The concept of affordances is rapidly gaining traction in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. Affordances are opportunities for action provided by the environment. An important open question is whether affordances can be used to explain mental action such as attention, counting, and imagination. In this paper, we critically discuss McClelland’s (‘The Mental Affordance Hypothesis’, 2020, Mind, 129(514), pp. 401–427) mental affordance hypothesis. While we agree that the affordance concept can be fruitfully employed to explain mental action, we argue that McClelland’s mental affordance hypothesis contain remnants of a Cartesian understanding of the mind. By discussing the theoretical framework of the affordance competition hypothesis, we sketch an alternative research program based on the principles of embodied cognition that evades the Cartesian worries. We show how paradigmatic mental acts, such as imagination, counting, and arithmetic, are dependent on sensorimotor interaction with an affording environment. Rather than make a clear distinction between bodily and mental action, the mental affordances highlight the embodied nature of our mental action. We think that in developing our alternative research program on mental affordances, we can maintain many of the excellent insights of McClelland’s account without reintroducing the very distinctions that affordances were supposed to overcome.

Key words: affordance, mental action, action selection, attention.

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum, a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value.

Key words: affect and value, central and peripheral nervous system, ecological psychology, enactivism, gut microbiome, pragmatism and phenomenology, physarum polycephalum, realism vs. constructivism.

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: We extend the authors’ arguments on direct perception, specificity, and foundational principles to concerns for theories of joint action. We argue for the usefulness of the affordance concept in an ecological theory of social interaction; highlighting linkages between theories of affordance-based behavior (control) and fundamental, physical principles.

It has been argued that affordances are not meaningful and are thus not useful to be applied in contexts where specifically meaningfulness of experience is at stake (e.g. clinical contexts or discussions of autonomous agency). This paper aims to reconceptualize affordances such as to make them relevant and applicable in such contexts. It starts by investigating the ‘ambiguity’ of (possibilities for) action. In both philosophy of action and affordance research, this ambiguity is typically resolved by adhering to the agents intentions and concerns. I discuss some recent accounts of affordances that highlight these concerns but argue that they tend to adopt an ‘atomistic’ approach where there is no acknowledgement of how these concerns are embedded in the agents wider concerns, values, projects and commitments. An holistic approach that does acknowledge this can be found in psychological research on agents having a sense of what they’re doing. I will discuss this research in the second part of the paper and argue that agents can analogously have a sense of what is afforded. This is deemed the entry point for understanding the meaningfulness of affordances. In the final part of the paper I apply this analysis to recent attempts which seek to make sense of authentic and autonomous agency in terms of affordances.

Key words: affordances, agency, phenomenology, autonomy, meaningfulness, relevance.

The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast existing theoretical approaches to understanding the visual guidance of action and to introduce a new approach. The focus is on tasks, such as steering, braking, and intercepting, that are (more or less) continuously guided on the basis of visual information. The prominent approach, information-based control, captures important aspects of behavior but is incompatible with the theory of affordances, a core principle of the ecological approach. Information-based control also fails to capture how actors behave in ways that take the limits of their action capabilities into account. I attempt to resolve these problems by introducing a new approach, affordance-based control, which asserts that a primary function of vision is to allow actors to see the world in terms of what they can and cannot do. Affordance-based control captures the tight coupling between information in optic flow and movement that is characteristic of visually guided action but also provides a parsimonious explanation of how actors take into account the dynamic properties of their body and the environment.

Insights into the nondual relationship of organism and environment and their processual nature have resulted in numerous efforts at understanding human behavior and motivation from a holistic and contextual perspective. Meadian social theory, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), ecological psychology, and some interpretations of complexity theory persist in relating human activity to the wider and more scientifically valid view that a process metaphysics suggests. I would like to articulate a concept from ecological psychology – that of affordance – and relate it to aspects of phenomenology and neuroscience such that interpretations of the self, cognition, and the brain are understood as similar to interpretations of molar behaviors exhibited in social processes. Experience with meditation as a method of joining normal reflective consciousness with “awareness” is described and suggested as a useful tool in coming to better understand the nondual nature of the body. Relevance: The article directly addresses problems and strategies for conceptualizing and working with nondual phenomena and the paradoxes therein.

Jakob von Uexküll is mostly known for his concept of Umwelt – the meaningful surrounding of animals. von Uexküll insisted vehemently on the fact that Umwelt vindicated Kant’s subjectivist epistemology in the biological domain. However, we argue that a crucial yet widely overlooked development in von Uexküll’s theory of meaning implies a more radical vision strikingly germane to J. J. Gibson’s own direct realist epistemology-ontology and in tension with his own subjectivist concept of Umwelt. Gibson argued that organism and environment are complementary and meaning is not constructed via a subjective act but is directly available in the world as opportunities for action, namely, affordances. We show that von Uexküll’s notion of “functional tone” is similar to Gibson’s concept of affordance in that it includes action in perception. More important, von Uexküll introduces the musical metaphor of harmony to characterize the relationship between animal and environment. Like Gibson’s reciprocity, harmony implies an unmediated isomorphism between the dispositions of the animal and those of the environment that allows for direct perceptual contact with the world and action upon it.

Two important issues of recent discussion in the philosophy of biology and of the cognitive sciences have been the ontological status of living, cognitive agents and whether cognition and action have a normative character per se. In this paper I will explore the following conditional in relation with both the notion of affordance and the idea of the living as self-creation: if we recognize the need to use normative vocabulary to make sense of life in general, we are better off avoiding taking sides on the ontological discussion between eliminativists, reductionists and emergentists. Looking at life through normative lenses is, at the very least, in tension with any kind of realism that aims at prediction and control. I will argue that this is so for two separate reasons. On the one hand, understanding the realm of biology in purely factualist, realist terms means to dispossess it of its dignity: there is more to life than something that we simply aim to manipulate to our own material convenience. On the other hand, a descriptivist view that is committed to the existence of biological and mental facts that are fully independent of our understanding of nature may be an invitation to make our ethical and normative judgments dependent on the discovery of such alleged facts, something I diagnose as a form of representationalism. This runs counter what I take to be a central democratic ideal: while there are experts whose opinion could be considered the last word on purely factual matters, where value is concerned, there are no technocratic experts above the rest of us. I will rely on the ideas of some central figures of early analytic philosophy that, perhaps due to the reductionistic and eliminativist tendencies of contemporary philosophy of mind, have not been sufficiently discussed within post-cognitivist debates.

Key words: enactivism, ecological psychology, affordances, normativity, dispositionalism, analytic philosophy, representationalism, agency

Abstract: I offer a response to some criticisms raised by the commentators on the basis of the following claims: (a) Disagreements and publicness are not counterexamples to my view on normativity, but cases that are explained by appealing to its social basis. (b) It is possible to offer a general view of experience from a situated and embodied approach based on the concept of affordance but without perverting its scientific basis. (c) The Rylean-inspired dispositionalism that I offer can explain why the concept of affordance is based on the organism-environment complementarity explained in nomological or causal terms without committing to substance ontology. I also try to find a common ground that could work for establishing the conceptual basis of a post-cognitivist, affordance-based approach to the mind.

Context: Affordances are gaining momentum as a key object of study in the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind. In The Philosophy of Affordances I propose a new way to understand affordances that avoids some philosophical problems that have been overlooked in the literature. Problem: I summarize two of the problems and discussions that are analyzed in the book: first, the ontological characterization of affordances; second, the alleged normative character of affordances. Method: I apply a conceptual analysis of the main philosophical implications that result from understanding affordances as grounded on the principles of the ecological approach. Results: I propose a dispositional approach to affordances based on a Rylean, non-reductive perspective that avoids both the hidden Platonic commitment of dispositionalism and the alleged normative character attributed to affordances. Implications: Affordances can be understood as dispositional properties from a non-reductive or Rylean perspective, which helps preclude some key problems related to the ontological status of these scientific entities. Constructivist content: Affordances do not imply mental construction; they refer to a new way in which we can describe the reciprocity between organism and environment while avoiding dualizing terms. Keywords: Affordance, agency, ecological information, enactivism, disposition, James J. Gibson, normativity, phenomenology, Gilbert Ryle.