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Mind in Action

This post is by Marta Jorba and Pablo Lopez Silva, who have recently guest edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology entitled Mind in Action: Expanding the concept of affordance.


Marta Jorba


Organisms relate to their environment through action. Human behavior is guided by the perception of certain opportunities for action that specific objects invite. For example, when playing football, one does not only perceive the ball as round, moving, having certain shades of color, etc. One also perceives the ball as kickable. The perception of the ball as kickable is constitutive of our visual experience of the ball. J.J. Gibson, the father of ecological psychology, captures this phenomenon with the notion of affordances. 

Perceiving a ball as kickable is, then, the perception of an opportunity for a certain action, namely, to kick the ball. For Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), perceptual affordances directly relate organisms to their environments through opportunities for action explaining the efficiency of our automatic attunement with the physical world. 

While the study of affordance perception has allowed the specification of certain laws governing direct perception of action opportunities in scientific fields, the notion of affordance has been also explored in several other areas of inquiry and fields of research. Especially relevant to our Special Issue was the extension of the notion into the mental or cognitive realm, a movement that affordance research has experienced in recent years. 

The idea is that, alongside perceiving affordances for bodily action, we also perceive affordances for mental action, such as counting, attending, imagining, or categorizing (see Proust 2016; Metzinger 2017; McClelland 2020; Jorba 2020; Gray 2024 for different proposals). This program is further developed in this Special Issue by Joëlle Proust, Tom McClelland and Monika Dunin-Kozicka and is criticized by Miguel Segundo-Ortín and Manuel Heras-Escribano, who challenge the approach and recommend a more orthodox approach to affordances as restricted to perceptual experience. 


Pablo Lopez Silva


The expansion of the concept of affordance has addressed and informed debates about several related areas and fields. We briefly present them in relation to the contributions we can find in this Special Issue. The concept of affordance is linked to:

All these works contribute directly or indirectly to the ongoing debate about the very definition of the notion of affordance and what it involves (Shaw et al., 2018; López-Silva, 2020; López-Silva et al. 2022; Ratcliffe & Broome 2022, among others). 

As shown in this Special Issue, for some authors, this exploratory agenda leads to several important problems due to the perceptual origin of the notion; for others, such projects could offer unique forms of enriching debates within psychology, philosophy, cognitive sciences, and psychopathology. "Mind in Action: Expanding the concept of affordance" presents an updated look at cutting-edge contributions on some of the core controversies and advancements in the discussion about affordances. 

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