Affordance

“ The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, 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. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. ” — James J.Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)

For agency to be meaningful, in any given context, agents (or actants) must be afforded opportunities for action. In this ecological framing, affordances become "ways to carry on [one's] life" or "the ways in which things come into the immediate presence of perceivers, not as objects-in-themselves, closed in and contained, but in their potential for the continuation of a form of life." 

In today's ecological psychology, discussion of affordances typically retains Eleanor J Gibson's and James J Gibson's framings of these opportunities for action as neither "out there" and objective (specifiable independently of constraints associated with specific agents/actants), nor internal and subjective (specifiable only within the constraints of forms-of-life which shape perception).

Within today's Anthro-complexity, practitioners are more likely to discuss an affordance landscape. This might have been mapped topographically as a basis for prioritising interventions to shape the dispositions which might lead actors (actants) to favour one set of affordances over another as they "wait on the world for emergent opportunities to progress forward."

Introduction

What Gibson’s theory tells us is that perception is carried on in public, rather than in the privacy of isolated minds. It requires us to participate with others, to attune our movements with theirs, to pay attention, and to care. By doing so we bring forth a world of affordances in common. This commonality lies, if you will, on the hither side of concepts: it precedes and facilitates, rather than depends upon, representation and interpretation. It is… a coming together in difference. It produces a certain sense of who “we” are, as people bound in the conduct of common tasks, yet not bounded by any categorical division between “us” and “them.”

— Tim Ingold, Back to the future with the theory of affordances,

Historical Context

In their 2024 Cambridge Elements survey of the historical roots of ecological psychology, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Vicente Raja note the roots of the Gibson's later thinking about affordances in everything from American Functionalism (e.g. William James, 1890; John Dewey, 1896) and Radical Empiricism (e.g. E. B. Holt, 1915, and Clark L. Hull, 1935), through early 20th century Gestalt Psychology (e.g. Kurt Koffka, 1935), to phenomenological psychology (e.g. Albert Michotte, 1946) and the mainstream of European phenomenology (e.g. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945). 

In introducing The Modern Legacy of Gibson's Affordances for the Sciences of Organisms, William M. Mace draws special attention to the influence of Edward Chace Tolman and Egon Brunswik, and to their 1935 paper referencing “manipulanda properties.” These were "properties which make possible and support… actual behavioral manipulations" including "the object’s grasp-ableness, pick-up-ableness, chewableness, sit-onableness, run-through-ableness, and the like" - though Mace's stress on perception should be read in the light of Edward S. Reed's observation, back in the 1980s, that for the Gibsons, this was always as a stepping stone to a cohesive, wide ranging approach to "the whole of psychology."

Why Affordances?

An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.

— James Gibson, The ecological approach to visual perception,

By the mid 1950s, the Gibsons were preoccupied with moving beyond a dualist cognitive science which considered the human mind independently of any niche it might be inhabiting. A host of interrelated concepts emerged from practical efforts to overcome the limitations of starting with stimuli or sensory inputs when seeking to explain perception. Affordances emerged as the thread linking an appreciation that {i} to perceive the environment is to coperceive oneself; {ii} perception is something we actively do; and {iii} perception is an embodied process for attuning to specifying information.

James Gibson ended up drawing on affordances as he worked towards a general theory of perception and action in ways which have subsequently been developed by the likes of Michael Turvey: one of many to also draw upon Russian pioneer in the field of motor control and motor learning, Nikolai Bernstein. Meanwhile, Eleanor Gibson ended up investigating how perception develops through maturation and learning, most famously in "visual cliff" studies of depth perception. In this tradition, see also Karen Adolph's work, her accessible presentation of An Ecological Approach to Learning in (Not and) Development).

Affordances in Contemporary Ecological Psychology

Pioneering work referencing affordances now ranges from Scott Kelso's work deploying dynamical systems theory within coordination dynamics to Vicente Raja's work on how the same perceptual information might constrain organism–environment dynamics and neural-dynamics. Other work sits in a tradition more closely linked to Edward S. Reed's contributions, and ranges from Harry Heft's on perceptual learning within behaviour settings to Miguel Segundo-Ortin's on how intention can be socio-normatively educated and on how socio-cultural norms shape human agency.

Recent lines-of-flight emerging from the Gibson's work on affordances have come from the likes of Jelle Bruineberg, Anthony Chemero, Carl Woods, Erik Rietveld, Manuel Heras-Escribano, Ludger van Dijk, Rob Withagen, Ed Baggs, Michael Anderson, Sabrina Golonka, Andrew Wilson, Duarte Araujo, and Julian Kiverstein. For practitioners of anthro-complexity and sense-making, potential starting points range from treatments of affordances as invitations or solicitations, through considerations in contexts ranging from collaborative and joint activities (we-intentionality) in sport and music, to applications within architecture and making human technologies.

Controversies and Critiques

To successfully extend the ecological approach in such a way that it can be usefully applied to behavior involving other individuals, it is necessary to describe environmental structures that arise at scales higher than that of the individual animal–environment system. It will be necessary to go beyond affordances and to develop tools (new ones and existing ones) for describing the environment at interpersonal or collective scales, incorporating symbolic and material culture

— Ed Baggs, ‘All Affordances Are Social: Foundations of a Gibsonian Social Ontology’,

Looking back on the ecological psychology scene of the early 1980s, Tim Ingold recalls a community united in opposition to cognitivismbut also fiercely divided, not least over how affordances could at one and the same time be both intrinsic properties of objects in themselves and yet also existing "only insofar as they are realized in the activity of a creature for which, or for whom, they are of consequence." Such controversies continue to this day, with the likes of Anthony Chemero arguing that affordances must be understood to be relational, and the likes of Andrew Wilson arguing that they need to be understood as "dispositional properties of task environments which can be perceived via "lawfully created ecological information variables in ambient perceptual arrays."

In 2018, Tim Ingold noted the end of his dalliance with affordances, arguing for a need "to think differently of the imagination: not as a capacity to construct images, or as a power of mental representation, but more fundamentally as a way of living creatively in a world that is not already created, already formed, but one that is itself crescent, always in formation… [as] a world without objects." More recent critiques include one from 2021, relating to the expressive and aesthetic qualities of artifacts and buildings, where Rob Withagen and Alan Costall declared themselves "no longer convinced that Gibson’s concept of affordances is sufficient to capture what the environment means to us." By 2023, Miguel Segundo-Ortin Manuel Heras-Escribano were discussing The risk of trivializing affordances in relation to supposed mental and cognitive affordances.

Related

Principles

• reference related principles here...

Frameworks

• Cynefin
• Estuarine framework
• Flexuous curves

Concepts and metaphors

• Agency
• Assemblage
• Chronos
• Counterfactual
• Ecosystem
• Kairos
• Sense-making

Methods

• Constraint mapping

References

Articles and books

• James J.Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)
• Karen E. Adolph, An Ecological Approach to Learning in (Not and) Development, Human Development (2019) 63 (3-4): 180–201.
• Tim Ingold, Back to the future with the theory of affordances, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8:1-2, 39-44 (2018)
• Mangalam, M., Hajnal, A., & Kelty-Stephen, D.G. (Eds.). The Modern Legacy of Gibson's Affordances for the Sciences of Organisms (1st ed.), Routledge, 2024.
• Rietveld, Erik, and Julian Kiverstein A Rich Landscape of Affordances.” Ecological Psychology 26 (4) : 325–52 (2014)
• Woods, C. T. and Davids, K. (2021) ‘“You Look at an Ocean; I See the Rips, Hear the Waves, and Feel the Currents”: Dwelling and the Growth of Enskiled Inhabitant Knowledge’, Ecological Psychology, 33(3–4), pp. 279–296
• Mark Reybrouck, Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance, Springer (January 29, 2012)
• Nick Brancazio, Being Perceived and Being “Seen”: Interpersonal Affordances, Agency, and Selfhood, Frontiers in Psychology (July 30, 2020)

Blog posts

• Dave Snowden, Cynefin & Ethics (2 of 2), Cognitive Edge Blog (December 19, 2021), quotes Gibson's book and establishes connections between affordances and ethics, and with other concepts