Ever since Gibson proposed the concept of ‘affordances’ in 1979, we have been arguing about the best way to formalize the idea in a way that can allow us to successfully explain behavior. The first approach was to consider them as dispositional properties of task environment which can support skillful perception and action. A more recent approach considers them more broadly as relations between properties of organisms and their environments. This expands the spatial and temporal scope of affordances; we stand in many kinds of relations to our physical but also social and cultural environments. Relational affordances are therefore offered as an ecological way to explain behaviors in these domains. However, these relational affordances do not, as a rule, interact with perceptual media and therefore do not create perceptual information about themselves. This means they cannot be perceived, which in turn means they cannot play any role in an ecological explanation of a behavior. This paper briefly reviews the dispositional vs relational accounts of affordances, explains the problem, and proposes an information-based alternative (building on Golonka, 2015). Affordances are not relational, but fortunately information is, and this is where we should focus our attention.
Optic Flow: Perceiving and Acting in a 3-D World