 69–92)Google Scholar. In Human Experience, I especially stress the role of intersubjective “couplings” in the formation of our sense of personal agency, and I study in particular the crucial role of the family for the development of the sense of oneself as a personal agent. My interpretation of the family as a formative matrix for personality fits well with the work of Salvador Minuchin. See especially Minuchin, Salvador, Rosman, Bernice L., and Baker, Lester, Psychosomatic Families: Anorexia Nervosa in Context (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an exemplary study. Compare Leder, Drew, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar, on the way our interpersonal relationships manifest themselves in our bodily comportment.

⁸ Stuhr, citing the Oxford English Dictionary, wonders about the source of my definition of neurosis. I have tried to define neurosis in a way that is in keeping with mainstream psychological discourse about this notion throughout the twentieth century. In that sense it is surely true that my definition is interpretive, but I think it is not unusual. The OED does not seem to me appropriately authoritative for such a technical notion; nor have I turned to DSM-IV-TR as an authority here because of the significant theoretical bias that has shaped its revisions since 1980 (see Wilson, Mitchell, “DSM-III and the Transformation of American Psychiatry: A History,” The American Journal of Psychiatry, 150, 3 [03 1993]: 399–410).Google ScholarPubMed

⁹ Fragment #51 in the Diels-Kranz numbering system.