Visual response to affordances
Central to Gibson’s “ecological approach” is his account of what it is that an animal perceives and how. Visual perception cannot be understood, he maintains, if one starts from the perspective of physical optics. A system that sees—a sighted animal—is not responsive, in the first instance, to physically simple properties of light, like color and brightness, but rather to visible features of the environment that matter to it. Gibson calls such features “affordances”.
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 found 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. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (Gibson 1979, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 127)
So for example, a suitably sturdy and flat surface could afford a place to stand or walk to an animal of a certain sort—not to a fish, of course, and what affords standing room to a sparrow might not to a cat (a matter of some importance to both). Nooks can afford shelter and seclusion, green leaves or smaller neighbors can afford lunch, larger neighbors can afford attack, and so on—all depending on who’s looking and with what interests.
—Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded, pp. 15-16. Chapter 9 in Haugeland, J., 2000: Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Harvard University Press. (Citing Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 127.)
author:gibson-james book:gibson-ecological-approach-to-visual-perception author:haugeland-john book:haugeland-having-thought paper:haugeland-mind-embodied-and-embedded snip:visual-response-to-affordances affordance definition perception animal environment list:mind-body-world
