Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson ed. by Edward Reed, Rebecca Jones (review)

wonderful example of a book that presents technical information so that it comes alivefor nonspecialists. It may be the doorway for artists who have felt locked out. How does Williams succeed in this difficult task of opening the closed doorway? He values the reader who comes to electronics from an outside world. Recognizing the gaps readers might have in technical or mathematical subjects, he does not assume any background. He provides refresher material on necessary math, but structures explanations so they do not rely on math. He uses an innovative approach of presenting information by analogy. Electrical and electronic ideas are introduced by analogy with plumbing, rotating gears, and other mechanical material familiar in everyday life. Abundant diagrams enhance this approach. I marvel at the author’s ingenious physical analogies for electronic concepts. Artists will find this reasoning by physical analogy a comfortable mental pathway into electronics. Williams also addresses his nontechnical audience by including many photographs of the devices considered, by explaining the operation of everyday equipment such as television and radio, and by providing interesting historical background on theoretical issues, such as the nature of magnetism. In spite of being interesting, this book is not a superficial coffee table book. It is a textbook with chapters covering the customary topics for an introductory electricity-electronics text, ranging from Ohm’s law through motors and generators, through amplification, up to electronic applications. My major objection to the book is its short treatment of digital electronics. Much modern equipment uses digital components, yet only the last two chapters address the topic. Certainly length might have precluded more. I was happy to see another book, Digital Technology, by the same author. I assumed this was a follow-up text. Unfortunately, Digital Technology was intended to be a more traditional text with the usual assumptions about readers’ technical and math backgrounds . It is clearer than some, but nontechnical readers may find it hard going. I hope the author will consider doing a digitalelectronics -for-everyone text on a par with his first book. Reviewed by Stephen Wilson, Dept. of Art, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, CA94117, U.S.A. Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson. Edward Reed and Rebecca Jones, eds. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1982. 449 pp., Cloth, $39.95. ISBN: 0-89859-207-0. Reed and Jones have produced an interesting and timely intellectual biography of the late James Gibson. It is presented as acollectionof Gibson’s most important papers and talks, some previously unpublished or difficult to obtain. The biographical tone isset by Eleanor Gibson’s foreword and the inclusion of Gibson’s fascinating autobiography. The material has been selected and arranged chronologically around four topics central to Gibson’s thinking on how we perceive. Each is prefaced with an essay by the editors, usefully plotting the development of ideas within each area and the connections between them. The papers in the first section deal with ‘ecological optics’, the discipline Gibson founded to provide a psychologically and ecologically appropriate description of the information available in light. The section traces the notion of informative disturbances in the nested structure of the optic array from its beginnings in the concept of retinal gradients. This clearly illustrates Gibson’s constant willingness to refine and often reformulate his ideas in the light of new evidence. The second section is a compilation of Gibson’s writings on motion perception. The editors point out the crucial importance of Gibson’s early realization that normal perception requires movement through space and time-that is, transformations in the optic array. Of equal note for Gibson, however, is that bodily movements are perceptually guided perception is active and exploratory, and different perceptual ‘channels’ may register the same information. This point is most clearly stated in Gibson’s essay ‘Observations on Active Touch’ [I], an important paper and the only no;able omission from this book. The next section chronicles Gibson’s lifelong interest in pictures and how they are perceived. The papersselected clearly illustrate how Gibson’s work in this area influenced the development of his information-based theory of perception. Gibson’s wish to account for the perception...