78 Informational environments
As to the property of specificity, the notion of an environment, if it is to be useful in biological ecology, should neither be plainly equated with an organism’s or
other system’s physical surroundings, nor should it be confounded with the subjectively experienced environments of the organisms inhabiting a certain region
in space-time. A well-known attempt at providing an intermediate account was
undertaken by Jakob von Uexküll (1956). On his view, there would be a plurality
of differently constituted individuals living in a plurality of differently constituted environments, each pair being intertwined in their specific fashion but along
similar patterns of interaction (a “Funktionskreis” or functional cycle). The perceived, phenomenal environment will be at variance between different organisms,
as will the relevant variables within the environment and the possible ways for the
organisms of influencing conditions in their environment, in scope and depth. The
environment would even be different for different members of one and the same
species, for the rather trivial facts that they inhabit different slices of space-time
and that their constitution, perspectives and behavioural opportunities will vary,
however slightly. What remains identical across all those individually constituted
environments is the general functional pattern of interaction. However, this usage
would make it difficult to account for how those many individual environments
are related to each other, and on what grounds.
Conceiving of environments in the Uexküllean way is instructive when exclusively focusing on an organism’s phenomenal environment, but not when seeking
to account for how different organisms interact in shared surroundings. Moreover,
his view will be fully tenable only within the neo-vitalistic framework within
which it was developed. The teleological structures within which an organism is
embedded could then be taken for granted rather than being the explananda for
a theory that seeks to illuminate the ways in which some such structure emerges
and is maintained. In absence of the neo-vitalistic premises of von Uexküll, and in
view of accounting for the interaction of various organisms in a shared environment, a promising solution will be to conceive of environments in a way that echoes the intermediate, twofold nature of Gibsonian affordances, as being specific
to an organism but objectively rooted.
A conceptual distinction between different notions of an organism’s environment that highlights its twofold nature has been introduced by Robert N. Brandon
(1995), within the context of theories of natural selection. It was crafted in order
to distinguish between those instances of differential reproduction within populations which are and those which are not due to the environmental fit, hence the
adaptedness, of certain traits of the organisms involved rather than sheer luck.
Under “external environments”, Brandon subsumes all physical and biotic conditions in an organism’s or a population’s surroundings that may affect them and
the local or temporal variance in these conditions. These conditions are typically
directly measurable by an external observer. The “ecological environment”, in
turn, is constituted by those factors within the former set that have an effect on,
and thus are relevant to, individual organisms with respect to their rate of reproduction, and hence their contribution to their population’s demographic make-up.
Precisely to the extent that the organisms within that population are genetically
As to the property of specificity, the notion of an environment, if it is to be useful in biological ecology, should neither be plainly equated with an organism’s or
other system’s physical surroundings, nor should it be confounded with the subjectively experienced environments of the organisms inhabiting a certain region
in space-time. A well-known attempt at providing an intermediate account was
undertaken by Jakob von Uexküll (1956). On his view, there would be a plurality
of differently constituted individuals living in a plurality of differently constituted environments, each pair being intertwined in their specific fashion but along
similar patterns of interaction (a “Funktionskreis” or functional cycle). The perceived, phenomenal environment will be at variance between different organisms,
as will the relevant variables within the environment and the possible ways for the
organisms of influencing conditions in their environment, in scope and depth. The
environment would even be different for different members of one and the same
species, for the rather trivial facts that they inhabit different slices of space-time
and that their constitution, perspectives and behavioural opportunities will vary,
however slightly. What remains identical across all those individually constituted
environments is the general functional pattern of interaction. However, this usage
would make it difficult to account for how those many individual environments
are related to each other, and on what grounds.
Conceiving of environments in the Uexküllean way is instructive when exclusively focusing on an organism’s phenomenal environment, but not when seeking
to account for how different organisms interact in shared surroundings. Moreover,
his view will be fully tenable only within the neo-vitalistic framework within
which it was developed. The teleological structures within which an organism is
embedded could then be taken for granted rather than being the explananda for
a theory that seeks to illuminate the ways in which some such structure emerges
and is maintained. In absence of the neo-vitalistic premises of von Uexküll, and in
view of accounting for the interaction of various organisms in a shared environment, a promising solution will be to conceive of environments in a way that echoes the intermediate, twofold nature of Gibsonian affordances, as being specific
to an organism but objectively rooted.
A conceptual distinction between different notions of an organism’s environment that highlights its twofold nature has been introduced by Robert N. Brandon
(1995), within the context of theories of natural selection. It was crafted in order
to distinguish between those instances of differential reproduction within populations which are and those which are not due to the environmental fit, hence the
adaptedness, of certain traits of the organisms involved rather than sheer luck.
Under “external environments”, Brandon subsumes all physical and biotic conditions in an organism’s or a population’s surroundings that may affect them and
the local or temporal variance in these conditions. These conditions are typically
directly measurable by an external observer. The “ecological environment”, in
turn, is constituted by those factors within the former set that have an effect on,
and thus are relevant to, individual organisms with respect to their rate of reproduction, and hence their contribution to their population’s demographic make-up.
Precisely to the extent that the organisms within that population are genetically