You Cannot Perceive a Relational Affordance (A Purple Peril)

One of the more enduring arguments in ecological psychology is about the best way to formally describe affordances. The two basic approaches are that they are dispositions (Turvey, Scarantino, me) or that they are relations (Reitveld, Kiverstein, Chemero). The argument has mostly settled down into just agreeing to disagree, but I am still convinced that the relational analysis is critically flawed and I want to try and either get them to solve the problem or end the debate once and for all. I've reviewed this in a bunch of places (e.g. here, here, and here)  but this post is just setting out my challenge once and for all; you cannot perceive a relational affordance, and there is as yet no good story about how to learn new affordances.

My problem stems from this Gibson (1979) quote (we all have our favourite, but this one seems to cut to the heart of it)

The central question for the theory of affordances is not whether they exist and are real but whether information is available in ambient light for perceiving them.

Right now, the affordances-are-relations camp have no story for how these can structure light (or other energy media) and therefore create information about themselves. They are therefore, as currently formulated, not even in principle perceptible. This means affordances-as-relations is of zero use to the ecological approach. 

Bruinberg et al (2018) tried to address this problem, but as I blogged here their solution is not ecological information and it reveals that these authors do not as yet understand what information actually is. My challenge is therefore this: tell me a story in which affordances-as-relations are able to create ecological information in energy arrays, and might therefore be learned, and the debate will be back on. Until then, affordances-as-dispositions is the only account that formalises the right properties and the debate is over.