What an Affordance Adds

We have recently been trying to disentangle three things that are easily run together.

A world can leave something possible.

A situation can make that possibility available.

And a participant can be ready to take it up.

We have called the first possibility, the second availability, and the third potential.

The distinctions seem clear enough.

But then there is affordance.

And now we have to ask an awkward question.

Does affordance actually add anything?

Perhaps it is merely a fancy name for the relation between availability and potential.

Or perhaps something more happens when a possibility becomes available to a participant that is ready to take it up.

Consider the familiar example of a chair.

The chair makes sitting available to a human-sized participant.

The participant has the ability to sit.

Perhaps the participant is also inclined to sit.

We could therefore say that sitting is possible, available and within the participant's potential.

What, then, is left for affordance to do?

One answer would be: nothing.

Affordance could simply be the name we give to the relation between availability and potential.

There is something attractive about this. It keeps the conceptual furniture to a minimum.

But I think something is missing.

The missing element is directedness.

The chair is not merely available in the abstract. Its structure makes a particular kind of participation possible.

It offers itself, so to speak, in a particular way.

The participant does not merely encounter a physical object and then independently decide what to do with it. The structure of the chair and the potential of the participant come together in a situation in which sitting becomes a way of participating.

That is more than accessibility.

Availability tells us that something can be taken up.

Potential tells us that the participant is ready to take it up.

Affordance tells us what the participant can do with what is available.

This may sound like a very small difference.

It is not.

Imagine that a chair is available to someone who can sit but who is carrying a large box.

The possibility remains.

The chair remains physically accessible.

The participant still possesses the general ability to sit.

But the particular situation may not afford sitting in the same way.

The relevant relation has changed.

Affordance therefore seems to concern not merely whether a possibility is accessible, but the mode of participation that the configuration invites or supports.

This gives us a useful refinement.

Availability is accessibility.

Potential is readiness.

Affordance is organised participation.

The word “organised” matters.

An affordance is not simply the meeting point of two inventories: possibilities on one side and capacities on the other.

It is a relation structured so that one kind of participation becomes possible as a way of acting within the situation.

This is why affordances can be discovered.

A child encountering a staircase does not need to possess an explicit concept of “staircase” before discovering that it can be climbed.

The staircase does not merely contain the possibility of climbing.

Its structure participates in making climbing available as a mode of engagement for a participant with the relevant potential.

And the participant's engagement can change the relation again.

The child climbs.

The staircase is now part of the child's history.

The child's balance, confidence and bodily capacities may change.

The next staircase is encountered differently.

What was once difficult may become easy.

What was once unavailable may become available.

Affordance is therefore dynamic.

It belongs neither simply to the object nor simply to the participant.

It belongs to a relation in which both are changed by participation.

This helps explain why affordance is particularly useful for thinking about development and evolution.

A new structure can make a new mode of participation available.

But once participants begin using that possibility, their own potential can change.

And their activity can alter the environment.

So we have a feedback loop:

field → availability → potential → affordance → participation → transformed participant and field

The affordance is not the final step before action.

It is the point at which the relational configuration becomes actionally significant.

This also gives us a way to distinguish affordance from mere opportunity.

An opportunity can be described from the outside.

An affordance is something that exists for a participant.

The difference becomes obvious when we consider an environment containing possibilities that are available to one organism but not another.

A branch affords perching to a bird.

It does not therefore afford perching to a stone.

A gap may afford passage to an insect but not to an elephant.

A sound may afford communication to one species and merely stimulation to another.

The physical situation has not necessarily changed.

The relation has.

And yet there is still something more.

The participant itself need not remain unchanged.

An organism can acquire a new capacity and thereby encounter an old environment differently.

A tool can alter the affordances of an environment without changing the environment in any simple physical sense.

A language can make distinctions available that change what speakers can do with one another.

A concept can make a previously unnoticed relation available to thought.

In each case, affordances are not merely waiting in the world.

They emerge from a history of participation.

This suggests that we should resist two tempting mistakes.

The first is to make affordances properties of objects.

The chair does not simply have the affordance of sitting.

The second is to make affordances subjective projections.

The participant does not simply invent sitting.

The affordance lies in the relation between the structure of the situation and the participant's potential.

But perhaps even this is not quite enough.

For the relation is not static.

When the affordance is taken up, something happens.

And what happens can transform the very relation that constituted the affordance.

This brings us back to our earlier question about becoming.

A participant does not merely move through a world of pre-existing affordances.

Participation can generate new affordances.

A tool can be used in an unexpected way.

A new musical technique can make new musical relations possible.

A new word can make a new kind of linguistic action available.

A new scientific concept can make a previously invisible pattern available to investigation.

The history of participation therefore becomes part of the history of affordance.

And now the distinction between possibility, availability, potential and affordance begins to look less like a taxonomy and more like a process.

Possibility is what the field leaves open.

Availability is what the field makes accessible.

Potential is what the participant is ready to take up.

Affordance is the structured relation in which that readiness can engage what is accessible.

Participation is what happens when the affordance is taken up.

And becoming is what follows when participation changes the relations from which further possibilities arise.

Perhaps, then, affordance does add something.

But it does not add another object to our conceptual museum.

It adds a verb.

It tells us that the relation between possibility and potential is not merely something that exists.

It is something that can happen.

A possibility becomes available.

A participant becomes ready.

The two enter into a relation.

Something can then be done.

And in doing it, the participant and the world may both become different.

That may be what an affordance really adds.

Not another thing.

A way for possibility and potential to become consequential to one another.