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Perceiving Affordances and Social Cognition

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Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition

Part of the book series: Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality ((SIPS,volume 4))

Abstract

Navigating successfully through the environment requires perceiving what action possibilities the ecological environment affords to us. Though ecological affordances have been discussed intensively in the Gibsonian tradition, little attention has been paid to the role that social cognition plays for our perception of ecological affordances. The present chapter aims to fill this gap in the debate. In a first step, I will provide a relational account of affordances according to which perceiving affordances are perceiving one’s own action possibilities (i.e. the ‘animal relatum’) in relation to particular aspects of the environment (i.e. the ‘environment relatum’), including physical, intentional, and institutional aspects. In a second step, I discuss the role of social cognition for the perception of ecological affordances in social and institutional contexts. Here, I distinguish between ‘social cognition in a narrow sense’ that is required to understand the attitudes and intentions of a particular person in a social context and ‘social cognition in a broad sense’ that is required to understand the shared intention of a social group in an institutional context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other approaches to affordances deny the notion of negative affordances. Michaels (2003, p. 137), for example, defends the view that affordances need to be action related. Basically, Michaels distinguishes between two categories of ‘affordances’; (1) action-related affordances such as stairs that afford climbing and (2) affordances in which actions are conspicuously absent such as a cliff or a snake that might afford danger or particular substances that afford nutrition. Since danger and nutrition are not actions in the sense of movements that are coordinated in order to achieve some goal, Michaels does not rank them among affordances.

  2. 2.

    Of course, the perceived ‘flexibility’ of the use of an object’s physical aspects ‘for whatever purpose’ is relative to the perceiving system. That is, although the secateurs may, in general, be perceived as being heavy and big enough to be a tool for breaking the window, I may not perceive this sensorimotor affordance because I do not think I am strong enough to pick up and throw the secateurs.

  3. 3.

    This does not necessarily presuppose the possession of a linguistic concept of pork, but only the capability to categorize pork according to specific physical aspects (colour, consistency etc.). Already 11-month-olds have been found to be able to categorize ecological objects (Pauen 2002).

  4. 4.

    That is, social cognition in a broad sense also comes into play when the interacting agents form a shared intention outside of an institutional setting. This, however, is not the focus of the present investigation.

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Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the support provided by the Humboldt Foundation and Albert Newen for a research stay in Memphis, USA, where I finished this chapter. I would like to thank Shaun Gallagher, Steve Butterfill, Nivedita Gangopadhyay, John Michael, and one anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter as well as Deborah Tollefsen and the auditory of the colloquium of the Philosophy Department of the University of Memphis for fruitful discussions. Finally, I would like to thank Adrian Smith and Joel Krueger for organizing a conference on affordances at the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen, 2010, which inspired me to dip deeper into that debate.

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  1. Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Anika Fiebich

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  1. Anika Fiebich
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Correspondence to Anika Fiebich .

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  1. School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Mattia Gallotti

  2. Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    John Michael

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Fiebich, A. (2014). Perceiving Affordances and Social Cognition. In: Gallotti, M., Michael, J. (eds) Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9147-2_11

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