Perceiving Potentiality: A Metaphysics for Affordances
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Perceiving Potentiality: A Metaphysics for Affordances Barbara Vetter1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract According to ecological psychology, animals perceive not just the qualities of things in their environment, but their affordances: in James Gibson’s words, ’what things furnish, for good or ill’. I propose a metaphysics for affordances that fits into a contemporary anti-Humean metaphysics of powers or potentialities. The goal is to connect two debates, one in the philosophy of perception and one in metaphysics, that stand to gain much from each other. Keywords Affordances · Dispositions · Potentiality · Powers · Perception
1 Introduction The notion of an affordance was first introduced by Gibson (1966) to refer to ‘what things furnish, for good or ill’ (Gibson 1966, p. 285), and more explicitly in Gibson (1986): The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, for good or ill. The verb to afford is in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. (Gibson 1986, p. 127) While the expression is introduced as a technical term, the phenomenon itself should be familiar. A surface that is knee-high and sufficiently steady affords sitting on (see Gibson 1986, p. 128); a roughly horizontal, flat, rigid, and sufficiently extended surface ‘affords support … It is standon-able … walk-on-able and run-over-able’ (Gibson 1986, p. 127); slopes ‘afford walking, if easy, but only climbing, if steep … a slope downward affords falling if steep; the brink of a cliff is a falling-off place’ (Gibson 1986, p. 132). Various substances have ‘affordances for nutrition and for manufacture … affordances for manipulation’, while other animals ‘afford … a rich and complex set of interactions,
* Barbara Vetter barbara.vetter@fu‑berlin.de 1
Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, 14195 Berlin, Germany
sexual, predatory, nurturing, fighting, playing, cooperating, and communicating’ (Gibson 1986, p. 128). It is of the utmost importance for the survival and thriving of animals, including human animals, that they recognize the affordances of their environment. But how do animals know what their environment affords them? On orthodox views of perception, affordances are not the kind of thing that is perceived directly by an animal. On that orthodox view (which, of course, comes in many different forms), animals may be said to perceive that the surface in front of them affords walking or falling, but they do so indirectly: ‘the perception of the affordances of objects is mediated by inference from prior detection of their shape, color, texture, or other such “qualities”’ (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1981, p. 148). Gibsonian ecological psychology rejects this orthodox view as a symptom of a mistaken view of perception itself. To perceive, for ecological psychologists, is not to react to the input of light on our retina; rather, it is
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