We began with a simple question.
What does the world afford?
At first, the question seemed almost innocent.
A chair affords sitting.
A branch affords perching.
A doorway affords passage.
But we soon discovered that nothing is quite so simple.
The world does not issue invitations.
A chair does not ask us to sit.
A cliff does not warn us to stay away.
An affordance is not a message waiting to be received.
Nor is it simply a property of the object.
What something affords depends upon what encounters it.
A branch affords one thing to a bird, another to a climber, perhaps something else to a fungus.
The possibility belongs neither entirely to the world nor entirely to the organism.
It emerges between them.
Yet this does not mean that organisms invent their possibilities.
The world has structure.
It resists some actions and permits others.
The organism has capacities, histories and value organisation that make some of those possibilities more available than others.
Possibility is therefore neither imposed by the world nor projected by the organism.
It is relational.
This gave us our first important distinction.
An organism can be responsive to the world without representing what it encounters.
A plant can change its growth in response to light without needing a concept of light.
An animal can respond to an obstacle without constructing a proposition about it.
Something can make a difference without being a sign.
Something can be relevant without being meaningful.
This was our first step away from a surprisingly persistent confusion.
We do not need to put meaning everywhere simply because we find organised responsiveness.
But neither do we need to reduce responsiveness to meaningless mechanism.
There is a middle territory.
A world of structured possibilities.
Then perception entered.
We discovered that organisms do not encounter all possibilities equally.
Their histories and internal value systems shape what becomes salient.
Perception is not simply a photograph of the world.
It is a selective way of becoming sensitive to possibilities for action.
And still, perception is not necessarily meaning.
A possibility can become perceptually available without becoming a proposition.
Then something changed.
A possibility could become mediated.
An alarm call could make a hidden predator relevant.
A footprint could make an absent animal inferable.
A gesture could coordinate an action.
But here too we had to be careful.
Indication is not automatically a sign.
Information is not automatically communication.
A physical trace can indicate something without anyone having meant to indicate it.
Meaning does not appear merely because one thing provides evidence for another.
The sign introduces something different.
A difference can begin to function within a relation in which something can stand for something else.
And then language arrives.
Words do not merely point at a pre-existing world.
They afford distinctions.
They make some ways of construing experience available.
They allow us to organise possibilities into systems of further possibilities.
A tree can become timber, habitat, property, landscape or resource.
The physical tree has not changed.
But the world of human action has.
Words afford worlds.
And concepts go further still.
They can become embodied in practices, institutions, technologies and material arrangements.
A concept can become a road.
A road can become a route.
A route can become an institution.
An institution can become part of the environment within which other possibilities arise.
The landscape begins to contain our own constructions.
The furrows deepen.
New paths become easier to follow.
Others become harder to see.
And so we arrive back at our original question.
What does the world afford?
The answer now seems less like a list.
It is not:
The world affords this, that and the other.
For there is no single inventory of affordances.
There are only relations between structured environments and organised beings, relations that change as both sides change.
The world affords possibilities to us.
We respond to those possibilities.
Our responses alter the world.
The altered world affords new possibilities.
We develop concepts to construe them.
Those concepts become practices.
Practices become institutions and technologies.
And these become part of the environment for the next generation of possibilities.
The circle has no obvious beginning.
World makes possibility possible.
Possibility makes action possible.
Action changes the world.
Language makes new construals possible.
Construal changes action.
Concepts change the landscape.
The changed landscape changes what can subsequently be thought.
The world we inhabit is therefore not merely the world we were given.
Nor is it a world we have freely invented.
It is a world in which possibilities have histories.
Some possibilities are physical.
Some are biological.
Some are perceptual.
Some are social.
Some are linguistic.
Some are conceptual.
And they are not interchangeable.
A plant turning towards light is not saying anything.
A bird responding to an alarm call is not necessarily making a proposition.
A word is not merely another physical affordance.
A concept is not merely a word.
At every stage, something new becomes possible.
But nothing has to appear from nowhere.
Perhaps this is the deepest lesson of affordances.
The world does not need to contain meanings in order for meaning to become possible.
It only needs to contain structures with which organised beings can enter into relations.
And organised beings do not need to invent the world in order to construe it.
They need only possess histories, capacities and forms of organisation through which some possibilities become available.
Meaning, then, need not be a substance added to matter.
Nor need it be a mysterious realm standing beyond the world.
It can be something that emerges when relations become sufficiently organised to be mediated, shared and construed.
That leaves us with a rather different picture of reality.
Not a world of objects carrying intrinsic meanings.
Not a meaningless mechanism upon which minds later project significance.
But a world of structured possibilities, continually entering into new relations with beings capable of responding to them.
And perhaps this is why the question with which we began now sounds different.
We asked:
What does the world afford?
Perhaps the better question is:
What can become possible between us and the world?
For the world does not tell us what to do.
It does not tell us what it means.
It does not even tell us what it can become.
It affords.
We participate.
And in that participation, new possibilities appear.
Somewhere among them, eventually, a world capable of meaning emerges.
Not outside nature.
Not imposed upon it.
But unfolding within it.
And perhaps that is all an affordance ever was:
a possibility waiting for a relation.
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