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Jan 10, 2020
The Philosophy of Affordances
Summary
Ecological psychology is one of a number of contemporary theories that explains the mind in terms of embodiment and environmental situatedness, rather than inner symbol manipulation by brains. J. J. Gibson, a founder ecological psychology, coined the term “affordance” to express a core concept of the view: as embodied, situated organisms we do not simply perceive objects, such as a chair or a tree, but rather we perceive the object as something that is sit-on-able or climbable. In The Philosophy of Affordances (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), Manuel Heras Escribano elaborates this idea of affordances as directly perceived possibilities for action available to us in an environment. Heras Escribano, a research fellow at the University of the Basque Country, considers the relation of affordances to values, the type of ecological information we perceive, the nature of agency from the ecological psychological perspective, and a political dimension to affordances.
Your Host
Carrie Figdor
Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.