This text attempts to reorient modern psychology by finding a middle ground between the study of nerve cells and cultural analysis. It offers a psychology that combines ecological and experimental methods to demonstrate the ways in which people and animals make their way through the world.

1. regulation vs. Construction ; 2. An Evolutionary Psychology ; 3. Affordances: A New Ecology for Psychology ; 4. The Importance of Information ; 5. Functional Systems and the Mechanisms of Behavior ; 6. Varieties of Action Systems ; 7. The Effort After Value and Meaning ; 8. The Human Environment ; 9. Becoming a Person ; 10. The Daily Life of the Mind ; 11. Entering the Linguistic Environment ; 12. Streams of Thought

"Reed's book is an intense, sustained, and thought-provoking exposition of a highly original theory...If Encountering the World leads us to interrogate our faith in the theoretical underpinnings of psychology and to be more naturalistic and less individualistic in our methods of study, it will have succeeded admirably."--Contemporary Psychology "Reed's ideas provide a valuable. . .corrective to the postmodernist view of the tenuous relationship between experience and the real world."--Choice "For those whose scientific focus is on complex systems, one of the more imposing challenges lies in understanding human behavior and cognition. . . . Ed Reed's . . . relatively slim volume is rich in conceptual development and offers a philosophically sound perspective on a comprehensive range of psychological issues. . . . This treatment of psychology could support a venture into dynamical modeling of behavior and cognition. It is primarily a descriptive treatment that steers away from any discussion of how the nervous system accomplishes what it does. There is, however, explanatory value in the use of selectionist principles to account for the development of human capabilities (in phylogenetic time) and of behavioral organization (in ontogenetic time). . . . I believe that many readers of this journal will find this an insightful treatment and one they will be able to integrate comfortably into their own perspective on organization of complex systems."--Complexity "Reed's book is an intense, sustained, and thought-provoking exposition of a highly original theory...If Encountering the World leads us to interrogate our faith in the theoretical underpinnings of psychology and to be more naturalistic and less individualistic in our methods of study, it will have succeeded admirably."--Contemporary Psychology "Reed's ideas provide a valuable. . .corrective to the postmodernist view of the tenuous relationship between experience and the real world."--Choice "For those whose scientific focus is on complex systems, one of the more imposing challenges lies in understanding human behavior and cognition. . . . Ed Reed's . . . relatively slim volume is rich in conceptual development and offers a philosophically sound perspective on a comprehensive range of psychological issues. . . . This treatment of psychology could support a venture into dynamical modeling of behavior and cognition. It is primarily a descriptive treatment that steers away from any discussion of how the nervous system accomplishes what it does. There is, however, explanatory value in the use of selectionist principles to account for the development of human capabilities (in phylogenetic time) and of behavioral organization (in ontogenetic time). . . . I believe that many readers of this journal will find this an insightful treatment and one they will be able to integrate comfortably into their own perspective on organization of complex systems."--Complexity

Edward S. Reed, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Psychology at Franklin & Marshall College. His research on ecological psychology has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institute on Disabilities and Rehabilitation, and a Guggenheim fellowship.