Abstract
In this chapter, I offer a primer on the conceptual foundations for an integration of affordances and social norms. For this, I start from three well-established concepts in the literature: Costall’s idea of canonical affordances, Reed’s idea of fields of promoted action, and my own account of social normativity. Then I explore the conceptual connections among these three notions, and I propose a possible way of understanding how social norms and affordances are related thanks to an adaptation of the idea of fields of promoted action. This framework offers great promise for installing social normativity into the ecological picture of human nature and reality.
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Notes
- 1.
In previous writings I have also analyzed the difference between the normative and the nomological, where I stated that the title “normativity” should be restricted to a social phenomenon and that we should not confuse the peculiar aspects of social normativity with non-social aspects that, while labeled as normative as well, they refer to subpersonal lawful regularities. For a detailed discussion on the issue, see Heras-Escribano (2020a, b), Raja and Chemero (2020), and Mojica (2020).
- 2.
Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, and also to the audiences at the University of Utretch and at the University of the Basque Country for their wonderful comments to previous versions of this work.
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Heras-Escribano, M. (2022). Affordances and Social Normativity: Steps Toward an Integrative View. In: Djebbara, Z. (eds) Affordances in Everyday Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08629-8_7
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