Are Affordances Plausible? Updating Some Intuitions

In the previous post, I laid out the basic distinction between direct and indirect theories of perception. The basic issue is how to get to behaviourally relevant properties. Such properties of the world have to be partly about the organism, and not just the world; not just 'mass', which is something about the world, but 'moveability' which is something about the world, relative to the organism. If there are properties like these out in the world, and we can perceive them, then perception can, in principle, be direct. If there aren't properties like these there to be perceived, we would have to invent them, and perception would have to be indirect. The ecological hypothesis has to begin by finding behaviourally relevant properties out in the world, ready to be perceived without having to be invented; we need to find affordances. 

The problem is that this seems to be madness, right off the bat. It seems bizarre to think that things separate from the organism could possibly have properties that have anything to do with the organism. Why would they have such things? Surely things can only have properties that are about themselves and make them what they are? 

This post will talk about some pieces of information that make this at least plausible; the next post will talk about the specific ecological hypothesis about affordances that tries to implement that plausibility. To get to that plausibility, I am going to have to update your intuitions about what is simple, and what sorts of things can be physically real, and along the way introduce some useful vocabulary I will do everything I can to use clearly. 

Lecture 4: Simulative, Projective, and Locality Assumptions (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)

This lecture is a brief history of the common assumptions made in theories of perception about how things 'over there' can cause us to have a given perceptual experience. The simulative and projective elements can be quickly dealt with; the big claim in this lecture is that the right notion of causation for perception is non-local, as it is in quantum mechanics. (Note: Turvey is not saying perception is a quantum process. He's just going to use it as a framing to explain what non-local causation is, and he will rely on the rigorous empirical testing it has passed in physics to say it is a viable notion of causation for a physical system.)

Lecture 3: Direct Perceiving, Indirect Perceiving (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)

In this lecture, Turvey provides a formal definition of what it means to claim a theory of perception is direct vs indirect. A theory of direct perception invokes lawfully specifying information, while all indirect theories invoke at least one mediating physiological or psychological process. Direct theories are allowed to discuss internal states, etc (Gibsonian neuroscience isn't a contradiction in terms), but these states are not allowed to alter information so it is no longer lawfully related to the environment. The big Turvey word we will learn about in this chapter is impredicative entailment - exciting! I'll also briefly point to some implications this chapter has for my recent papers with Sabrina on neuroscience and mechanism.