This introductory chapter aims to offer a brief but general overview that helps readers to capture the spirit of what does it mean to understand cognition from the perspective of affordances and ecological psychology. For this reason, sometimes I introduce some key terms rather quick, or even offer some definitions that are allegorical and suggestive, but this is just for the sake of the narrative. Key concepts mentioned in this chapter will be defined more technically in the rest of the book. In what follows, I offer a general sketch that serves to awake the interest of the reader and motivate the ideas offered in this work.
1.1 A Meaningful World of Promises and Threats
What is cognition? If we look back at the origins of what has been called ‘the cognitive revolution’ or the emergence of the cognitive sciences as a multidisciplinary field of study, our cognitive capacities were defined by the so-called “higher” capacities that we exclusively possess: abstract thinking, speaking, calculating, etc. The leaders of that cognitive revolution identified cognition with the mechanisms for abstract processing or manipulation of representations according to certain rules. Perception and action were taken as the entrance and exit doors of what really mattered: the inner processing. By means of this inner processing, the perceived stimuli of an inert and meaningless world are enriched, stored, and manipulated inside our heads to generate our own values and meanings. This view, then, demarcating the cognitive from the non-cognitive (such as perception and action), became the mainstream approach and seemed to be there to stay. It is still endorsed by many (Aizawa 2015). However, this picture started to change a few decades ago: Approaches such as ecological psychology , phenomenology , and enactivism criticized the representationalist picture of the mind and vindicated the essential cognitive role of perception and action, expanding the boundaries of cognitive processes beyond the brain to the whole body and even to the world. The alleged cognitive revolution of inner processing was nothing but a cognitivist revolution: the imposition of that view, cognitivism , as the only reasonable way of understanding cognition. But, luckily, things changed: Alternative definitions of cognitive phenomena were offered from different principles and scientific tools, and the post-cognitivist approach started to gain momentum in the cognitive sciences. This post-cognitivist approach emphasizes different aspects that were neglected by cognitivism . For example, according to post-cognitivism, cognition is embodied and situated, which means that the body and the environment play an essential role for explaining how an organism develops its cognitive abilities. This is because we cannot fully make sense of how an organism knows how to do something if we do not appeal to the particular history of interactions between a given organism and its particular environment. In this sense, each agent develops its cognitive abilities in a specific spatiotemporal situation. Contrary to cognitivism , abstract information-processing is not the key, since what matters now is the development of an organism’s ability explained in spatial and temporal terms. Cognition is not information-processing , but adaptive behavior: the capacity of the organism to actively and skillfully engage with its environment.
One of the concepts that helped to develop this post-cognitivist approach to cognition was the idea of affordance, a key object of study within ecological psychology . Affordances are the possibilities for action that are available to agents in their environments. According to their defenders, when we explore the environment we do not just perceive physical objects; rather, we also perceive what we can do with them: We perceive the graspability of a cup, the climbability of a step, or the kickability of a ball. Furthermore, it seems that, from this point of view, there is no need to appeal to inner representations, inferences, or computations for making sense of our action if we directly perceive those properties, as ecological psychologists claim. This is because those opportunities for acting are dependent on what we can do with our bodies in a given environment. For example, when seeing a cup, an organism from a species without opposable thumbs could not perceive the graspability of an object, but one with such thumbs could directly perceive it. According to this idea, the surroundings of the organism are populated with all these affordances, which are encountered inasmuch as the animals explore their environment . And, with practice, the organisms learn how to perceive and take advantage of them, so these affordances help them to navigate the environment in a skillful way. These affordances, then, guide and constraint the animals’ behavior, precluding or allowing them to perform certain action, showing them what they can and cannot do. In this picture, the surroundings become meaningful for the organisms in an embodied and situated way. Organisms can control their actions with regard to the affordances of the environment , going from one affordance to another in an unfinished process. This means that organisms do not live in an inert or meaningless world anymore. They are surrounded by promises and threats.
Many disciplines and approaches within post-cognitivism and beyond ecological psychology made extensive use of affordances as a key object of study. Phenomenologists, enactivists, relationalists, dynamicists, all of them found in affordances a new way to emphasize the main ideas that they wanted to champion: the continuity between perception and action, a situated and embodied idea of meaning or value that was not semantic or representational, the priority of skillful and adaptive coping over abstract and intellectual processes, etc. The notion was soon applied to design or architecture, to environmental studies, robotics, and many other fields. Even cognitivists reclaimed affordances as a new object of study: Just in case affordances could be explained in a cognitivist way, it would count as a victory for cognitivism , and information-processing would win again. If affordances seem so central to everyone for making sense of cognition, how comes that such an intuitive and familiar object of perception has taken so long to be an object of study for the behavioral sciences?
My guess is that, until the birth of ecological psychology , we had not enough resources to discover such an object of study. Ecological psychology is an embodied, non-representational, and situated approach to perception and perceptual learning that was pioneered by James J. Gibson and Eleanor J. Gibson. This approach gave shape to the idea of affordance and took it as its main concept. The main problem is that the influence of ecological psychology has not been sufficiently emphasized by those disciplines that made use of affordances, so their popularization came at a price: There has been an abuse of the concept of affordance in the cognitive sciences. The notion has been stripped away from its original context and adapted to other contexts, theories, and approaches, which means that its full potential has not been yet displayed and that its meaning is confused with other elements that have nothing to do with affordances. Some authors outside ecological psychology realized that. Take, for example, this passage:
Far too often I hear graphic designers claim that they have added an affordance to the screen design when they have done nothing of the sort. Usually they mean that some graphical depiction suggests to the user that a certain action is possible. This is not [an] affordance, either real or perceived. Honest, it isn’t. It is a symbolic communication, one that works only if it follows a convention understood by the user. (Norman 1999: 40)
As I see it, if we do not understand affordances within ecological psychology , we cannot fully comprehend neither the radical consequences that imply the centrality of these objects of study for our cognitive lives, nor the philosophical impact that such concept offers for our theoretical views on cognition.
The idea of affordance was developed by J. J. Gibson in the 1960s and 1970s to serve as the proper object of perception for the emerging field of ecological psychology (although words for affordances were formulated in his first book, see Gibson 1950: 198–199 and Costall 2012: 87). In this sense, affordances and the ecological approach cannot be separated, because the former are the culmination of the latter. Affordances can only make sense, thus, as the consequence of endorsing the principles that gave rise to ecological psychology . If affordances are not conceived from an ecological standpoint, other conceptions of affordances would be untechnical; that is, they would be mere trivializations or honorific titles, something that would resemble the intuition behind the definition, but not the theory or the scientific evidence that proves their existence. It would be like talking about atoms or gravity without appealing to their proper scientific framework or using their true definition, that of the physical sciences.
J. J. Gibson worked in this concept at least from his 1966 book, in which he explains why sensory modalities should be better understood as perceptual systems. The first use of the idea of affordance is offered in that book (J. J. Gibson 1966: 272), where J. J. Gibson defines affordances as the values or meanings of things. This is because what is perceived is the possibility of doing something, something that can only be done by you (or by a particular agent with a similar bodily equipment) and that will offer an outcome that allows you to keep acting: ‘I have coined this word as a substitute for values (…) I mean simply what things furnish, for good or ill’ (Gibson 1966: 285). It is the way in which your surroundings are understood in relation to your capacities, skills, or abilities for performing certain activities.
J. J. Gibson found inspiration for formulating his idea of affordance in two main theories: American pragmatism and Gestalt theory. In fact, the name ‘affordance’ comes from the word Aufforderungscharakter, the demanding character of things that we can find on objects, according to Gestaltists. This was the value character of things for these authors, which was totally phenomenal and could not be found in the physical or scientific realm, according to J. J. Gibson (Gibson 1979/2015: 130–132). One main point of Gestalt psychology is that we perceive the environment as meaningful, and that we cannot find that meaningful character by looking to the physical constituents of our experiences. According to these authors, the phenomenal field of experience (the field in which the surroundings are presented to the perceiver as unitary) could not be explained by appealing to their simpler or elemental constituents: Reductionism was not an option. Experience of these consistent and meaningful objects (the Gestalten) should be explained by appealing to its own level of study or analysis, not by reducing them to their physical basis. This non-reductionist approach and the unitary character of experience, along with the demanding character of the objects of perception, were inherited by J. J. Gibson for formulating his ecological approach.
However, as I see it, J. J. Gibson rejected the opposition of a phenomenological versus a scientific or fact-stating description of reality. He did not oppose that dichotomy qua dichotomy, but he rejected all views in which there is a sharp distinction between value or meaning and scientific explanation. This is because he aimed to naturalize those values or meanings; that is, he aimed to offer a scientific account of the unitary objects of perception without reducing them to their physical constituents (Gibson 1979/2015: 130–132). And American pragmatism revealed as essential for this task: In particular, James’ neutral monism and radical empiricism helped him to achieve this goal (Gibson 1979/2015: 229). According to radical empiricism, all knowledge is derived from immediate experience, and what we experience are not just the objects of perception, but also our relations to them. This is because radical empiricism does not start from two disconnected entities that should be linked (the knower and the known, mind and world) but from the fact that organisms are constantly dealing with their environments: ‘[m]ind and world in short have been evolved together, and in consequence are something of a mutual fit’ (James 1892: 3–4, as quoted in Costall 2001: 477). This radical departure goes against most theories of cognition, such as empiricism and idealism. According to radical empiricism, if all our knowledge should be built upon the knowledge derived from experience, and if mind and world are closely related, experience cannot be taken as separated from its environmental source. But, if mind and world evolved together and are mutually fit, what is the object of our experience in this picture? As Heft claims:
Empiricism and idealism fail to recognize the orderliness of experience because they both fail to take relations in experience as real aspects of immediate experience itself. James’s alternative to these views, radical empiricism, asserts that the relations providing the structure in our experience of the world are intrinsic to the experience. (Heft 2001: 35, emphasis added)
What is important is that, according to radical empiricism, experience is not a Cartesian theater through which we contemplate the world, understood as a way in which we fill a gap between the knower and the known thanks to the mediation of inner representations (Heft 2001: 36–37, 2003). On the contrary, as it has been mentioned, experience should depart from the ‘mutual fit’ of mind and world, so this means that we perceive the relations between mind and world as primitive aspects of our experience: These relations are ‘as “real” as anything else’ (James 1912/1976: 22). Thus, James claimed that the world we perceive is composed of a primitive ‘stuff’ that includes these relations. In this vein, James claimed that there is a world of pure experience, a dynamic and changing world in which we experience those relations immediately and prereflectively (Heft 2001: 26). The idea of ‘pure experience’ refers to ‘a multiplicity of sensible natures’ which are illustrated as follows: ‘It [pure experience] is made of that, of just what it appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not’ (James 1912/1976: 14–15). This pure experience, which includes the relations that we perceive immediately, is the ground of all future knowledge of the knower. The object of our perception is this pure experience, these relations or sensible natures, and we perceive them actively thanks to selectivity: If there is a world of pure experience, a multiplicity of ‘stuff’, then what we perceive are selections or differentiations of this dynamic multiplicity of stuff thanks to a selective function, which is an active capacity of knowers. This offers a dynamic analysis of experience that includes a non-representational and active idea of cognition. As Heft explains it:
What is initially differentiated or selected is a dimension of experience, a relation with its termini being the knower and the object known. Hence, the knower is not introduced into his framework as an isolated Cartesian observer standing apart from the object thought about. Rather, in James’s psychology, the knower appears from the outset in relation to the thing known because of the essential selective character of knowing. (Heft 2001: 28)
The metaphysical consequences of radical empiricism in the work of James have been the subject of considerable debate among experts (Heft 2001: 27). In historical terms, Holt and some other philosophers (the so-called new realists) argued that James endorsed neutral monism . Since J. J. Gibson was deeply influenced by Holt (Gibson 1967: 129), this means that J. J. Gibson’s understanding of James’ ontological view is very likely to be in terms of neutral monism. According to neutral monism, what we perceive are neither purely mental nor purely physical entities, but a ‘stuff’ that can be defined either physically or psychologically, with no preeminence of the scientific explanation over the phenomenal one. To illustrate this, James offers the example of what happens when we are acquainted with a piece of white paper, a situation in which ‘[t]he thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature (…) the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one i...