James J. Gibson Quotes

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

Being that can be understood is language.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Man lives in a world of meaning.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Common sense says that chairs and tables exist independently of whether anyone happens to perceive them or not.

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

There is no standard for truth. We cannot even agree on the meaning of words.

Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.