Searching for rightness: Ecological perspectives on realizing values in acting and perceiving

The problem of animate action

What explains animate action—musicians playing together, a mother carrying her child, birds flocking and roosting, a grandfather chopping wood, a mouse scampering into a crevice? These and countless other actions seem to be marked by skill and purpose. How are they to be explained? The distinguished ecological psychologist Michael Turvey once remarked that what got him interested in psychology was thinking about a footballer in action. How does one get one’s head or foot (i.e., the right body part) to the right place at the right time headed in the right direction, striking the ball with the right force to send it to the right place (e.g., a teammate, the goal). From this perspective, perceiving and acting appear to be a set of sensitivities and skills aimed at rightness. Being a good player means being right in one’s actions a preponderance of the time. No player, of course, is right all the time. The question that Turvey (1990, 2019) came to focus on, following Gibson’s (1966) lead, was whether there were ecological laws of perceiving and acting that might help to explain how such actions were reliable skills and not just lucky happenstance.

It is one thing to observe that all kinds of everyday actions, including those in sports, are aimed at being right. But what is meant by being right? Even in a game, answering such a question gets complicated quickly: Being right cannot be reduced to running fast while dribbling the ball, or following the rules, or scoring a goal, or being a “good sport.” This paper is an exploration of various ways in which rightness has been characterized. Its central argument is that the search for rightness is best framed in terms of values, and the meanings that point to values, being realized. First, a cognitive and an ecological approach are briefly described, followed by three ecological approaches that highlight the importance of values. The third of these, ecological values-realizing theory, is described and illustrated in three different contexts. Second, the paper considers whether biological processes or physical laws can account for rightness, such that psychological accounts of meaning and values become unnecessary. Finally, questions of how values, laws, goals, and rules relate to each other and how agency is central to the question of rightness are addressed.

Approaching rightness

Psychologists do not often speak of rightness explicitly, although sometimes they do. In proposing an evolutionary theory of remembering, Klein et al. (2002, p. 306) claimed that a memory system would be useless “without search engines that can search for and retrieve the right information, supplying it to the right decision rule at the right time [emphases added].” But what do they mean by “right”? They frame it in evolutionary terms: “Memory evolved to supply useful, timely information to the organism’s decision-making systems. Therefore, decision rules, multiple memory systems, and the search engines that link them should have coevolved to mesh in a coadapted, functionally interlocking way” (Klein et al., p. 306). They cite Tulving (1995) to summarize the case: “Owners of biological memory systems are capable of behaving more appropriately at a later time because of their experiences at an earlier time” (p. 751). Their account suggests that to be right is to be useful, timely, informed, decisive, coadapted, functional, and interlocking. Overall, rightness is defined by acting appropriately over time. All these ways of describing rightness would, presumably, find their meaning within a larger evolutionary account of adaptive development.

Warren (2006) approaches the issue, not in terms of rightness per se, but in terms of organization. He asks how “animals can generate behavioral patterns that are tightly coordinated with the environment, in the service of achieving a specific goal” (p. 358) Thus, he notes that actions are patterned, coordinated, and goal-directed. Rather than looking to biology or developmental history alone to explore how behavior can be stable and flexible, he searches for ecological laws that distribute the control of actions across the entire animal-environment system.

Biology capitalizes on the regularities of the entire system as a means of ordering behavior. Specifically, the structure and physics of the environment, the biomechanics of the body, perceptual information about the state of the agent–environment system, and the demands of the task all serve to constrain the behavioral outcome. Adaptive behavior, rather than being imposed by a preexisting structure, emerges from this confluence of constraints under the boundary condition of a particular task or goal. (Warren, 2006, p. 358)

For Warren, the rightness of behavior emerges from physical, biological, and psychological regularities, given that the animate agent has a goal or a task. Central to his account is how perceptual information allows the interlocking of the physical structure of the environment and the biomechanics of the body so that action is controlled to be appropriate to achieving the goal. However, he observes that an animate agent, while stabilizing its goal-directed activity, must also use perceptual information to maintain flexibility (Warren, 2006, pp. 369–370). Rightness appears to require balancing stability and instability, or goal-directedness and openness. Actions can be appropriate only because the physics, biology, and psychology work together as a self-organizing dynamical system, but this ecological account depends on agent-environment systems being goal-directed.

The account of rightness in Klein et al. (2002) suggests that a biological account may lie behind and explain how memory functions can contribute to appropriate actions. Warren’s (2006) account does not ignore biology but focuses on ecological laws and how skilled actions can emerge in goal-directed tasks under the guidance of perceptual information. In both cases, it appears that the rightness of actions needs be mapped onto a set of coordinates that are large-scale, evolution-long in one case, and ecosystem-wide in the other. This is an important insight, but it raises questions: Is rightness determined by biological processes? Is it a byproduct of physical and ecological laws controlling biomechanics under the constraint of well-defined goals and tasks?

Before exploring these specific questions further, it is worth considering another approach to the question of rightness (e.g., organization, coordination, directedness, stability and flexibility, appropriateness, functionality). It too emerges from ecological psychology, but it differs from Warren’s account in some ways, as well as differing from Klein et al.’s cognitive evolutionary conjectures. Its focus is on meaning and value, and it is the approach that will be highlighted in the remainder of this article. The surprise, at least for some, is that Gibson (1966, 1979) himself sometimes took this approach to the question of how acting and perceiving can be right.

A psychology of meaning and value

One of the simplest and most dramatic ways in which Gibson’s (1966, 1979) approach to perceiving and acting differed from other approaches was his focus on how sensitive and skilled ordinary actions were (e.g., threading a needle, driving a vehicle). Mostly, perceiving and acting seemed to be characterized by rightness; they were functional. This led Gibson eventually to shift from seeing perception as a response to stimulation to seeing it as an exploratory hunt for information that provided meaningful guidance for engaging in effective actions. Perceiving and acting were about seeking meaning and value, or “how do we see what things are good for?” (Gibson, 1979, p. 1).

In his biography, Reed (1988, p. 55) characterizes Gibson’s early views about motivation and values as follows:

The meaningful things in the world are both subjective and objective . . . Human action is motivated by values whose source lies outside the individual, values as basic as food or sex and as abstract as freedom. It is true that these values can be internalized through action, but the fact that we must act in order to use any value shows that values are as much without as within.

Near the end of his life in an interview, Gibson himself characterized his work in terms of values. “I have been moving toward a psychology of values instead of a psychology of stimulus” (Locker, 1980, as cited in Reed, 1988, p. 296). He did not offer theoretical statements about values, but he did propose that what animate agents perceive and realize through their actions are affordances, stating that he “coined this word as a substitute for values” (Gibson, 1966, p. 285). Affordances, he later described as what the environment provides or offers for “good or ill” (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). What he meant by proposing that animate agents perceive values becomes clearer in his descriptions of perceptual activity, as illustrated in the following statements (Gibson, 1979):

Perception needs to be both comprehensive and clear. The visual system hunts for comprehension and clarity. It does not rest until the invariants are extracted. Exploring and optimizing seem to be the functions of the system. (p. 219)

Knowledge of the environment, surely, develops as perception develops, extends as the observers travel, gets finer as they learn to scrutinize, gets longer as they apprehend more events, gets fuller as they see more objects, and gets richer as they notice more affordances. (p. 253)

Perceiving gets wider and finer, and longer and richer and fuller as the observer explores the environment. (p. 255)

A perception, in fact, does not have an end. Perceiving goes on. (p. 253)

A perceiver can keep on noticing facts about the world she lives in to the end of her life without ever reaching a limit. (p. 243)

Gibson’s characterizations are interesting. Perceiving is something that hunts, explores, and develops, always working to improve its grasp of reality. Values do not seem to be goals that can be achieved. Rather they are described as ongoing commitments or responsibilities—clarifying, comprehending, extending to become wider, finer, richer, fuller—all relational terms that are taken to be valuable (i.e., good) for knowing. Within the exploring and hunting, there is the search for invariants, the stable relations that emerge from the constantly changing actions involved in comprehending and clarifying. Reed’s (1988) description indicates that the values sought can range from freedom to food, and Gibson (1966, p. 271) explicitly notes that clarity is a value.

Gibson’s descriptions are intriguing but limited. Reed (1996a), in his own attempt to map out an ecological approach to psychology, claimed that a natural science of psychology needed to make meaning and value central to the enterprise. Acting and perceiving were to be understood as the “effort after value and meaning,” where values and meanings were understood as external, not internal, and which were not “shaped by either heredity or experience” but were “ecological” (Reed, 1996a, p. 101). Reed thinks that these efforts after meaning and value apply to all animate beings, but he notes that the seeking, searching, and striving (all terms he uses) are not guaranteed to succeed. Psychology, he proposed, should be the study of how animals encounter their surroundings and alter their relation to them, so that those encounters are regulated. This is similar to Warren’s (2006) focus on organization and coordination in characterizing rightness, and it generally fits an adaptationist approach. The regulation of these encounters emerges from each species member engaging in efforts to use the affordances of its niche (i.e., way of life), and to be able to do that, it hunts for information that points to those affordances. Meaning is seeking information; value is realizing affordances. Neither meaning nor value are imposed on animate agents; meaning, value, and regulation of encounters are not forced or caused. Finally, Reed observes that humans and perhaps some other social animals have created new layers of meaning and value; they have created affordances that allow for new forms of cooperation and competition, making the search for rightness more complex and the need for coordination more pressing.

Reed’s (1996a) book describing his approach to ecological psychology has been widely cited, especially among ecological researchers; nevertheless, his attempt to place values and meanings at the center of an ecological account has received little attention. Bruineberg et al. (2024) argue that there have been at least three different strands of ecological theory and research that have their roots in Gibson’s (1966, 1979) work: the physical, the biological, and the social. Reed’s (1996a) work, whose views were deeply influenced by Darwin as well as Gibson, they place within the biological strand of ecological theorizing. Warren (2006), they see as standing in the physical tradition with its emphasis on physical laws and self-organizing dynamics to explain regularity and coordination. The view to be considered next, ecological values-realizing theory (Hodges & Baron, 1992), they locate in the social stream of ecological theory and research. This third view shares the focus on meaning and value that appears in Reed and in Gibson, but it characterizes values differently, and it reframes Warren’s goal-directed approach.

Ecological values-realizing theory

Hodges and Baron (1992) sketched an ecological account of values that was intended to expand and elaborate Gibson’s (1979) limited statements about values and affordances, and to address epistemological and ethical issues that emerge in social and developmental contexts that others had noted (e.g., Costall & Still, 1989; Heft, 1989; Martin et al., 1987; Reed, 1988). It considered how perceiving and acting could be right (e.g., appropriate, coordinated, directed), and how values and affordances related. The account has since been developed and applied in a wide variety of empirical and theoretical contexts, such as perception-action tasks (Hodges, 2007b; Hodges & Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2022), social conformity and dissent (e.g., Hodges & Geyer, 2006; Hodges et al., 2014), language (e.g., Hodges, 2009, 2014b), development and imitation (Hodges, 2014a, 2017b), judgment and reasoning (Hodges, 2019), and evolution and agency (Hodges, 2017a, 2023b). Selected aspects of the theory are described and illustrated in what follows; additional aspects of the theory are addressed elsewhere (e.g., Hodges, 2023a; 2023b; Hodges & Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2022).

Values are often taken to be beliefs people have about what they think is important and desirable, or ideals they admire or consciously pursue (e.g., Schwartz, 2016). Sometimes these are taken to be personal preferences (“my values”) and sometimes they are seen as cultural norms (“the way we do things”) (Gavrilets & Richerson, 2017). Some scientists have taken values to be properties of environmental objects or events (Reed, 1996a) or biological biases tied to inclusive fitness (Michod, 1993). The ecological values-realizing approach to what values are and where they may be found differs from all of these. Rather than begin with abstract theoretical descriptions, consider a familiar activity, driving a vehicle.

What makes for good driving; how is it done rightly? Simply managing to maneuver a vehicle from A to B, while following traffic rules, and not crashing the vehicle does not define good driving. Achieving a goal, following rules, and not ignoring physical laws is not enough. Driving a vehicle is constrained and guided by an array of values that are ontologically real, ecological demands that are physical, social, and moral. They include accuracy, tolerance, speed, freedom, comfort, equality, justice, trust, stability, flexibility, economy, efficiency, among others (Hodges, 2007b; Hodges & Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2022). Vehicles must be free to move quickly, comfortably, and accurately, passing close to but not too close to many other vehicles. Drivers are required to treat others justly and to realize that generally all vehicles have equal rights to the road. They must also trust all the parties who structured and maintain the roadways and vehicles—who were constrained to be as economical and efficient as possible—to have carried out their responsibilities with competence and care. Driving demands that actions be stable and reliable, but constantly flexible, ready for any eventuality. Thus, values define and evaluate all aspects of the system: from the design of vehicles, roadways, and signaling systems, to the practices of drivers and those who train them, to the behavior of other animate beings whose pathways cross those of vehicles.

Good driving is defined by the joint realization of all the values. The hypothesis of ecological values-realizing theory is that all the values work together as a self-organizing community of constraints, such that each of the values depends on all the others for its realization. No single value and no fixed hierarchy of values can define good driving. Safety depends on accuracy, flexibility, and justice, for example, and safety sometimes takes the lead with respect to accuracy, and other times that reverses. Thus, the hypothesis is that the values defining the fields of action within the system are heterarchically related; there is no fixed organization of values that controls actions (Hodges & Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2022). Over time and task, values function cooperatively and variably to constrain actions in directions that contribute to the common goods of driving, which, as noted earlier, entail an enormous range of people and technologies. It would be possible to develop a safe driving system by only allowing a few people to go to a few places at very slow speeds in a highly regimented way (e.g., single-file, one-way), and so on. However, such a system would not be a very good system, because it would undermine accuracy, justice, freedom, speed, and many other values. Systems and the actions of agents within the system cannot be defined by a single value; it requires all the values working together.

Values are not natural laws, or social rules, or personal goals, but ongoing obligations. Values provide the larger dynamical context in which natural laws (large-scale stabilities) and rules (small-scale stabilities) are coordinated, and the criteria by which goals may be established, coordinated, evaluated, and revised. Values have priority—ontological, epistemic, and ethical—over goals of participants and the rules by which those goals may be pursued. Goals, needs, and preferences answer to values, not the reverse. Treating values as if they were goals, rules, or laws undermines action in the long run.

Values are obligatory. Drivers, for example, are obligated to look where they are going. The obligation is not a social convention, or a natural law (i.e., one is not caused to look where one ought to be looking). Looking is not the goal of driving either; rather, it is a responsibility. It is required because the values of driving (e.g., accuracy; tolerance; safety) cannot be realized otherwise; it is a necessary constraint that makes the freedom of driving possible. Values work together in concert as a set of boundary conditions that create a task-space, or a field of action, that is open to creative activity within those constraints. (Hodges & Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2022, p. 88)

Values are like natural laws in the sense that they are ontological constraints with physical as well as social consequences. It is possible for drivers to drive without respect to the demands of accuracy, safety, or justice—in certain circumstances for short periods of time—but they cannot do so continuously and everywhere. To act as if values were not forceful constraints on action would be to risk collapsing the immediate field of action (e.g., collision; gridlock) or otherwise degrading the action potentials for the driving system as a whole (e.g., undermining the freedom, safety, and so on of other participants in the system).

Values, then, are not located solely in any component of the driving system; safety, accuracy, freedom, and the other values of driving are not found in roadways, vehicles, individual drivers, traffic designers, service personnel, engineers, or pedestrians. What matters if the system is to work rightly is for the relationships among all these components to be constrained as much as possible by the values that define the system. No system is ever perfect or finalized; things will need to change. But these changes need to be guided, so that the system is made better, not worse. According to the theory, values are revealed over time and thus have an intrinsic developmental dimension that is both directed and open-ended. The heterarchical tensions among values work together to motivate continued perceptual learning and skill development. Values are realized both in action and in awareness through continuing engagement over time; thus, for participants in an ecosystem, there is always more to learn. Values are tacit in some sense, yet they are increasingly revealed (i.e., realized) as development and history unfold (Martin et al., 1986). Part of the scientific task is trying to track ecosystems and the ways in which values are realized, including their heterarchical shifts over time and task. Methodologically, for researchers, the role of values is more likely to appear in measurable ways when the system is stressed in some way, developmentally, socially, physically, or morally. Trying to do research on an isolated value (e.g., accuracy; safety) risks serious oversimplifications (e.g., Hodges, 2007b; Hodges & Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2022).

Because of the heterarchical and developmental dynamics of values, they function in a way that goals cannot. They allow both self-criticism and creativity. “Every attempt to explicate a value is subject to criticism from the point of view of the value itself” (Martin et al., 1987, p. 68). Not only can one come to a truer appreciation of truth, but the partial realization of any single value is judged by all the values, since they are mutually constraining. Not only do values motivate self-criticism, but the multiplicity and diversity of values allows for creativity in learning to act and perceive better.

The driving system has been used as an example. The more general proposal of ecological values-realizing theory is that all action, perception, and cognition are constrained by multiple, diverse values, which are the demands that ecosystems place on ways of life (i.e., niches) within the system, and the goods that must be realized for niches to flourish and develop. Values are the boundary conditions that provide for the dynamics of self-organizing ecosystems and the directedness of animate activity within them. They are not properties of any isolated components of an ecosystem, such as genes, individuals, cultures, objects, or events. Rather, they are the real goods that make it possible to define and evaluate acting, perceiving, feeling, and thinking. To illustrate further how realizing values is critical to the search for rightness, consider vision and conversation.

Is rightness a byproduct of physical law?

Some of Gibson’s most accomplished successors (e.g., Turvey & Shaw, 1995) have explored the relation between physical laws and ecological perceiving and acting, including Warren (2006), whose views were briefly discussed earlier. Physical laws apply to biological organisms and their actions; however, that does not mean that perceiving and acting can be explained by physics. Gibson did think that a crucial piece of the puzzle for accounting for the rightness of perceiving and acting was found in laws (Raja, 2019), but the laws were ecological laws, not the universal, deterministic, causal laws that are frequently ascribed to explanations in physics (Gibson, 1979).

[People and animals] move from place to place, . . . doing all this spontaneously, initiating their own movements, which is to say their movements are animate. These bodies are subject to the laws of mechanics and yet not subject to the laws of mechanics, for they are not governed by these laws . . . (Gibson, 1979, p. 135)

This is not the place to explore the nature of ecological laws, but it is intriguing that Turvey and Shaw (1995) suggest that the physics of systems that can “know about” other systems is not yet understood. Petrusz and Turvey (2010) cite the physicist Rosen to make the point.

Organisms, far from being a special case, an embodiment of more general principles or laws we believe we already know, are indications that these laws themselves are profoundly incomplete . . . far from being a special case of these laws, and reducible to them, biology provides the most spectacular examples of their inadequacy. The alternative is not vitalism, but rather a more generic view of the scientific world itself, in which it is the mechanical laws that are the special cases. (Rosen, 2000, pp. 33–34)

The perspective taken by these authors is that sciences of the animate are more general than those of the inanimate. If these arguments are correct, the abilities and actions of biological and psychological beings cannot be exempted from physical accounts, which include the activities of scientists themselves. As numerous authors have noted, this would mean that the epistemic actions of scientists—how they make judgments of better or worse ways of theorizing or making empirical measurements—would need to be included in their accounts (Martin & Kleindorfer, 1991; Martínez-Kahn & Martínez-Castilla, 2010; Van Orden et al., 2010). Whether such revised and expanded physical theories, if they were to be developed, could explain the rightness of actions cannot be assessed definitively at this juncture, but at a minimum they would need to account for biological action.

It appears that the mechanistic, causal accounts that are often viewed as the hallmark of physics are inadequate to explain animate perceiving and acting. Does shifting to a biological level of analysis help to address the issues more forthrightly? Talbott (2017, p. 77) observes that in biological systems, information and meaning show up at every level of analysis.

The mechanistic, programmed organism is a deception. It turns out that nothing is controlled in the required way. The relevant processes—generally involving trillions of diffusible molecules making their way in a watery medium—remain “on track” only because the organism, as a unified center of agency, is being-at-work-staying-itself. It is wisely coordinating, redirecting, revising, and sustaining the overall form and coherence of countless interactions, including all those interactions involving what once was thought to be the explanatory program.

If Talbott is correct, any biological story that will be adequate to account for the rightness of perceiving and acting will need to move beyond approaches that treat organisms as mechanistic, programmed beings. What is the current state of biology with respect to this challenge? Is it moving in the direction that Talbott is pointing?

Does biology determine rightness?

The story of biological research over the past few decades is one of dramatic expansion: the discovery of new distinctions and more relationships (e.g., coding and non-coding DNA; reversible cell fates; shift of causal activity to higher levels of organization in transitioning from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life forms). But the unfolding narrative, described by Ball (2023a) and others (e.g., Walsh, 2015), is primarily a story of unfurling complexity. The fractionated, linear, mechanistic descriptions of how life works, popular among biologists and shared with the public, are deeply misleading.

The most widely known story is one of genetic control, but gene action has turned out to be wildly more complicated, messy even, than previously assumed. Networks of interacting molecules such as proteins must come together,

perhaps half a dozen of them at once, just for the instant the message is transmitted. That problem became simply embarrassing when it came to understanding gene regulation. The components that seemed to be required just kept multiplying . . . you have to wait until all the right components just happen to come together at the right time and place to form this incredibly complicated and intricate structure. (Ball, 2023a, pp. 188–189)

Thus,

genes cannot be characterized as occupying a privileged position in the development of an organism, as they are themselves participants in the developmental process, which includes influences and interactions taking place at many hierarchically arranged levels, including nucleus–cytoplasm, cell–cell, cell–tissue, and organism–organism. (Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2003, p. 824).

Information flows in both directions between “the molecular scale and the larger scales all the way to the whole organism (and indeed beyond)” (Ball, 2023a, p. 130). Genetic resources at any given moment depend “on the whole organism . . . on the choices we make” (Ball, 2023a, p. 130). Instead of genes controlling the actions of animals, the actions of animals influence the activity of genes. Thus, trying to explain animate skills for doing the right thing by appealing to instincts fails; these adaptive capabilities “are not satisfactorily described as inborn, pre-programmed, hardwired, or genetically determined” (Blumberg, 2017). Even neural patterns and genetic influences depend on actions taken by animals that inform those processes, for those processes to function appropriately (Crewes, 2010).

The story of biological research is not simply that genes do not control animate actions. It is how complex, integrated, wholistic, and agentic life is. “Life has rules at many different levels of organization that don’t relate in any obvious way to those of the levels above and below. None is more fundamental than any other” (Ball, 2023a, p. 190). What seems like a messy, vague set of processes “demands that lots of details be weighted, filtered, and integrated . . . [but what is required] is robustness—which in general demands adaptability and flexibility. It requires not a concentration but a dispersal of power” (Ball, 2023a, p. 203). Cell fates (i.e., what tissue cells become) are not due to internal instructions, but “are collective [emphasis added] decisions—contextual, contingent, and made in the moment . . . destroying any idea that the developmental process is just an inevitable unfolding of a preexisting plan” (Ball, 2023a, pp. 235–236).

Walsh (2015) tells a similar story but with the spotlight on evolution and its relation to animate action. One of his central points is how the Modern Synthesis shifted the focus away from organisms and their actions to lower levels (molecular) and to higher levels (population shifts in gene frequencies). It allowed for the Modern Synthesis to look right through the activity of individual organisms making their way in the world, maintaining their integrity and extending their existence. Organisms and their way of life became invisible in the evolutionary story. Walsh argues that these shifts generated important insights that should not be minimized, but he is convinced that they have distorted a proper appreciation of evolution. A key aspect of a more ecologically appropriate understanding of evolution is that the unit of analysis of both ontogeny (development) and phylogeny (evolution) is the developmental system (p. 156), which entails all levels of organization from molecular to tissue to organismic to cultural, operating as a single, interacting system. Seen holistically, a developmental system characterizes organisms as purposive and goal-directed, and it takes selection to be a higher-order effect of all the activities of individual organisms. This means that the adaptive bias in evolution emerges from the orchestration by individual animals of “genes, epigenetic structures, tissue, organs, behaviour and the physical, ecological cultural setting” (Walsh, 2015, p. 157). “Evolution is adaptive because organismal development is adaptive” (Walsh, 2015, p. 149).

Like Walsh’s (2015) claims, Ball’s (2023a) review of recent research leads in an intriguing direction. It highlights an ecological scale of analysis that does not privilege the molecular, but points to the agency of biological processes at every level of life, and particularly the role of individual animate agents and their actions.

How can it be that these many steps all work together in synchrony to fashion an organism like us? Why, for example, should the process of protein folding to make an enzyme cooperate with the migration of cells, at scales many thousands of times bigger, to make a tissue? All these processes operate as if in thrall to some overall plan, with us as the goal. Biology looks uncannily teleological. That thought disturbs some biologists no end. (Ball, 2023a, p. 336)

Rather than showing that the acting and perceiving of animate beings is determined by biological forces, the evolution of biology appears to be moving toward an increasing acknowledgment of the importance of individual organisms, and their ability to be “actively involved in creating and constituting the conditions of their existence” (Walsh, 2015, p. 173). As Von Bertalanffy (1969, p. 3), put it: “you cannot even think of an organism . . . without taking into account . . . adaptiveness, purposiveness, goal-seeking and the like.” Biology, it seems, has become increasingly psychological. Perceiving and acting contribute to the biology that makes perceiving and acting possible. All together, these accounts try to encourage biologists to take seriously the purposive life of organisms, without feeling the need to assume that all organisms have consciousness, or make plans (Ball, 2023a, 2023b; Talbott, 2011; Walsh, 2015).

Rather than trying to avoid the centrality of meaning and value to animate actions (for fear of being labeled a “vitalist”), biologists could join forces with psychologists and physicists in looking for better ways of appreciating the directedness that seems to characterize animate perceiving and acting. Biology is a critical aspect of the search for rightness in animate life, but by itself it appears unable to account for what makes animate life directed, functional, and open.

Agency and values: Making good use of laws, goals, and rules

The surprise in both Walsh’s (2015) review of evolutionary theory and Ball’s (2023a) review of biological research is that the enigma of agency emerges as central to life. Ball describes agency as “the ability of a living entity to manipulate and control itself and its environment in order to realize a goal: to achieve a purpose . . . life ascribes values and meanings and has goals” (p. 351). Meaning, he characterizes in terms of “affordances: useful possibilities for attaining a goal” (p. 351). Walsh (2015) explicitly appeals to Gibson’s (1979) account of affordances, as well as subsequent elaborations (e.g., Chemero, 2003; Stoffregen, 2003), arguing that:

The activities of organisms—their capacity to exploit and alter their affordance landscapes account for both the conservativeness of form and its capacity for adaptive change. (p. 183) Adaptive evolution is the process in which populations change as a consequence of organisms responding to, and constructing, their affordances. An affordance, unlike an environment, is an emergent property of a purposive system embedded in its setting; an opportunity for, or an impediment to, the achievement of a goal. (p. 185)

Both Walsh and Ball speak of agency in terms of goals, as did Warren (2006). But are goals sufficient to characterize the rightness of actions? Gibson (1979), as noted earlier, hints at values and affordances being the way to characterize agency and the hunt for rightness, but he also stresses ecological laws and information. Other theorists such as Klein et al. (2002) appeal to rules to characterize the search for rightness. How do laws, rules, and goals relate to values and to agency? Ecological values-realizing theory conjectured that laws, rules, and goals all have their place in addressing agency and action, but within the boundary conditions of values.

Concluding remarks

The representational theories offered in most cognitive accounts of psychology often focus on rules: what makes actions or thoughts right is an outcome of rule-following. Ecological theories have seen such accounts as much too arbitrary and speculative; instead, they have worked to place animate actions back in their physical, ecological context, explaining their rightness in terms of laws and goals. Both sorts of approaches have found that some larger story of agency is at work in the dynamics of conforming to laws, pursuing goals, and following rules. Biologists, too, have been confronted increasingly by agency, operating at various levels in bodily dynamics, but also working in coordinated, directed ways that are attuned to the level of organisms working out their livelihood at ecosystem levels. How can such agency be understood; how can the rightness of animate action be appreciated? The possibility explored in this paper is that values and the meanings that point to values will be necessary to integrate properly the contributions of goals, rules, and laws. Ecological values-realizing theory was offered as a useful step for characterizing values in a way that creates affordances for creativity, learning, and self-criticism.

One problem with many, if not most, of the discussions about agency and rightness, including those described earlier in this paper, is that the focus is on a single animal or person. That is understandable, but it is deeply misleading. Humans certainly, and most other animals, cannot properly be understood as isolated beings, finding their way in the world. Not only are there other animate beings that make their way of life possible, but the inanimate aspects of the ecosystems in which animals participate are part of the story of agency. The focus of this paper has not been agency per se, but the necessity of values for appreciating the rightness of animate action. Elsewhere (Hodges, 2023b), agency has been addressed more directly, with a comparison of Reed’s (1996a, 1996b) explorations, enactive accounts (e.g., Di Paolo et al., 2017), and an ecological values-realizing theory approach (e.g., Hodges & Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2022). Agency in human, bacterial, and thermodynamic (i.e., autocatakinetic) ecosystems is considered.

Scientific activity itself is a values-realizing, agentic activity. As noted earlier, even the physics of animate beings needs to address the directedness of action, and the question of how it is that rightness is realized (Swenson, 2023). If this is so, then it seems prudent to recognize that agency, affordances, and values are crucial issues for the natural sciences to acknowledge and address, especially psychology.