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Artifacts and affordances

  • S.I.: Between Vision and Action
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Abstract

What are the affordances of artifacts? One view is that the affordances of artifacts, just as the affordances of natural objects, pertain to possible ways in which they can be manipulated (e.g., a computer keyboard affords grasping). Another view maintains that, given that artifacts are sociocultural objects, their affordances pertain primarily to their culturally-derived function (e.g., a computer keyboard affords typing). Whereas some have tried to provide a unifying notion of affordance to capture both aspects, here I argue that they should be kept separate. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between standard affordances, which concern the function of artifacts, and ad-hoc affordances, which refer to how artifacts are manipulated. I then argue for the neuropsychological plausibility of such a distinction, linking it to the dissociation between function knowledge and manipulation knowledge. Finally, I defend the equal status of these forms of knowledge and, hence, of standard and ad-hoc affordances, and I show that this has some implications for the debate on the role of motor processes in the conceptual knowledge of artifacts.

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Notes

  1. Heft (1989) defines affordances as dispositional properties of the environment relative to the size of some relevant body feature. His definition is based on the results of the classical empirical study by Warren (1984) on stair climbing affordances, which shows that participants’ judgements about whether or not they could climb the stairs without using their arms or legs are based on a constant ratio between riser height and leg length (this ratio, 0.88, is called by Warren “body-scaled” information).

  2. I do not mean to imply here that declarative knowledge is only of verbal nature. My claim is rather that humans are often capable of making verbal statements on the basis of this knowledge. This is fully consistent with the idea of non-verbal declarative knowledge; e.g., non-human animals may possess declarative knowledge about their environment and their conspecific and express it non-verbally.

  3. Declarative and procedural knowledge need not be of different nature or involve different representational formats. See Sect. 2.1 for further discussion of similar issues. See also Pezzullo (2011) for an account of procedural and declarative knowledge in which they are defined, respectively, as on-line sensorimotor anticipation and off-line simulations of potential actions.

  4. Here and elsewhere in the paper, I discuss the notion of “affordance” drawing some analogies to the notion of “function.” However, as I should make clear with the following discussion, the analogy is restricted only to standard affordances and does not extend to ad-hoc affordances. This has two main implications. First, the relation between standard affordances and functions is not clear-cut. My analysis is consistent with the interpretation that standard affordances are, indeed, functions, that is, they are ontologically the same. Second, given that I emphasize the distinction between standard and ad-hoc affordances, and ad-hoc affordances are not functions, I claim that the notion of “affordance” should not be conflated with that of “function.”

  5. In this respect, the notion of standard affordance is similar to that of canonical affordance introduced by Costall (2012). However, I prefer the current term for two reasons. First, the term “canonical affordance” has been used with different meanings in the philosophical and psychological literature. For example, Borghi and Riggio (2009) use this term to refer to something radically different from what is meant by Costall (2012): in their account, canonical affordances are a subset of temporary affordances and are related to the typical orientation with which we interact with objects—for example, the typical orientation with which we read a book. Second, the adjective “canonical” has become popular in the neuroscientific literature to refer to a class of neurons in the F5 area of the premotor cortex of macaque monkey, which discharge during motor act execution and during simple visual presentation of objects (Rizzolatti and Fadiga 1998; Rizzolatti and Umiltà 2013). Thus, the term “canonical affordances” might be misleading, because it might suggest a special relation to canonical neurons. Exploring the relation between canonical neurons and different types of affordances is beyond the scope of this paper.

  6. This phrasing is consistent with the possibility that in a certain given situation, standard affordances might not be appropriately detected. For example, a mailbox does not afford sending correspondence if it is pulled away and lying on the ground. Still, we would maintain that mailboxes do generally afford sending correspondence. The concept of a mailbox seems to include what mailboxes are generally for, that is, what type of function is usually supported by them.

  7. The paper is neutral with respect to this issue. In fact, a crucial claim of the paper is that it is not necessary to put this issue at stake to address the question of the role of motor processes in the conceptual knowledge of artifacts. See Sect. 3 for a detailed argument in support of this claim.

  8. For example, at an elegant cocktail party, it might be socially inappropriate for a particular agent to stand on the buffet table. This particular ad-hoc affordance is, then, very unlikely to be selected by the agent in that context.

  9. Even though Garcea and Mahon phrase their claim in terms of the necessity of function knowledge for the possession of a minimal concept of an artifact, their discussion of apraxic patients (see below in the text) seems to involve that function knowledge is even sufficient for a minimal concept possession. However, they are careful not to phrase their hypothesis this way, so the following discussion will only assume the requirement of necessity. Whether or not the notion of a minimal or core concept is an adequate one, will remain on the background of the current discussion. For the sake of the argument, I will assume that this notion is adequate, however it should be noted that it is not unproblematic. Pulvermüller (2013) has pointed out to a number of criticisms concerning this notion in his discussion of the idea, presented by Mahon and Caramazza (2008) and Bedny and Caramazza (2011), that the functional contribution of sensorimotor systems to conceptual or semantic processing would consist in enriching (“coloring” and “dressing”, Mahon and Caramazza 2008, p. 68f) the conceptual representation.

  10. It should be noted, though, that apraxic patients have been found to be able to associate an appropriate hand posture to novel objects, but not to familiar objects (Buxbaum et al. 2003). Thus, manipulation knowledge might be compromised in apraxic patients only for familiar objects, but not for novel objects.

  11. The Grounding by Interaction Hypothesis holds that there is a level of conceptual content which is “abstract” or “symbolic”, that is, not constituted by sensory and motor information. However, sensorimotor systems functionally contribute to conceptual processing by “coloring” or “dressing” the concept (Mahon and Caramazza 2008, p. 68f; see also note 10 above).

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Acknowledgements

This research has been presented at the 24th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP) in St. Andrews, at the CoSt2016 in Düsseldorf, and in the research colloquium of the Mercator Research Group “Structure of Memory.” I would like to thank the participants in these events for their helpful comments. Also, I thank the colleagues who contributed to this research with their valuable insights, in particular, Anna M. Borghi, Francesco Ferretti, and Markus Werning.

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    Erica Cosentino

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Cosentino, E. Artifacts and affordances. Synthese 198 (Suppl 17), 4007–4026 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02297-4

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