I’m pretty sure I’ve commented this before elsewhere on LW when a similar discussion came up, but there’s a wealth of literature on this topic but under a different set of terms than “affordance”. SEP feels the right general term is “disposition”, and it generalizes not just to people but to all things.
I don’t think this is quite the same. An affordance is relational and subjective. From Wikipedia:
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.
Hence an affordance depends both on the subject and the object. A disposition seems like a concept which is supposed to apply to the object in itself, independent of subject.
A disposition seems like a concept which is supposed to apply to the object in itself, independent of subject.
I wouldn’t say there’s any existence of an object (as an object) independent of a subject; there’s instead just stuff that’s not differentiated from other stuff because something had to tell the difference, hence I don’t see a real difference here, although the theory of dispositions is jumbled up with lots of philosophy that supposes some kind of essentialism, so it’s reasonable that there might seem to be some difference from affordances under certain assumptions.
Even if so, I miiight contend that there’s an important distinction between (a) affordance as a concept which is itself relational, vs (b) affordance as a predicate on objects, where objects are understood to be subjective. In the guest case, it’s possible for agents to have a shared model in which an object has different affordances for different people. In the second case, if agents try to have a shared model but end up disagreeing about affordances, it’s not clear what they should do.
I’m pretty sure I’ve commented this before elsewhere on LW when a similar discussion came up, but there’s a wealth of literature on this topic but under a different set of terms than “affordance”. SEP feels the right general term is “disposition”, and it generalizes not just to people but to all things.
I don’t think this is quite the same. An affordance is relational and subjective. From Wikipedia:
Hence an affordance depends both on the subject and the object. A disposition seems like a concept which is supposed to apply to the object in itself, independent of subject.
I wouldn’t say there’s any existence of an object (as an object) independent of a subject; there’s instead just stuff that’s not differentiated from other stuff because something had to tell the difference, hence I don’t see a real difference here, although the theory of dispositions is jumbled up with lots of philosophy that supposes some kind of essentialism, so it’s reasonable that there might seem to be some difference from affordances under certain assumptions.
Even if so, I miiight contend that there’s an important distinction between (a) affordance as a concept which is itself relational, vs (b) affordance as a predicate on objects, where objects are understood to be subjective. In the guest case, it’s possible for agents to have a shared model in which an object has different affordances for different people. In the second case, if agents try to have a shared model but end up disagreeing about affordances, it’s not clear what they should do.