On Affordances
Just jargon?
A tea pot has a handle that affords the ability to tip and pour. In philosophical terms the tea pot offers an affordance. This is philosophic nonsense - a tea pot cannot offer anything and the ability to handle a teapot is not a thing. But let's try to understand what people are trying to get at with the idea of affordance.
It's pretty general in that it applies to at least to all animals.
For a monkey a branch affords the opportunity to swing. The interesting thing is to think about how that could possibly be - how could it be that there are monkeys who have the ability to swing from branches.My Philosophers worry about stuff like does the branch really offer affordability. Would that affordability be there if there were no monkeys?
My interest in this idea is different. I'm interested that creatures are things for which affordances are possible. And since I like the evolutionary perspective it's easy to see how the ability of creatures would get more and more sophisticated. For instance a branch offers graspable affordance to a monkey and a hangable affordance to a sloth and who knows what sort of affordance enables ants to walk upside down on it.
I know that for me the handle of a teapot is an affordance - when I see it I know what I can do, I don't have to figure it out - it's apparent as soon as I see it
This is philsophically interesting on many levels - the main thing is that meaning is detached from logic
We know upon seeing what things mean - we rarely have to figure it out
And that rarely defines in a way what it means to be human. Sometimes we do figure things out an act differently than in the past.
With affordances we are confronted with just why a teapot handle affords me to tip and pour.
The answer is not found in logic.
The answer is found in ecology and evolution.
That is - the answer is found in iterative processes that continually optimize themselves Certain affordances are possible because of the ways we perceive reality and the physical nature of our bodies. The small hole affords a refuge for the mouse because it doesn't afford access to the larger cat. That is, in the course of developing they each learned about various affordances offered by the environment that were appropriate to them.
The interesting thing is that there may be features of an environment that potentially could be an affordance to a creature but isn't because the creature never learned about it.
Affordances are a development of the twentieth century thread of philosophy that emphasizes that our cognitive abilities cannot be understood in isolation. People don't think in isolation - they are more like sites influenced by waves of influence washing through all the minds involved in a situation. And when they reach for a doorknob they don't need to carefully guide their hand. The whole body knows how to act so the hand grasps the handle. And when we see a doorknob we just know what it's for. And it's not the shape or size alone that tells us that - it's the whole context that the person wanting to open door that makes the person see it as a doorknob.
If the context is different the doorknob offers different affordances. It can be a handy place to hang your jacket. But notice how door and doorknob offer an affordance that neither does alone - so much so that we often open and pass through doors without being aware of either the door or the knob.
Second Life offers an interesting space to consider affordances.
We have the fundamental ones of mouse and keyboard.
With the mouse we are offered the affordance of moving a cursor around and the affordance of clicking on things.
Those are actually two affordances in a way - but we don't really experience them that way - instead we use them together unconsciously to do things like selecting things and moving them
Or making a landmark
Or choose somebody to talk to.
So the basic affordances of the mouse enable meta-affordances like being able to make landmarks.
And then the landmarks offer the affordance of being able to return to same place.
And that offers the affordance of being able to send out the same landmark to a bunch of people.
Which offers the affordance of interesting discussions like this.
So - what are we to make of this term? Is it just a new piece of jargon, or is the idea actually useful?
It links to other ideas about how things are meaningful to us without us having to analyse or even think about them. We understand language at a pre-conscious level. Similarly morality and risk are interpretted on a pre-conscious level. We perceive affordances in a similar way - we just see them and use them - we don't usually figure out that something is a doorknob - we just see it as a doorknob right off and know what to do with it.
But the idea of affordances applies not just to physical things like branches and doorknobs. It applies to all our interactions with others in society. The bus that affords me a trip across town affords the driver a job. It is very hard to conceptualize that dynamic web of shifting affordances - the best way I can get at it is with Heinlein's idea of grokking - a deep understanding that doesn't translate into words. I'm familiar with the affordances in my life and I'm familiar with how they work. And thinking about them doesn't lead me into a sterile path of logical first principles.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.