What Does the World Afford?: II. A Chair Is Not a Chair

A chair is a chair.

Or so it seems.

It has four legs, a seat, perhaps a back, and a remarkably persistent tendency to turn up whenever we need somewhere to sit.

But what is a chair?

For a human being, it may afford sitting.

For a small child, it may afford climbing.

For someone moving house, it may afford carrying.

For a carpenter, it may afford dismantling.

For someone trying to reach a high shelf, it may afford standing upon.

For a cat, it may afford sleeping.

For fire, eventually, it may afford burning.

None of these possibilities is simply in the chair.

If sitting were an intrinsic property of the object, we would have to explain why the same object can afford so many other activities. Nor can we solve the problem by saying that the chair possesses all these possibilities simultaneously. That merely gives the object a catalogue of affordances, waiting for the appropriate user to arrive.

But the opposite solution is no better.

Perhaps, we might say, the chair has no affordances at all. We simply project them onto it. Sitting is something we imagine; climbing is something the child imagines; sleeping is something the cat somehow supplies.

Yet this goes too far in the other direction.

The chair really does support us.

It has a height, a shape, a weight-bearing capacity and a particular relation to the ground. If it collapses when we sit on it, we don't normally conclude that our projection has failed. We conclude that the chair was unsuitable—or broken.

Something about the object matters.

But it is not enough by itself.

The same physical structure can participate in different possibilities depending on what encounters it.

This is why an affordance is neither a property of the object nor a property of the subject.

It is a relation between them.

And that relation is not arbitrary.

A chair does not afford sitting to a cloud. A brick wall does not afford passage to a human body simply because someone wishes it did. A branch that supports a sparrow may not support a person.

Affordances therefore depend upon capacities as well as structures.

The world supplies constraints.

The organism supplies capacities.

The possibility arises between them.

This is easy to miss because our language encourages us to compress the whole relation into a noun.

We say chair, as though the word named a self-contained thing with a fixed identity.

But perhaps the more revealing question is not:

What is this thing?

but:

What can happen between this thing and something else?

The chair does not cease to be a chair when nobody is sitting on it. But what it affords is not exhausted by what it is considered to be.

Its affordances belong to its relations of possible action.

And this gives us a useful distinction.

A chair can have a physical structure without having a meaning.

It can enter into a relation of possible action without representing that action.

It can afford sitting without saying sit here.

That last distinction will become increasingly important.

For once we notice that a possibility can be real without being a message, we can begin to see how much work we have been asking the concept of meaning to do.

Perhaps the world does not need to mean anything in order to make a difference to what can happen.

Perhaps it is enough that the world has structure, and that living beings have capacities.

The chair, then, is not quite what we thought.

It is not merely an object with properties.

Nor is it a screen onto which organisms project their intentions.

It is a node in a field of possibilities.

And those possibilities do not belong to the chair alone.

They emerge when the chair meets an organised being with particular capacities, histories and ways of responding.

A chair is not a chair, perhaps, because of what it means.

It is a chair because of what it makes possible.

And that leaves us with the next question.

If possibilities arise in the relation between organism and world, how much of the possibility comes from the world itself?