This article will contest the claim made by many ecological psychologists that affordances are in... more This article will contest the claim made by many ecological psychologists that affordances are invariantly the objects of perception. First of all, the lack of agreement concerning what affordances actually are, what their true nature is, is considerable. Second, the metaphysico-ontological debate has obscured the important misunderstanding consisting in conceiving of affordances as ecological objects or entities of any kind. Third, an appropriate analysis of the notion of affordance will show that this concept is not primarily devoted to perception, and believing that it is has unnecessarily impoverished what we (can) see in our environment. From a Wittgensteinian and an ethnomethodological approach, to make sense of the relation between ourselves and our environments we should use only those concepts available to us, and the internal relation between our everyday concepts and the way we invoke them in practice will be shown. No theory of meaning is needed here.
This article will contest the claim made by many ecological psychologists that affordances are in... more This article will contest the claim made by many ecological psychologists that affordances are invariantly the objects of perception. First of all, the lack of agreement concerning what affordances actually are, what their true nature is, is considerable. Second, the metaphysico-ontological debate has obscured the important misunderstanding consisting in conceiving of affordances as ecological objects or entities of any kind. Third, an appropriate analysis of the notion of affordance will show that this concept is not primarily devoted to perception, and believing that it is has unnecessarily impoverished what we (can) see in our environment. From a Wittgensteinian and an ethnomethodological approach, to make sense of the relation between ourselves and our environments we should use only those concepts available to us, and the internal relation between our everyday concepts and the way we invoke them in practice will be shown. No theory of meaning is needed here.
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