Abstract
This short essay describes the origin of my intellectual interest in James Gibson’s An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. I came to Gibson’s ideas via prior interest in phenomenological philosophy and behavior-based robotics. I use this origin to make sense of my promotion of a relational approach to affordances over the more typically held dispositional approach developed by Turvey, Shaw, Reed, and Mace. I finish with some speculation about the future of scientific research on affordances.
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Notes
- 1.
Thanks to Matt Bateman for helping me find this quote.
- 2.
You might have heard otherwise on Twitter. Don’t believe it.
- 3.
Elmo Feiten (2020) argues that Baggs and I, along with many other embodied cognitive scientists, are not using the term “umwelt” in its original von Uexküllian sense. He is probably right about that.
- 4.
There is a potentially slippery slope toward ableism lurking here. The habitat has to be understood in terms of the statistically average member of the population, which is not the same as the “normal” member of the population.
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Chemero, A. (2022). A Path to Ecological Psychology. In: Djebbara, Z. (eds) Affordances in Everyday Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08629-8_4
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