Heras-Escribano, D. M., Travieso, D., & Lobo, L. (2024). "An affordance-based approach to the origins of concepts". In The modern legacy of Gibson's affordances for the sciences of organisms. Taylor & Francis. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dispensing with the theory (and philosophy) of affordances
Theory & Psychology, 2020
This article will contest the claim made by many ecological psychologists that affordances are invariantly the objects of perception. First of all, the lack of agreement concerning what affordances actually are, what their true nature is, is considerable. Second, the metaphysico-ontological debate has obscured the important misunderstanding consisting in conceiving of affordances as ecological objects or entities of any kind. Third, an appropriate analysis of the notion of affordance will show that this concept is not primarily devoted to perception, and believing that it is has unnecessarily impoverished what we (can) see in our environment. From a Wittgensteinian and an ethnomethodological approach, to make sense of the relation between ourselves and our environments we should use only those concepts available to us, and the internal relation between our everyday concepts and the way we invoke them in practice will be shown. No theory of meaning is needed here.
The Social Orders of Existence of Affordances
Philosophia scientiae, 2022
Des figures centrales de la tradition phénoménologique, telles qu'Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Paul Sartre et Maurice Merleau-Ponty, se sont largement inspirées de la psychologie de la gestalt dans leurs écrits. Le dialogue entre la phénoménologie et la psychologie qu'ils ont entamé se poursuit aujourd'hui dans le domaine des sciences cognitives incarnées. Nous reprenons cette conversation à partir de la riche analyse phénoménologique de la perception du monde culturel réalisée par Aron Gurwitsch. Ses descriptions phénoménologiques de la perception du monde culturel ressemblent de façon frappante aux travaux de la science cognitive incarnée qui s'inspirent de la psychologie écologique de Gibson. Gibson a inventé le terme « affordance » pour désigner les possibilités d'action qui peuvent être directement perçues par les personnes [Gibson 1979]. Cependant, dès ses premiers écrits, Gibson a fait une distinction entre une forme de perception universelle, strictement individuelle et non sociale, et une perception du monde soumise à des influences sociales et culturelles. Nous utilisons Gurwitsch pour argumenter contre la compréhension individualiste de la perception directe de Gibson. Chaque affordance qui peut être sélectionnée comme objet de perception se réfère à un contexte socioculturel plus large, que Gurwitsch a appelé un « ordre d'existence ». Nous terminons notre article en abordant la question de la relation entre la description phénoménologique du monde perceptif et les explications de l'expérience perceptive fournies par la science cognitive incarnée.
An Outline of a Theory of Affordances
Ecological Psychology, 2003
A theory of affordances is outlined according to which affordances are relations between the abilities of animals and features of the environment. As relations, affordances are both real and perceivable but are not properties of either the environment or the animal. I argue that this theory has advantages over extant theories of affordances and briefly discuss the relations among affordances and niches, perceivers, and events.
Triplec Communication Capitalism Critique Open Access Journal For a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2007
Peirce and Whitehead share a common project: to restrict the over-extension of reductionism, to show how matter must be sensate and to create an ontology of process and subjectivity. This article claims that biosemiotics can assist this project. Moreover, it shows that the concept of affordance is a means to produce a theory of causation that embraces physical, natural and cultural levels of order.
Issues regarding the origins of concepts have been hotly debated for over two millennia. The main two strands in this debate are on the one hand Rationalists/Nativists – who argue that concepts are innate – and on the other hand, Empiricists, who argue for the perceptual origins of concepts. Despite recent advances in both camps, the answer to the question about how concepts are acquired is still pending. In this paper, I suggest a way to fill in this important gap in the literature. More specifically, I appeal to the Empiricist dictum that everything that is in the intellect is first in the senses, and argue that concepts are acquired through experiences with instances of a given kind. Furthermore, I argue that concept acquisition occurs in virtue of a domain-general cognitive mechanism, which exploits a limited number of perceptual pattern recognition abilities, and ascribe an important role to language. In particular, I argue that concept acquisition occurs in two, roughly sequen...
Affordances and Emergence of Concepts
2010
Abstract In this paper, we used the affordance formalization framework (Sahin et al; Adaptive Behavior, 15 (4), 447-472, 2007) to link the concepts represented by verbs and nouns in language to the affordance relations that a robot acquires through its interaction with the environment. First, we argued that a verb is linked not to a specific behavior of the robot, but to a specific effect that different behaviors may generate.
Philosophical Psychology, 2023
In the last years, we have attended to different attempts to extend the notion of affordance to include mental or cognitive actions. In short, the idea is that our capacity to perform some cognitive functions such as counting, imagining, mathematical reasoning, and so on, is preceded by our awareness of cognitive or mental affordances. In this paper, we analyze two of these attempts, Mental Affordance Hypothesis, and cognitive horizons, and conclude that they fail to deliver their promise. Our argument is twofold. First, we show that both proposals lack an explanation for how these affordances can be perceived or experienced by the individuals. Second, we argue, focusing on the examples provided by the authors, that the introduction of cognitive affordances is not justified on explanatory grounds. In other words, neither of these proposals offers a compelling justification for thinking that performing said "mental acts" requires the perception of mental or cognitive affordances. Hence, the existence of mental or cognitive affordances remains both scientifically mysterious and explanatorily unjustified.
Interacting with Computers, 2005
The concept of affordance is relatively easy to define but has proved to be remarkably difficult to engineer. This paradox has sparked numerous debates as to its true nature. The discussion presented here begins with a review of the use of the term from which emerges evidence for a two-fold classification -simple affordance and complex affordance. Simple affordance corresponds to Gibson's original formulation, while complex affordances embody such things as history and practice. In trying to account for complex affordance, two contrasting but complementary philosophical treatments are considered. The first of these is Ilyenkov's account of significances which he claims are 'ideal' phenomena. Ideal phenomena occupy are objective characteristics of things and are the product of human purposive activity. This makes them objective but not independent (of any particular mind or perception) hence their similarity to affordances. The second perspective is Heidegger's phenomenological treatment of 'familiarity' and 'equipment'. As will be seen, Heidegger has argued that familiarity underpins our ability to cope in the world. A world, in turn, which itself comprises the totality of equipment. We cope by making use of equipment. Despite the different philosophical traditions both Ilyenkov and Heidegger have independently concluded that a thing is identified by its use and that use, in turn, is revealed by way of its affordances / significances. Finally, both authors -Heidegger directly and Ilyenkov indirectlyequate context and use, leading to the conclusion that affordance and context are one and the same.
Extending the Notion of Affordance
Post-Gibson attempts to set out a definition of affordance generally agree that this notion can be understood as a property of the environment with salience for an organism’s behavior. According to this view, some scholars advocate the idea that affordances are dispositional properties of physical objects that, given suitable circumstances, necessarily actualize related actions. This paper aims at assessing this statement in light of a theory of affordance perception. After years of discontinuity between strands of empirical and theoretical research, the time is ripe for addressing the question of whether the dispositional interpretation of affordance is in accordance with some recent evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. Following this line, I clarify that there are some cases of affordance-related effects that neither require the actualization of an action, nor the presence of an action-related property bearer in the environment. My claim is that the identification of affordance with physical properties provides only a partial explanation of the wide range of affordance-related effects. Accordingly, I argue in favor of a more general account of affordance perception based on the ability to directly detect perceptual patterns in the environment.
This article is about a sidebar in James Gibson's last book, The ecological approach to visual perception. In this sidebar, Gibson, the founder of the ecological perspective of perception and action, argued that to perceive an affordance is not to classify an object. Although this sidebar has received scant attention, it is of great significance both historically and for recent discussions about specificity, direct perception, and the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams. It is argued that Gibson's acknowledgment of Wittgenstein's ideas of classification suggests a limited scope of his theory of direct perception-it cannot account for the classification of objects. The implications for both the specification debate and theorizing about the brain's dorsal and ventral pathways are explored. Based on a recent ecological conception of information and direct perception, we ultimately argue that both affordance perception and classification are direct.