Responding to the Affordances

In this section I will discuss the relationship between Gibson’s conception of affordances and what Dreyfus makes of them. We have seen that for Dreyfus the basic role of perception is that it opens up a world; consisting of pragmata (usable entities, artefacts and tools) that Heidegger calls Zuhanden. Remember the quote from the introduction to Skillful Coping in which Wrathall accounts for the fact that Dreyfus

sees the world at its most basic level as a rich and fine-grained structure of functionality relationships.

What we normally encounter is not a desk, and certainly not an object with properties of shape, dimension, color, hardness, and so on. What we first encounter is an affordance—a “for sitting at and writing on.” As Dreyfus puts it, the world is made up of “for-whats” not “whats”.¹²⁸

127 Gibson, J.J. (1979) p.8

128 Wrathall (2014) quoting Dreyfus.

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It would appear that the world is, for Dreyfus, “at its most basic level” made up of affordances.

This seems to be compatible with Gibson’s view. He introduced the concept of affordances as perceptually basic, that is, the way he sees it, we do not first encounter fundamental “bare”

qualities of say, shape and color (two favorite examples in traditional perception studies), which the mind, by its operation(s) then categorize into the affordances we end up perceiving. We do not first perceive a brown-ish color along with a semi-rectangular shape, and then represent it as sittable; no we first encounter the tree stump in all its alluring sittability only then to talk about its color, shape, the fineness of its grain, the type of tree it belonged to etc. In other words, tree stump shows up for us as active living creatures, which, now having been overly active in our brisk walks through the woods, require rest. The Gibsonian upshot is that one basic “condition of the possibility” of perception simply is that we are alive an active, and respond to the features and objects of the world in virtue of being thus animated: beings for whom things matter. This basic fact holds for any active living creature, including ourselves.

The theory of affordances implies that to see things is to see how to get about among them and what to do or not do with them. If this is true, visual perception serves behavior, and behavior is controlled by perception. The observer who does not move but only stands and looks is not behaving at the moment, it is true, but he cannot help seeing the affordances for behavior in whatever he looks at.¹²⁹

Furthermore, given our bodily structure of bendable knees and firm buttocks, (i.e. that we can sit) and given that we, as humans have learned to sit, the condition of the tree stump

showing up for us is met (along with the tree stump actually being there of course). If we are tired, the sitting-affordances offered by the tree stump solicits us to sit, that is, it pulls our

attention in, and draws our bodies to move in the appropriate way. Dreyfus introduces, to expand upon Gibson, “solicitations” as relevant affordances. The affordances are (always already) there, and can in a sense be viewed as perfectly objective in the sense that they are in the world, yet, whether they show up to us or not is dependent upon the situation, our current state of fatigue, attention, needs, intentions etc. Compatible with the notion of “skillful coping” in perception, affordances can, and often do, have motivational content. That the content of perception is motivational means, roughly speaking, that it is a part of its very constitution that the animal is drawn to move as a response to it; that it is part of the very experience of, the smell of freshly

129 Gibson, J.J. (1979), p.223.

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made stew, that it draws the subject in so as to move closer to it. The content of perception is motivational when it motivates the animal so as to get closer to the proximal cause of the

perception. In this case, a freshly made stew, so tantalizingly tempting to the olfactory system of the animal (human) exposed to it.

This helps to supply the view central to enactivism, that perception first and foremost serves action. On one interpretation, it is part of the very nature of affordances; that they have this motivational “pulling-and-pushing” value, without which, they wouldn’t be picked up by the animal in its ongoing activity. This account can be problematized, however, for the notion of

“motivation” will differ depending on who you ask. McDowell, for one, would probably say that we are normatively motivated, since whatever we are drawn to respond to, especially in the social sphere, will be saturated by our conceptual capacities. If motivational content is cached out as a basic animal capacity, then conceiving of affordances as dependent on normative-motivational content seems to mark yet another difference between the perceptions of us and other animals, as it, on the McDowellian take, would not be applicable to our animal cousins.

Indeed, even if Dreyfus is opposed to the pervasiveness of conceptual capacities in our lives, he, like McDowell, will probably state that the affordances we disclose and respond to are dependent on normative forces and cultural meanings. But what if there is another way of looking at

“normative” here, one that does not mention cultural or rational capacities at all? Such a view is discussed by Sean D. Kelly, a student of Dreyfus who in turn discusses Merleau-Ponty (whom both Dreyfus and Gibson are heavily influenced by).

[I]t is a part of my visual experience that my body is drawn to move, or at any rate that the context should change, in a certain way. These are inherently normative, rather than descriptive, features of visual experience. They don’t represent in some objective, determinate fashion the way the world is; they say something about how the world ought to be in order for me to see it better. In this way Merleau-Ponty takes very seriously the idea that perception is a way of being involved with the world, not an objective,

determinate way of recording it.¹³⁰

This Merleau-Ponty-inspired account of how the body is “drawn to move” as a

“normative” rather than “descriptive” explanation of comportment can be related to the space of motivations, as indeed it has been other places by Dreyfus. If “descriptive” is tied to mechanical

130 Kelly, S.D. (2005) Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty, p.14.

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processes or “impressions” then this normative account is not in the space of causes. And if we pull down the notion of “normative” and bring I closer to “motivational” then we can avoid unnecessarily high-level, conceptually or culturally penetrated accounts of the preconditions for perceiving affordances.

As I have discussed, another part of the nature of affordances is that they are directly responded to, sans mental, intermediary content. All that is required for a proper perception is having an active body, a body which is not the mediator of perception, but the enabler of it. I will get back to this later, but if the nervous-system evolved for action by being the mediator of impression and response, then most animals with a nervous-system could be said to perceive affordances in one way or another, since affordances are inherently tied to action. Since animals respond to a host of different affordances in their natural habitats, the affordances furthermore can be said to constitute their respective environments. This is supported in Gibson’s discussion of niches in the environment:

Ecologists have the concept of a niche. A species of animal is said to utilize or occupy a certain niche in the environment. This is not quite the same as the habitat of the species; a niche refers more to how an animal lives than to where it lives. I suggest that a niche is a set of affordances.¹³¹

Notice the identification claim: Gibson explicitly states that “a niche is a set of affordances” (my italic) which means that we already at this point can see how important affordances are for any talk of the environment or world the animal is open to. For one important part of my discussion has been not just how an animal or human are open (in virtue of what capacities, the condition of the possibility etc.) but to what is responded to; the content of perception. It should be clear by now that these two aspects of perception are related, as what the animal is open to, what it perceives, is dependent upon how it is open, the nature of its bodily comportment, its abilities and accumulated skills. For McDowell, humans are open to rational structures, reasons for action and propositional content in virtue of our conceptual capacities as language using animals. For Dreyfus, openness is made possible in a combination of bodily skills, and socio-cultural practices that gives us access to an interconnected web of significations our world consist in. The how and the what of perception are thus necessarily linked. Now, that the how and the what of perception

131 Gibson, J.J. (1979) p.128.

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are necessarily linked will obviously also hold for Gibson, with his focus on movement and action. Yet there is an important difference already discerned here, between him and McDowell and Dreyfus. Gibson, not being a philosopher, does not one time mention transcendental

strategies in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, and “phenomenology” is mentioned only once. It would seem that the important takeaway for him is that perception is tied to

meaningful movement humans and animals exhibit, and no talk of “openness” is included in The Ecological Approach. In fact, Gibson is as liable to talk about human and animal perception in the same breath, and as a city as a “habitat”. Mixing up the human and animal world in ways avoided by McDowell and Dreyfus.

When the vistas have been put in order by exploratory locomotion, the invariant structure of the house, the town, or the whole habitat will be apprehended. The hidden and the unbidden become one environment. One can then perceive the ground below the clutter out to the horizon, and at the same time perceive the clutter. One is oriented to the environment. It is not so much having a bird's-eye view of the terrain as it is being everywhere at once. The getting of a bird's-eye view is helpful in becoming oriented, and the explorer will look down from a high place if possible. Homing pigeons are better at orientation than we are.¹³²

“Homing pigeons are better at orientation than we are” presumably because they perceive certain aspects of their environment better than us. Furthermore “the house, the town, or the whole habitat” likens the human world to the animal world as described by the ethologist. It is clear that Gibson allows himself to be colored by his ecological approach. Gibson does not need

“spaces” to talk about perception, it would seem.

That the world of the animal is in some way dependent upon the constitution of the animal should not to be mistaken as a form of idealism; that the mind or subjective mental states of the animal is sufficient for perceptual disclosure of the environment.

An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a

sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither

an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance

132 Gibson, J.J. (1979) pp.198-199.

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cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither.¹³³

That interrelated affordances are not indeed just disclosed in a landscape, but in fact can be seen as constitutive of a landscape sounds strikingly similar to one of the definitions of a Heideggerian Welt as a “large-scale holistic network of interconnected relational

significance[s].”¹³⁴ So it seems to follow that animal and human are not that different after all, if we simply translate “environment/niche” to “world/welt” and view affordances as Zuhanden.

This, I venture to say, is exactly the strategy Dreyfus employed when he initially introduced human and animal coper as doing basically the same. And like the early Dreyfus, I too find it tempting to let the concepts stay loose at this level, in order to see the similarity, rather than the difference between the way humans and other animals inhabit their respective worlds. But the pertinent question would be to ask: is the technical notion of the Heideggerian world really suited for talk about ecological niches?

The concept of a niche is, after all a technical concept in its own right for the

evolutionary biologist and perceptual psychologist, as it denotes the way in which an animal relates to its surroundings, surroundings with which it has evolved and also helped bring forth.

The beaver inhabits its niche, for instance, by being a amphibious mammal, that creates its own dams by gnawing down trees. The trees block the water in the nearby stream(s) allowing the buildup of water necessary for the beaver to construct its water-huts within which it lives. The reason why this is a niche is that the beaver is so closely fitted to it; everything from its flat, powerful tail, to its water-proof fur, its dexterous paws and its tree-gnawing teeth are perfectly adapted to this lifestyle in woodland marshlands. Furthermore, as the beaver gnaws down trees and builds its dams; it alters the landscape to its beaver-particular needs. Much like humans do with our technology. But we would be hard-pressed to call this environment, rich as it is, for a Heideggerian world. Remember that a world for Dreyfus is a holistic web of interconnected significations, subtended by, and pervasively dependent upon strong normative forces and the background practices within which the various skills and perceptions we exhibit makes sense. To surreptitiously transfer all this to the beaver-environment would be an imprudent break with the

133 Gibson, J.J. (1979) p.129.

134 Wheeler, Michael, "Martin Heidegger", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N.

Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/heidegger/>. Section 2.2.3.

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parsimony obviously sufficient for understanding beaver-behavior. Or would it? Once again, the beaver is suddenly defined by what it lacks, and the interesting investigation into its particular mode of being, like perceiving the tree-affordances, and responding to the solicitations of

moving water, is, the complexity of its social relations, is lost out of sight. When do we enter into the space of culture, or reason? Beavers are natural engineers, they actively construct their

environments, their also social mammals with strong family ties. Are they so radically different from us humans in these qualities?

Now, if it is true that we perceive pragmata/affordances given our status as embodied, active creatures, then, no matter how big a role higher-order processes (like deliberating, calculating, reasoning etc.) or cultural-normative processes play in our lives, we can never lose this original mode of perception. It cannot be lost, since losing it would mean losing our status as embodied beings in contact with the world, a contact necessary for, and evolutionary speaking prior to, culture and rationality, whatever the latter are taken to be. This is exactly where the plot thickens for my two philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus, and John McDowell for whereas their

explicit (and at oftentimes implicit) focus on human abilities is of utmost importance for

understanding our own species-relative being-in-the-world among other forms of life, this focus renders them somewhat negligent when it comes to the perceptual overlap with other animals. As we shall see, it seems that the very concept of affordance as presented by Gibson, is general enough so as to open us up to viewing animal and human perception as albeit different, not radically so. McDowell has his response to this latter proposal, as we have seen. I will get back to his “non-exhaustive claim” for understanding human perception as opposed to animal perception, but first, let me get back to Dreyfus’ discussion of openness and perception:

What makes us [humans] special isn’t that, unlike animals, we can respond directly to the conceptual structures of our environment; it’s that, unlike animals, we can transform our unthinking nonconceptual engagement, and thereby encounter new, thinkable structures. […] [A]ccording to existential

phenomenologists like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Todes, analytic attention brings about a radical transformation of the affordances given in absorbed coping. Only then can we have an experience of objects with properties, about which we can form beliefs, make judgements, and justify inferences. At the same time, however, this transformation covers up the non-conceptual perception and coping that made our openness to the world possible in the first place.¹³⁵

135 Dreyfus, H. (2005) pp.60-61.

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Now it would appear that Dreyfus in the above quote is consistent with the original definition of affordances, as heexplains skillful coping as that which opens us up to a perceivable world, more basic, and indeed more primordial than knowledge (rationality, conceptuality etc.) Non-conceptual perception makes “openness to the world possible in the first place”. Yet as we have seen, and as McDowell also have pointed out in his way, on further scrutiny, Dreyfus is

committed to a Heideggerian picture of human beings as opened to a cultural world, a world that remains very much human even at a basic level. What makes matters worse is that he is

committed to a “switch-over” account of rationality, in which the affordances we initially encounter are somehow “transformed” by our analytic thinking into thinkable structures.

Rationality, at least in its full blown sense is, for Dreyfus, fundamentally detached from the immediacy of the situation, and is even an enemy of skillful, fluid coping. This is exactly the point at which McDowell disagrees with Dreyfus, as he sees rationality (conceptual capacities) as always already a part of our experiences, not something that comes in later as an add on.

“Second nature” for McDowell, is our naturally acquired rationality, in which we must grow and mature in order to become human at all. As such, rationality is to be seen as not something that is added on top of already existing more basic structures of “animality” as Dreyfus initially seemed to think, but as making possible our species-unique actualization of the sort of animals we are.

Fully without recourse to any super-natural rational realm with which we magically commune, or to which we have privileged, disembodied access. The “space” in the “space of reasons” then is

Fully without recourse to any super-natural rational realm with which we magically commune, or to which we have privileged, disembodied access. The “space” in the “space of reasons” then is

In document The Spaces of Human and Animal Perception (sider 68-76)