Abstract
When a person stretches out her hand to me, I see it as an invitation to shake her hand. In other words, I see her hand as 'shake-able'. J.J. Gibson invented a word for this phenomenon. He called it an 'affordance'. The out-stretched hand 'affords' me to shake it. Likewise, a ball flying towards me 'affords' me to catch it, if I have the right kind of skills. It has the affordance 'catch-ability'.
What, now, makes it the case that I see features of situations as 'Q-able'. Clearly, not only the physical properties of the situation or object matter. Characteristics of the perceiver are involved as well, cf. my ball catching skills. A person who's never played a ball game may not see a fast flying ball as catchable.
How should this mode of perception be construed? Does the perceiver 'infer' the affordance from assembled information about himself and the situation? Or is the affordance perceived 'directly', without an inferential process? Gibson endorsed the latter, but his theory doesn't provide a clear story of how direct perception of affordances should be understood. The concept of affordance is attractive for applications in many domains such as social and moral perception, but has also received a lot of criticism for its vagueness and the uncertainty of its explanatory
role.
This project aims at elucidating what it means to perceive affordances in their wide – physical, social and moral – application, and at providing a solid basis for their explanatory role.
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