My major problem with this use of the “affordance” terminology (which I’m mostly familiar with from the perspective of UX design) is that you are inverting the role of agent and object. In the original usage of the term, and affordance is something that the object has which both signals to the agent that an action is possible and makes that action easy to carry out. Most of your psychological examples make the “affordance” a property of the agent, referring to the agent’s predisposition and ability to carry out an action in a particular context. It’s not clear to me whether you even noticed that you inverted the locus in your extended examples.
This makes it hard for me to read your examples, and I wish we had a different word for the agent-focused notion of “affordance” and kept the original notion of “affordance” for the object-focused concept.
My understanding is that the concept is supposed to be a fully relational one, indicating something about the interaction of a subject and object. So I would say a door “has an affordance” (for a person to open it) and a person “has an affordance” (to open the door), much like I would say both people in a romantic relationship “have a romantic relationship” (with each other).
In the original usage of the term, and affordance is something that the object has which both signals to the agent that an action is possible and makes that action easy to carry out.
The key to understanding affordance is that it is relational and characterizes the suitability of the environment to the observer, and so, depends on their current intentions and their capabilities. For instance, a set of steps which rises four feet high does not afford climbing to the crawling infant, yet might provide rest to a tired adult or the opportunity to move to another floor for an adult who wished to reach an alternative destination. This notion of intention/needs is critical to an understanding of affordance, as it explains how the same aspect of the environment can provide different affordances to different people, and even to the same individual at another point in time.
You wish for different terms:
This makes it hard for me to read your examples, and I wish we had a different word for the agent-focused notion of “affordance” and kept the original notion of “affordance” for the object-focused concept.
I suppose it would be possible, like a King “has subjects” and the subjects “have a ruler”. So in an affordance relationship, the object could “have a an afforder” and the subject could “have an affordee” or something like that. But personally I find it perfectly intuitive to say that both “have an affordance”, and understand that different (but symmetric) things are meant in each case.
The concept is definitely relational; no disagreement there.
My objection is more narrowly linguistic: the syntactic structure used to describe the “affordance” relationship is Object affords Action to Agent. All of your quotes from Wikipedia follow this example, eg. the “set of steps… does not afford climbing to the crawling infant” (emphasis mine). I find no examples of this syntactic structure being inverted to allow Agent affords Action. Consequently, it seems that the noun “affordance” is best applied to the Object’s side of this relationship, and not the Agent side, since the Object is the syntactic subject.
Conceptually, this does matter because the affordance relationship is non-symmetric: what the Object does (“affords”) is very different from what the Agent does! Aside from the syntactic objection, I think that it obscures the topic to have the same word used for both sides of a non-symmetrical relation. Your suggestion of using “have an affordance” is possibly usable though I still think that it invites confusion. I do like the phrase ” behavioural repertoire”, mentioned in another comment, but it does not lend itself to being verbed very well. Another suggestion might be “reciprocate” or “engage”: an Agent engages the affordance by carrying out the Action in the manner intended. (Does the existing literature have a verb that slots into this construction?)
I don’t know. Words are hard. I still think that it’s important to have different words for the Object’s and the Agent’s respective contributions to the activity.
Yeah, agent vs object is the main thought I have as well after reading this post.
Coming from the perspective of affordances as belonging to the object, I have been thinking about the following recently. In programming, one of the big reasons to “choose the right tool for the job” is because of affordances. For example, suppose you have a bunch of functions that you want to wrap in a namespace. You can have a class and then make all of the functions static methods of the class. This is something I see Ruby programmers do. However, a class affords a few important things that aren’t being used here. Mainly object instantiation and inheritance (if you don’t need inheritance you can use a factor instead of a class). So then, due to the misleading affordances, I see a class with static methods as the wrong tool for the job.
My major problem with this use of the “affordance” terminology (which I’m mostly familiar with from the perspective of UX design) is that you are inverting the role of agent and object. In the original usage of the term, and affordance is something that the object has which both signals to the agent that an action is possible and makes that action easy to carry out. Most of your psychological examples make the “affordance” a property of the agent, referring to the agent’s predisposition and ability to carry out an action in a particular context. It’s not clear to me whether you even noticed that you inverted the locus in your extended examples.
This makes it hard for me to read your examples, and I wish we had a different word for the agent-focused notion of “affordance” and kept the original notion of “affordance” for the object-focused concept.
Thinking about this a bit more, I think a natural usage, which is pretty compatible with what I’ve experienced, would be:
A path affords walking.
A person has an affordance for walking down the path.
My understanding is that the concept is supposed to be a fully relational one, indicating something about the interaction of a subject and object. So I would say a door “has an affordance” (for a person to open it) and a person “has an affordance” (to open the door), much like I would say both people in a romantic relationship “have a romantic relationship” (with each other).
My basis for thinking it’s supposed to be relational is the Wikipedia article:
You wish for different terms:
I suppose it would be possible, like a King “has subjects” and the subjects “have a ruler”. So in an affordance relationship, the object could “have a an afforder” and the subject could “have an affordee” or something like that. But personally I find it perfectly intuitive to say that both “have an affordance”, and understand that different (but symmetric) things are meant in each case.
The concept is definitely relational; no disagreement there.
My objection is more narrowly linguistic: the syntactic structure used to describe the “affordance” relationship is Object affords Action to Agent. All of your quotes from Wikipedia follow this example, eg. the “set of steps… does not afford climbing to the crawling infant” (emphasis mine). I find no examples of this syntactic structure being inverted to allow Agent affords Action. Consequently, it seems that the noun “affordance” is best applied to the Object’s side of this relationship, and not the Agent side, since the Object is the syntactic subject.
Conceptually, this does matter because the affordance relationship is non-symmetric: what the Object does (“affords”) is very different from what the Agent does! Aside from the syntactic objection, I think that it obscures the topic to have the same word used for both sides of a non-symmetrical relation. Your suggestion of using “have an affordance” is possibly usable though I still think that it invites confusion. I do like the phrase ” behavioural repertoire”, mentioned in another comment, but it does not lend itself to being verbed very well. Another suggestion might be “reciprocate” or “engage”: an Agent engages the affordance by carrying out the Action in the manner intended. (Does the existing literature have a verb that slots into this construction?)
I don’t know. Words are hard. I still think that it’s important to have different words for the Object’s and the Agent’s respective contributions to the activity.
Yeah, agent vs object is the main thought I have as well after reading this post.
Coming from the perspective of affordances as belonging to the object, I have been thinking about the following recently. In programming, one of the big reasons to “choose the right tool for the job” is because of affordances. For example, suppose you have a bunch of functions that you want to wrap in a namespace. You can have a class and then make all of the functions static methods of the class. This is something I see Ruby programmers do. However, a class affords a few important things that aren’t being used here. Mainly object instantiation and inheritance (if you don’t need inheritance you can use a factor instead of a class). So then, due to the misleading affordances, I see a class with static methods as the wrong tool for the job.
I think behavioral repertoire captures this concept (I’m not too familiar with its usage: I have only heard it once).