Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Perceiving Potentiality: A Metaphysics for Affordances

  • Published:
Topoi Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

According to ecological psychology, animals perceive not just the qualities of things in their environment, but their affordances: in James Gibson’s words, ’what things furnish, for good or ill’. I propose a metaphysics for affordances that fits into a contemporary anti-Humean metaphysics of powers or potentialities. The goal is to connect two debates, one in the philosophy of perception and one in metaphysics, that stand to gain much from each other.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. In what follows, I will often speak of the content of perceptual experience; but what I say should be equally compatible with a Gibsonian or otherwise direct view of perception.

  2. It is sometimes claimed that affordances ‘cut[…] across the dichotomy of subjective-objective’ (Gibson 1986, p. 129). When spelling out the supposed subjective aspect of affordances, however, theorists generally point out that ‘affordances are properties of the environment taken with reference to an individual’ (Heft 1989, p. 3). The allegedly subjective aspect of affordances is just their relationality, as highlighted in (A3) below. I find it unhelpful to use the terminology of objective/subjective here. Note, by the way, that (A2) is not intended to exclude the existence of social affordances, which are in some way mind-dependent qua social. The point of (A3) is merely to stress that the affordance is independent of anyone’s perception of it.

  3. Turvey (1992) suggests that we focus on affordances for action as the central case; Michaels (2003) argues that there are only affordances for action, while Scarantino (2003) gives an account for both action-related affordances and happening-related affordances.

  4. Readers interested in a more impartial overview of the literature on dispositions are referred to Choi and Fara (2012) and Cross (2012).

  5. See, for instance, Martin (1994), Lewis (1997), Bird (1998), Manley and Wasserman (2008), and Steinberg (2010).

  6. Manley and Wasserman account for gradability in terms of proportions of conditionals: something x is more fragile than y, for instance, if more conditionals of the form ‘if x were struck in such-and-such a precise way, then x would break’ are true than corresponding conditionals for y. See Vetter (2011) for an argument that this view very nearly collapses into my own, and that mine is preferable for being more unified. Lowe (2011) and Aimar (2018) offer possibility views that do without graded possibilities.

  7. Many of them correspond to the old Aristotelian idea of active and passive powers, but the classification into active and passive has largely disappeared.

  8. Molnar (2003) also recognizes such joint potentialities but argues that they obviate the need to stipulate extrinsic potentialities.

  9. An anonymous reviewer suggested renaming them as specific and generic extrinsic potentialities. I have not followed the suggestion because, as we shall see below, the term ‘generic’ already has a use in the affordances literature. But if the alternative terminology helps, the reader is invited to substitute ‘specific’ for ‘de re’ and ‘generic’ for ‘de dicto’ in what follows.

  10. Not everyone agrees that dispositions need not be surefire. But I will not pursue the point since I am about to raise a different objection.

  11. Proponents of the dispositional view of abilities include Moore (1911), Vihvelin (2004), Fara (2008); for criticism, see Clarke (2009), Whittle (2010), and Vetter (2016).

  12. As we have seen above, Scarantino (2003) explicitly makes room for probabilistic affordances, but he records his own inclination to restrict affordances to reliable cases. Note that in the examples I have given, not only the conditional but also the corresponding disposition ascription seems implausible. I should note that the objection is inspired by a structurally similar problem raised by Romy Jaster against dispositional accounts of abilities (Jaster forthcoming; Jaster and Vetter 2017). Other objections against dispositional conceptions of abilities will also apply to the envisaged view of affordances: it is not, for instance, clear that an intention is always involved in the exercise of an ability or an affordance. But pursuing this issue takes us deep into issues about intending and trying in the philosophy of action; see Vetter (2016, Sects. 2.2–2.4) for a criticism of dispositional views of abilities along these lines.

  13. Of course, everything trivially entails possibilities such as the possibility that it be raining or not raining. I count on the reader’s sense of interpretative charity in isolating the relevant possibilities.

  14. I have said ‘may be’ because relational views, which I will discuss below, will differ. If they were to identify affordances with something categorical, they would identify them with the ratio between the animal’s leg length and the height of the stair, or between the animal’s hand span and the diameter of the object; and so forth. (See Stoffregen 2003, p. 123.) I will return to these relational views in Sect. 6.

  15. Scarantino (2003) has claimed that an affordance qua disposition is ‘subjective in the sense of reponse-dependent’, while ‘the sense in which affordances are also objective is the sense in which a disposition in good standing has a basis constituted by objective properties’ (Scarantino 2003, p. 952). But as noted above (Footnote 2), the supposed subjectivity of the disposition is just its relational nature, which we may interpret in different ways (I interpret Scarantino’s view as identifying affordances with certain de re-extrinsic dispositions; see Sect. 6). None of these interpretations makes the relevant dispositions subjective, even in the sense of typical response-dependent properties, whose possession depends on the potential experiences of an observer. An affordance does not depend on experiences; it simply depends, like other extrinsic potentialities, on the features of objects other than its bearer.

  16. For helpful discussion of earlier versions of this paper, I would like to thank Simona Aimar, Daniel James, and the participants of my research colloquium at Freie Universität Berlin. Thanks also to Rebekka Hufendiek and Anna Welpinghus for pointing me to affordances in the first place, and to some of the relevant literature. Finally, I’d like to thank the editors of this special issue and two anonymous reviewers for prompting me to think about the issues involved here and to make various improvements on the paper.

References

  • Aimar S (2018) Disposition ascriptions. Philos Stud. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1084-9

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Basingerhorn AD, Zaal FTJM, Smith J, Pepping G-J (2012) On possibilities for action: the past, present and future of affordance research. Avant 3:54–69

    Google Scholar 

  • Bird A (1998) Dispositions and antidotes. Philos Q 48:227–234

    Google Scholar 

  • Bird A (2007) Nature’s metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Bird A (2018) Fundamental powers, evolved powers, and mental powers. Aristot Soc Suppl Vol 92:247–275

    Google Scholar 

  • Chemero A (2003) An outline of a theory of affordances. Ecol Psychol 15:181–195

    Google Scholar 

  • Chemero A (2009) Radical embodied cognitive science. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Choi S, Fara M (2012) Dispositions. In: Zalta EN (ed) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford University, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarke R (2009) Dispositions, abilities to act, and free will: the new dispositionalism. Mind 118:323–351

    Google Scholar 

  • Cross T (2012) Recent work on dispositions. Analysis 72:115–124

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellis B (2001) Scientific essentialism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Fara M (2008) Masked abilities and compatibilism. Mind 117:843–865

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor JA, Pylyshyn ZW (1981) How direct is visual perception? Some reflections on Gibson’s “ecological approach”. Cognition 9:139–196

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore GE (1911) Ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson JJ (1966) The senses considered as perceptual systems. Houghton-Mifflin, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson JJ (1986) The ecological approach to visual perception. Psychology Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Heft H (1989) Affordances and the body: an intentional analysis of Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception. J Theory Soc Behav 19:1–30

    Google Scholar 

  • Heil J (2010) Powerful qualities. In: Marmodoro A (ed) The metaphysics of powers: their grounding and their manifestation. Routledge, New York, pp 58–72

    Google Scholar 

  • Hufendiek R (2016) Affordances and the normativity of emotions. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1144-7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jacobs JD (2011) Powerful qualities, not pure powers. Monist 94:81–102

    Google Scholar 

  • Jaster R (forthcoming) Agents’ Abilities. De Gruyter, Berlin

  • Jaster R, Vetter B (2017) Dispositional accounts of abilities. Philos Compass 12:e12432

    Google Scholar 

  • Jaworski W (2016) Structure and the metaphysics of mind: how hylomorphism solves the mind-body problem. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Jones KS (2003) What is an affordance? Ecol Psychol 15:107–114

    Google Scholar 

  • Kadar E, Shaw RE (2000) Toward an ecological field theory of perceptual control of locomotion. Ecol Psychol 12:141–180

    Google Scholar 

  • Kratzer A (1981) The notional category of modality. In: Eikmeyer HJ, Rieser H (eds) Words, worlds, and contexts: new approaches in word semantics. De Gruyter, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  • Kratzer A (1991) Modality. In: von Stechow A, Wunderlich D (eds) Semantik: ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 639–650

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis D (1986a) On the plurality of worlds. Blackwell, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis D (1986b) Philosophical papers, vol II. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis D (1997) Finkish dispositions. Philos Q 47:143–158

    Google Scholar 

  • Lowe EJ (2011) How not to think of powers: a deconstruction of the “dispositions and conditionals” debate. Monist 94:19–33

    Google Scholar 

  • Manley D, Wasserman R (2007) A gradable approach to dispositions. Philos Q 57:68–75

    Google Scholar 

  • Manley D, Wasserman R (2008) On linking dispositions and conditionals. Mind 117:59–84

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin CB (1994) Dispositions and conditionals. Philos Q 44:1–8

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin CB (1998) Rules and powers. Philos Perspect 12:284–312

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin CB (2008) The mind in nature. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • McGinn Colin (1996) Another look at color. J Philos 93:537–553

    Google Scholar 

  • McKitrick J (2003) A case for extrinsic dispositions. Australas J Philos 81:155–174

    Google Scholar 

  • Michaels CF (2003) Affordances: four points of debate. Ecol Psychol 15:135–148

    Google Scholar 

  • Molnar G (2003) Powers: a study in metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Mumford S, Anjum RL (2011a) Dispositional modality. In: Gethmann CF (ed) Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft, Deutsches Jahrbuch Philosophie 2. Meiner, Hamburg

    Google Scholar 

  • Mumford S, Anjum RL (2011b) Getting causes from powers. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Mumford S, Anjum RL (2018) What tends to be: The philosophy of dispositional modality. Routledge, London and New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Nanay B (2011a) Do we see apples as edible? Pac Philos Q 92:305–322

    Google Scholar 

  • Nanay B (2011b) Do we sense modalities with our sense modalities? Ratio 24:299–310

    Google Scholar 

  • Nanay B (2012) Action-oriented perception. Eur J Philos 20:430–446

    Google Scholar 

  • Nanay B (2013) Between perception and action. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Noë A (2004) Action in perception. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Plantinga A (1974) The nature of necessity. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Portner P (2009) Modality. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Prior EW, Pargetter R, Jackson F (1982) Three theses about dispositions. Am Philos Q 19:251–257

    Google Scholar 

  • Prosser S (2011) Affordances and phenomenal character in spatial perception. Philos Rev 120:475–513

    Google Scholar 

  • Reed ES (1996) Encountering the world: toward and ecological psychology. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Rietveld E, Kiverstein J (2014) A rich landscape of affordances. Ecol Psychol 26:325–352

    Google Scholar 

  • Rosen G (1990) Modal fictionalism. Mind 99:327–354

    Google Scholar 

  • Scarantino A (2003) Affordances explained. Philos Sci 70:949–961

    Google Scholar 

  • Siegel S (2014) Affordances and the contents of perception. In: Brogaard B (ed) Does perception have content? Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Steinberg JR (2010) Dispositions and subjunctives. Philos Stud 148:323–341

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoffregen TA (2003) Affordances as properties of the animal-environment system. Ecol Psychol 15:115–134

    Google Scholar 

  • Tillas A, Vosgerau G, Seuchter T, Caiani SZ (2016) Can affordances explain behavior? Revi Philos Psychol. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0310-7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turvey MT (1992) Affordances and prospective control: an outline of the ontology. Ecol Psychol 4:173–187

    Google Scholar 

  • Vetter B (2011) On linking dispositions and which conditionals? Mind 120:1173–1189

    Google Scholar 

  • Vetter B (2014) Dispositions without conditionals. Mind 123:129–156

    Google Scholar 

  • Vetter B (2015) Potentiality: from dispositions to modality. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Vetter B (2016) Are abilities dispositions? Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1152-7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vetter B (2018) Evolved powers, artefact powers, and dispositional explanations. Aristot Soc Suppl Vol 92:277–297

    Google Scholar 

  • Vihvelin K (2004) Free will demystified: a dispositionalist account. Philos Top 32:427–450

    Google Scholar 

  • Whittle A (2010) Dispositional abilities. Philos Impr 10:1–23

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Barbara Vetter

Authors
  1. Barbara Vetter
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Barbara Vetter.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Research Involving Human and Animal Participants

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Vetter, B. Perceiving Potentiality: A Metaphysics for Affordances. Topoi 39, 1177–1191 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9618-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9618-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation