What Does the World Afford?: X. What Does the World Afford?

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.

What Does the World Afford?: IX. When Concepts Change the Landscape

A word can make a distinction available.

A concept can change what becomes possible because of that distinction.

This is a larger claim.

The word property does not merely describe a piece of land.

Once the concept of property is embedded in a social system, land can be bought, sold, inherited, enclosed, taxed and disputed in ways that would otherwise make little sense.

The physical ground has not changed.

But the landscape of possible action has.

This is one of the strange powers of concepts.

They do not merely help us understand a world of possibilities.

They can reorganise the relations through which those possibilities are produced.

Consider a map.

The landscape existed before the map.

But once a boundary is drawn, something new can happen.

One side can become a country.

Another can become a border.

A line on paper can become a fence on the ground, a checkpoint, a jurisdiction, a reason for taxation, a cause of conflict.

The concept has travelled.

It has moved from language into practice, from practice into institutions, and from institutions into material arrangements.

The result is not imaginary.

The landscape itself has been altered.

This is why we should be cautious about saying that concepts are merely "in our heads".

Some concepts certainly begin as ways of construing experience.

But concepts can become embedded in collective practices, technologies, institutions and artefacts.

Once they do, they can acquire causal powers of a peculiar kind.

A road is not merely asphalt.

It embodies decisions about where people should travel.

A school is not merely a collection of buildings.

It embodies distinctions about knowledge, age, authority and learning.

A database is not merely stored information.

It embodies categories that determine what can be recorded, searched and compared.

A legal document is not merely words.

It can alter what people are permitted, required or entitled to do.

Concepts have therefore become part of the environment in which subsequent action takes place.

And this produces a remarkable feedback loop.

The world affords possibilities to organisms.

Organisms develop practices in response to those possibilities.

Practices become organised through language and concepts.

Concepts become embodied in institutions, technologies and material arrangements.

Those arrangements create new affordances.

Those affordances generate new practices.

And those practices generate new concepts.

The landscape is continually being remade.

This is not creation out of nothing.

A concept cannot simply abolish physical constraint.

We can declare a wall to be a door, but we still cannot walk through it.

Yet concepts can alter the social and practical landscape within which physical things acquire new possibilities.

A doorway can become an entrance.

An entrance can become a threshold.

A threshold can become a boundary.

A boundary can become a border.

A border can become a political fact.

At each stage, new relations become possible.

This is why conceptual change can sometimes feel like a change in the world itself.

Something that was previously invisible becomes obvious.

Something that was previously impossible becomes thinkable.

Something that was previously unthinkable becomes ordinary.

And sometimes the reverse happens.

A concept can make a possibility disappear.

Once a category becomes taken for granted, other ways of organising experience may become difficult to see.

The landscape of thought acquires paths and barriers of its own.

This brings us back to the furrow.

A furrow does not determine where the plough must go.

But once it exists, some trajectories become easier than others.

Concepts can work like furrows.

They channel subsequent thought without determining it.

And unlike a physical furrow, a conceptual one can be inherited, deepened, widened and reproduced by those who follow it.

This gives conceptual evolution a peculiar character.

Ideas do not simply succeed because they are true, nor disappear because they are false.

They also inhabit environments.

Some concepts fit the practices and institutions already in place.

Some generate useful distinctions.

Some connect easily with other concepts.

Some become embodied in technologies.

Some acquire authority.

Some become so familiar that we cease to notice them at all.

The conceptual landscape therefore has its own ecology.

But we should not conclude that concepts float above material reality and descend upon it.

The relation runs in both directions.

The world constrains what concepts can successfully organise.

And concepts reorganise what kinds of possibilities become available within the world.

Neither side is sovereign.

There is no purely material world waiting for concepts to describe it, and no purely conceptual world freely constructing reality.

There is a continuing circulation between them.

Perhaps this is one reason the evolution of concepts is so difficult to see.

We tend to notice concepts when they are new.

We notice them less easily once they have become roads.

And eventually we may forget that they were ever furrows at all.

The most powerful concepts may therefore be those we no longer experience as concepts.

They have become part of the landscape.

And once that happens, the question with which we began becomes even more difficult.

What does the world afford?

For the human world is no longer simply the world we inherited.

It is also a world of possibilities we have constructed, institutionalised and materially embodied.

The world affords us possibilities.

But some of those possibilities are now our own work.

And that leaves us with a final question.

If we are continually changing the landscape of possibility, what kind of world are our concepts making possible?

What Does the World Afford?: VIII. Words Afford Worlds

A word is a peculiar kind of thing.

It is physically small.

A sound disappears almost as soon as it is made. A mark on a page may occupy only a tiny space.

Yet a word can change what is possible.

The word tree does not merely point to a particular tree.

It makes available a category.

Once the category exists, we can ask which trees are old, which are useful, which should be protected, which belong to us, which belong to nobody, and which are not really trees at all but shrubs, timber, habitat or landscape.

The word has not changed the tree.

It has changed what we can do with the experience of trees.

This is a new kind of affordance.

A branch affords perching.

A word affords construal.

It makes certain distinctions available.

And this is why language cannot be understood simply as a collection of labels attached to a world that was already fully organised without it.

Language gives us ways of organising what we encounter.

Consider the difference between seeing a patch of ground and seeing it as a garden.

The physical ground has not changed.

But suddenly a remarkable number of possibilities appear.

It can be planted.

Cultivated.

Neglected.

Designed.

Maintained.

Owned.

Visited.

Destroyed.

Restored.

The word has not added these possibilities to the physical world.

It has made a different field of possibilities available to us.

Words therefore do something that ordinary affordances do not.

A chair affords sitting.

But the word chair affords a range of further distinctions and relations.

We can say broken chair, wooden chair, expensive chair, chair for children, chair beside the window.

The word enters into a system in which other words can modify it, classify it, contrast with it and relate it to events.

Language does not merely identify possibilities.

It organises possibilities into systems of further possibility.

This is where our earlier distinction between indication and sign becomes important.

A footprint can indicate that an animal passed by.

A sign can mediate something absent.

But a word can do something more.

It can participate in an indefinitely extensible network of distinctions.

A word can make another word relevant.

That word can make another distinction available.

And so on.

The result is not merely a larger collection of signs.

It is a different kind of world.

Not a different physical world, of course.

The same trees grow.

The same rivers flow.

The same bodies occupy the same ground.

But there is now a world of things that can be said about them.

And what can be said affects what can be done.

This is one reason language is so powerful.

To name something is not necessarily to discover what it really is.

It is to make a particular way of construing it available.

The distinction is crucial.

A classification can illuminate.

It can also obscure.

It can reveal possibilities.

It can also close them off.

Once something has been called a weed, for example, its removal may become obvious.

Call the same plant wildflower, and quite different possibilities become available.

The plant has not changed.

The physical relations have not changed.

But the linguistic construal has altered the field of human action.

Words therefore do not merely describe worlds.

They help organise which worlds we can inhabit.

And this brings us back to affordance.

An affordance arises when the structure of the world meets the capacities of an organised being.

A linguistic affordance arises when a system of signs makes certain distinctions, relations and actions available within a form of life.

The two should not be confused.

Language does not abolish the constraints imposed by the physical world.

Calling a wall a door does not make it passable.

Calling a cliff a safe place does not make it safe.

Words cannot simply legislate physical possibility.

But they can transform the possibilities that are available within a social world.

A wall can become a boundary.

A piece of land can become property.

A sound can become a promise.

A person can become a citizen.

A collection of marks can become a contract.

Here language is no longer merely accompanying action.

It is participating in the organisation of reality.

And something remarkable has happened.

The world once afforded possibilities to organisms.

Now organisms can use signs to afford possibilities to one another.

A word can make something visible that was previously unnoticed.

It can make a distinction where there was previously only continuity.

It can make a question possible.

It can make a new kind of action imaginable.

It can even make a new kind of object socially real.

Language has therefore become part of the affordance landscape itself.

But this raises an uncomfortable question.

If words can change the possibilities available to us, then concepts can do something even more powerful.

They can organise the relations among those possibilities.

A concept can make some distinctions seem natural, others absurd, and still others almost impossible to think.

And when concepts begin to reshape the landscape in which future concepts can emerge, we are no longer simply talking about words.

We are talking about the evolution of a world that can be construed.

Perhaps that is where we should go next.

What Does the World Afford?: VII. The First Sign

A bird sees a predator.

It may also hear it.

But suppose the predator is hidden.

A sudden alarm call comes from another bird.

Now something has changed.

The predator itself is not present to the hearer.

Something else has become relevant to it because it indicates what is elsewhere.

This is different from the branch that affords perching.

The branch participates directly in the possibility of action.

The alarm call does something different.

It mediates a possibility.

It makes something absent relevant to what the organism can do.

This is the point at which we begin to approach the sign.

But we should be careful.

A signal is not automatically a sign simply because it carries information.

A footprint can be caused by an animal without being produced as a footprint. A change in temperature can indicate a change elsewhere without anyone intending to indicate anything. Smoke can indicate fire without the fire having sent a message.

There is therefore a distinction between being an indication and functioning as a sign.

The distinction matters because otherwise we risk turning the entire physical world into a semiotic system.

The position of a planet indicates the gravitational relations acting upon it.

A tree ring indicates past conditions.

A wound indicates damage.

A footprint indicates that something passed this way.

But it does not follow that the planet, the tree, the wound or the footprint is meaningful in the same sense that a word is meaningful.

Something can be evidence without being a sign.

Something can carry information without communicating.

Something can make something else inferable without representing it.

So what changes when a sign appears?

Perhaps the crucial change is not that information suddenly enters the world.

Information was already everywhere.

Nor is it simply that one thing comes to stand in a causal relation with another.

That was already happening.

The important change is that a relation becomes available for coordination through mediation.

The alarm call can alter the behaviour of another bird because the call participates in a system of relations within which that sound has a particular function.

The sound is no longer merely something that happens.

It becomes something that can be used.

And this introduces a new possibility.

A sign can make something relevant even when the thing itself is absent.

The branch affords perching because the branch is there.

The alarm call can afford flight because the predator need not be.

The sign therefore extends the organism's practical world beyond immediate encounter.

Something that is elsewhere can begin to participate in what happens here.

That is a profound development.

Yet even here, we should resist the temptation to leap directly to human meaning.

An alarm call need not be a proposition.

The bird need not entertain the thought there is a predator nearby.

The sign can function within an organised system of behaviour without becoming a sentence in anyone's head.

Meaning, if it is emerging here, is not necessarily the meaning of an inner representation.

It is a property of a relation that has become mediated.

And mediation changes the affordance landscape.

Before the sign, what an organism can respond to is largely limited by what can directly affect it, or by possibilities made available through its perceptual capacities.

With signs, something absent can enter the field.

A sound can make a predator relevant.

A trace can make a past event relevant.

A gesture can make another organism's action relevant.

A signal can coordinate behaviour across distance.

The world has not become more meaningful because someone has painted meanings onto it.

Rather, organisms have acquired new ways of making possibilities available to one another.

This may be the beginning of something remarkably important.

For once a possibility can be mediated, it can potentially be shared.

And once possibilities can be shared, they can begin to be organised independently of the immediate circumstances in which they arose.

That is the road toward language.

But there is a danger here too.

We have been careful throughout this series to distinguish possibility from meaning, and responsiveness from representation.

We should now be equally careful not to assume that every signal is already a sign, or that every sign already possesses the kind of meaning we find in language.

There may be a long territory between them.

Perhaps the history of meaning begins not when the world first contains information, but when organised beings begin to use differences to make other possibilities available.

If so, the first sign would not be the moment when the world started to speak.

It would be the moment when a difference began to participate in a new kind of relation.

A relation in which something could stand for something else.

And that changes the question with which we began.

We asked what the world affords.

Now we can ask something stranger:

What can one organism afford to another?

Because once signs enter the picture, organisms do not merely inhabit fields of possibility.

They can begin to create them for one another.

What Does the World Afford?: VI. When Possibility Becomes Perception

A bird sees a branch.

But what does it see?

A collection of coloured surfaces? A certain arrangement of lines and angles? A physical object occupying a particular region of space?

Or does it see something more immediate?

A place to perch.

A place to land.

A route through the trees.

We tend to assume that perception gives us a picture of the world and that action comes afterwards.

First we see the thing.

Then we work out what it means.

Then we decide what to do.

But perhaps this gets the order wrong.

For a creature whose existence depends upon moving through an environment, perception may already be deeply entangled with possibility.

The bird does not need first to construct a neutral representation of the branch and then add the property perchable.

Its perceptual capacities have been shaped by its history as a living organism, including the ways in which its internal value systems have come to select some environmental differences as more significant than others.

Perception is therefore not simply a registration of whatever happens to be present.

The organism is selective.

It does not encounter an undifferentiated world and then discover that some things matter more than others. Its organisation already biases what can become salient to it.

The branch is there.

But the bird is organised to be sensitive to some of what the branch makes possible.

The possibility is not simply added to perception.

It may be part of what perception consists in.

This gives us a different way of thinking about seeing.

To see a cliff is not merely to register a vertical surface. For an animal capable of falling, the cliff is part of a landscape of possible movement.

To see an opening is not merely to register an absence of material. It may be to encounter a possible route.

To see a predator is not merely to detect a shape. It may be to encounter an altered field of possible action.

Perception, in such cases, seems less like making a copy of the world and more like finding one's way through its possibilities.

But this creates a problem.

If the bird sees the branch as a place to perch, have we now arrived at meaning?

Perhaps.

But perhaps not.

The word as is doing dangerous work here.

To say that the bird sees the branch as a perch sounds as though the bird has classified it, interpreted it or represented it as something.

That may be true in some cases.

But the behaviour itself does not establish it.

The bird's perceptual organisation may simply be sensitive to the structures that make landing and perching possible.

The distinction between perception and interpretation therefore remains important.

An organism can be perceptually organised around possibilities without necessarily representing those possibilities as concepts.

A possibility can become visible to a form of life without becoming a proposition in its mind.

This helps explain why different creatures inhabit different perceptual worlds.

A bat's environment is structured by possibilities available through echolocation.

A bee's environment includes patterns of light unavailable to us.

Our own perceptual world is shaped by the capacities, histories and value organisation of our bodies and nervous systems.

There is no single perceptual world which each species simply photographs from a different angle.

There are different ways in which organised beings can be responsive to the structures of a shared world.

And yet this does not mean that each creature lives in a private universe.

The branch is still there.

The gap is still there.

The predator is still there.

The possibilities are constrained by the world.

What differs is the organisation that makes some of those possibilities perceptually available.

Perhaps perception is therefore best understood neither as a picture of the world nor as a projection upon it.

It is a selective way of becoming sensitive to possibilities for action.

And this gives us a subtle transition.

Before perception, an organism can be responsive to environmental differences without those differences becoming anything it encounters as such.

With perception, some possibilities become available within the organism's ongoing engagement with its environment.

But something still seems to be missing.

A possibility that can be perceived is not yet necessarily a possibility that can be indicated.

A branch can be perceptually available as somewhere to land.

But a sound can indicate that the predator is nearby even when the predator itself cannot be seen.

Now the possibility is no longer simply encountered.

It can be mediated by something else.

And that is a remarkable development.

For the first time, something in the world can stand in for something that is not immediately present.

We have moved from possibility to indication.

And with that, we may be approaching the boundary we have been carefully avoiding.

The boundary of meaning.

What Does the World Afford?: V. Before Meaning

We have arrived at a curious possibility.

A being can be responsive to its environment without representing what it encounters.

This sounds almost contradictory.

How can something respond to a possibility if it does not, in some sense, recognise that possibility?

Perhaps because recognition is not required.

A plant grows towards light.

Its roots grow around obstacles.

Its leaves open and close in response to changing conditions.

We can describe these processes in increasingly sophisticated terms. We can speak of sensing, detecting, signalling, regulating and responding.

But none of those descriptions requires us to imagine that the plant has formed an internal representation of what is happening.

The plant need not know what light is.

It need not identify the obstacle.

It need not formulate a plan.

Something simpler is happening.

The organisation of the plant makes certain environmental differences consequential to what it can do.

The environment changes.

The plant changes.

The possibilities available to the plant change with it.

There is no message hidden in the light.

There is no instruction written into the stone.

There is no invitation waiting to be understood.

And yet the relation is real.

This gives us a useful distinction between being responsive to something and interpreting something.

We often move too quickly from the first to the second.

A thermostat responds to temperature. That does not mean that it understands temperature.

A vine responds to a support. That does not mean that it represents the support as something to climb.

An immune system responds to molecular structures. That does not require a little interpreter inside the organism reading molecular messages.

The response can be built into the organisation of the system itself.

This is important because otherwise we are tempted to place meaning wherever there is systematic sensitivity.

But systematic sensitivity is not yet meaning.

Something can make a difference to a system without being a sign for that system.

Something can alter what an organism can do without telling it what to do.

Something can be relevant without being represented.

The distinction may seem almost pedantic.

It is anything but.

For if we fail to make it, we risk turning the entire natural world into a population of miniature interpreters.

The plant becomes "reading" the light.

The bacterium becomes "decoding" the chemical gradient.

The animal becomes "interpreting" every environmental difference.

And eventually the language becomes so generous that almost any physical interaction can be redescribed as communication.

But then we have lost the very distinction between physical interaction and meaning that we set out to understand.

The world can be structured.

An organism can be organised.

The two can enter into relations that change what is possible.

None of this requires meaning.

Perhaps this is what it means to say that there is a world before meaning.

Not a world devoid of structure.

Not a world devoid of consequence.

Not even a world devoid of relations.

A world in which things can make a difference without that difference being a message.

That is a much stranger world than the old picture of a meaningless universe.

It is not empty.

It is full of possibilities.

But those possibilities do not yet have to be about anything.

And perhaps that is the crucial step.

Meaning is not simply the existence of a difference.

It is not even the existence of a difference that matters to an organised being.

Meaning requires something more.

We are not yet ready to say exactly what that something is.

But we can now see why the question matters.

For somewhere between a plant turning towards light and an animal seeing a place as somewhere to go, something changes.

The world has not changed into a world of meanings.

The organism has not necessarily acquired a little inner theatre in which meanings are displayed.

Rather, the relation between organism and possibility has become more deeply mediated.

And that may be where our next question lies.

What happens when possibility becomes something an organism can perceive?

What Does the World Afford?: IV. For Whom?

A branch affords perching.

But for whom?

The question sounds obvious until we notice what it does.

The branch does not afford perching in itself. Nor does it afford it to some generic creature called an "observer".

It affords perching to a being with the appropriate capacities.

A sparrow can perch on the branch.

A rhinoceros cannot.

The difference is not in the branch alone, and it is not in the creature alone.

It lies in the relation between them.

This may seem like a small point. It is not.

For it means that the world does not present the same field of possibilities to every form of life.

A tree is not simply a tree from every point of view.

To a bird, it may be a place to perch, nest, shelter or find food.

To a climbing animal, it may be a route through the forest.

To a fungus, it may be a substrate.

To a human, it may be timber, shade, scenery, shelter—or simply something to walk around.

None of these descriptions has to be the true meaning of the tree.

They are possibilities arising from different relations between the tree and different forms of organisation.

This is why affordances should not be confused with perspectives.

A perspective is something an observer has.

An affordance is something that can happen between a being and its environment.

The distinction matters because an organism does not first construct a picture of the world and then decide what to do with it.

Its very organisation already places it in a field of possibilities.

A bird has wings, a particular body weight, a particular visual system, a particular mode of movement. These are not merely properties it possesses alongside an otherwise neutral environment. Together with its history and value organisation, they shape the kinds of relations it can enter into.

The bird's world is therefore not simply the same world, seen differently.

It is, in an important sense, a different field of possibilities.

This becomes especially interesting when we turn to plants.

A plant does not have legs, wings or hands. Its possibilities are organised around growth, attachment, absorption, reproduction and chemical exchange. Light, water, gravity and neighbouring organisms therefore enter into its existence in ways radically different from ours.

We should be careful here.

It would be easy to say that the plant "perceives" these things as possibilities, or that they "mean" something to it.

But we have not established that.

We have established something simpler.

The plant is organised in such a way that certain features of its environment make a difference to what it can become and do.

That may be enough.

Indeed, perhaps it is important that it be enough.

For if we make perception or meaning a prerequisite for an affordance, we risk importing human categories into the very phenomenon we are trying to understand.

The plant need not think light in order for light to participate in its growth.

The bird need not formulate branch in order for the branch to participate in its perching.

The organism does not have to represent the possibility for the possibility to be real.

This gives us a rather strange picture of a living world.

There is no single inventory of possibilities waiting to be perceived.

There are overlapping fields of possibility, generated by the meeting of different forms of organisation with the same structured world.

And these fields can overlap in surprising ways.

The branch can support the bird.

The bird can inhabit the branch.

The bird can alter the branch.

The branch can become part of the bird's nest.

The nest can then become part of the bird's reproductive environment.

Possibilities generate new possibilities.

The relation is not between a static organism and a static world.

Both are continually changing through their encounters.

Perhaps, then, asking What does the world afford? is incomplete.

We should ask:

What does the world afford to this being, given what this being is capable of?

And even that may not be quite enough.

For a possibility is not necessarily something an organism recognises.

It may simply be something that its organisation allows the world to do with it—or allows it to do with the world.

That distinction will become important.

Because once we begin to talk about organisms responding to the possibilities their environments afford, we are standing very close to words like perception, information, relevance and meaning.

And we have already seen how easily those words can lead us astray.

Perhaps the first task is to understand how a being can be responsive to a possibility without representing it.

That takes us to a rather unfamiliar place.

A place before meaning.

What Does the World Afford?: III. The World Has Structure

We have said that an affordance is neither a property of a thing nor a projection of an observer.

It is a relation.

But this creates a new problem.

If what a thing affords depends upon what encounters it, might we conclude that the possibilities are entirely supplied by the organism?

The chair affords sitting because we are capable of sitting.

The branch affords perching because the bird is capable of perching.

The wall affords neither sitting nor passage because of what we can do with it.

Perhaps, then, the world is simply raw material for the possibilities that organisms bring with them.

But that won't do.

The world has structure.

A branch has a certain strength. A wall has a certain solidity. A gap has a certain width. A slope has a certain angle. Water flows downhill whether or not anything finds that fact interesting.

These properties constrain what can happen.

We cannot sit on every object.

We cannot walk through every opening.

We cannot fly merely by deciding that the air should support us.

The organism brings capacities to the relation, but it does not bring the whole relation.

This matters because it gives us a useful way of avoiding two opposite mistakes.

The first is to treat affordances as intrinsic properties.

The second is to treat them as subjective projections.

Neither is adequate.

A cliff does not contain a warning.

But neither is its capacity to precipitate a fall something we invent.

The cliff has a structure that makes some interactions possible and others impossible.

The important point is that possibility is not the same thing as meaning.

The cliff's height and gravity constrain what happens to a falling body. They do not communicate a message about what the body ought to do.

The distinction becomes even clearer with organisms.

A plant grows towards light, but the light does not have to mean anything to the plant for its presence to alter the plant's possibilities.

A root encounters a stone and changes direction. The stone does not have to be an obstacle in the semantic sense for the encounter to constrain what the root can do.

Something can therefore be relevant to an organism without being meaningful to it.

This is perhaps the most important distinction we have encountered so far.

For meaning is extraordinarily tempting.

Once we see an organism responding systematically to something in its environment, we are inclined to say that it has detected, interpreted or represented that thing.

Sometimes that may be exactly right.

But it need not be.

A structured world can make a difference to an organism simply because the organism is organised in a way that is sensitive to that structure.

No message is required.

No interpretation is required.

No little observer needs to be sitting inside the organism, reading the world.

There is simply a relation between what the world permits and what the organism can do.

And yet the relation is not passive.

The organism does not merely encounter a collection of fixed physical facts. Its own capacities help determine which possibilities become available.

The same slope is climbable for one creature and impassable for another.

The same temperature is harmless to one organism and fatal to another.

The same chemical substance is nourishment for one organism and poison for another.

The world has structure.

But structure does not come with a single interpretation attached.

Perhaps, then, an affordance is what happens when worldly structure meets organised capacity.

The world supplies neither invitations nor meanings.

It supplies constraints.

The organism supplies neither arbitrary projections nor pure invention.

It supplies capacities.

And between the two, possibilities emerge.

We have therefore moved a little closer to the puzzle.

But there is still a question waiting for us.

If the same world can afford different things to different beings, what makes an organism the kind of being for which a particular possibility exists at all?

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?

What Does the World Afford?: I. The World Offers No Invitations

A chair invites us to sit.

A doorway invites us to enter.

A path invites us to follow it.

A cliff warns us not to step over the edge.

We say such things without hesitation. And, in ordinary circumstances, there is nothing wrong with saying them.

But the world does not actually issue invitations.

The chair has no intention of being sat upon. The doorway is not asking us to enter. The cliff is not warning us of anything.

Yet something is happening.

The chair is shaped in a way that makes sitting possible. The doorway makes passage possible. The cliff makes falling possible—and, for a creature capable of falling, perhaps makes staying away from its edge a very good idea.

These possibilities are not simply properties of things.

A chair is not intrinsically a sitting possibility. A sufficiently strong chair might be a useful step for one person, a barricade for another, or an obstacle for a small animal. Its possibilities depend upon what encounters it, and upon what that being is capable of doing.

But neither are these possibilities merely inventions of the mind.

The chair really will support a person. The doorway really will permit passage. The cliff really will not permit us to walk through it.

We have therefore arrived at an awkward middle ground.

The possibility belongs neither entirely to the object nor entirely to the observer.

It belongs to a relation.

This is what makes affordances so interesting—and so dangerous.

The word afford seems innocent enough. But once we say that the world affords something, we are tempted to make the world sound as though it were speaking to us. We begin to imagine that things contain invitations, messages or meanings waiting to be perceived.

And then a subtle mistake becomes possible.

We move from:

This makes something possible for this kind of being

to:

This means something to this kind of being.

Those are not the same claim.

A branch may afford perching to a bird without meaning "perch here".

Light may afford a particular kind of growth to a plant without meaning anything to the plant.

A gap may afford passage to one organism and exclusion to another without signifying either possibility.

The world can therefore constrain what is possible without communicating what is possible.

That distinction may seem small.

It isn't.

For once we separate possibility from meaning, we can begin to ask a much more interesting question.

What exactly happens between a structured world and an organised being when one becomes capable of doing something in relation to the other?

Perhaps the world does not invite us anywhere.

Perhaps it does something stranger.

It makes some ways of going possible, and others impossible.

And perhaps meaning begins much later than that.

For now, we should resist the temptation to put it there too soon.

The world offers no invitations.

But it may afford possibilities.

And that is where our trouble begins.