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Meaningful affordances Roy Dings1 Received: 18 June 2020 / Accepted: 4 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020

Abstract It has been argued that affordances are not meaningful and are thus not useful to be applied in contexts where specifically meaningfulness of experience is at stake (e.g. clinical contexts or discussions of autonomous agency). This paper aims to reconceptualize affordances such as to make them relevant and applicable in such contexts. It starts by investigating the ‘ambiguity’ of (possibilities for) action. In both philosophy of action and affordance research, this ambiguity is typically resolved by adhering to the agents intentions and concerns. I discuss some recent accounts of affordances that highlight these concerns but argue that they tend to adopt an ‘atomistic’ approach where there is no acknowledgement of how these concerns are embedded in the agents wider concerns, values, projects and commitments. An holistic approach that does acknowledge this can be found in psychological research on agents having a sense of what they’re doing. I will discuss this research in the second part of the paper and argue that agents can analogously have a sense of what is afforded. This is deemed the entry point for understanding the meaningfulness of affordances. In the final part of the paper I apply this analysis to recent attempts which seek to make sense of authentic and autonomous agency in terms of affordances. Keywords Affordances · Agency · Phenomenology · Autonomy · Meaningfulness · Relevance

1 The problem of meaningful affordances Although devised in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of visual science, the notion of ‘affordances’ has recently become widespread in more general cognitive science and beyond (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; Heras-Escribano 2020). Affordances are typically construed as possibilities for action offered by the environment—such as a

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Roy Dings [email protected] Institute for Philosophy II, Ruhr-University Bochum, GA 3/140, 44780 Bochum, Germany

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chair affording ‘sitting on’, people affording ‘talking to’ and paperweights affording ‘picking up’. Despite its widespread application, the notion of ‘affordance’ is not without controversy. There have been many debates about the ontological status of affordances, their purported normativity and whether they require the positing of content (Chemero 2003; Michaels 2003; Rietveld 2008; Heras-Escribano 2020). The present paper focuses upon another controversy surrounding research on affordances, which questions the extent to which the concept fully captures what matters to individuals acting upon or being solicited by affordances. Certainly, Gibson’s (1966, 1979) theory of affordances constitutes a landmark in research on meaningful experience, as it provides what is arguably the first scientifically plausible framework for the study of how agents meaningfully perceive and interact with their environment. Moreover, the relational nature of affordances allowed for an understanding of meaning which did not solel