Exploring 'the affordance hypothesis' with Ed Baggs. What are affordances and are they different for non-human animals?

Ed Baggs, assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark, joins me for a conversation about his research on affordances. I invited Ed to join me after reading his latest (preprint) paper ‘The Affordance Hypothesis. In this paper Ed and his co-author Vicente Raja delve into affordance research, using examples like an African fish eagle hunting bee-eaters to illustrate direct perception. 

Ed discusses his journey from traditional cognitive science to exploring affordances in language and human interactions. Though the paper they reference, among many others, James's Principles of Psychology and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, to contextualise Gibson's work. Ed emphasises the need to move beyond categorisation-based thinking to a field-based approach, using action boundaries to operationalise affordances.

As a key part of the operationalisation problem (how to study affordances without falling back into categorical thinking), Ed explains the long-standing debate over affordances' ontological status, referencing Fodor and Pylyshyn's critique and Turvey et al.'s response. In their paper, Ed and Vicente propose viewing affordances as regions of movement space rather than categories. 

The discontinuity problem addresses how humans use language to categorise things, and therefore perceive affordances differently from other animals. 

The conversation also touches on the practical implications for coaches and athletes, emphasising the importance of shared perceptions and meaningful affordances.

There is so much in here. It is worth listening to Episode 60 with Dr Andrew Wilson for an introduction to affordances, and to Episode 1 with Dr James Stafford and Warren Lampard for a conversation about action boundaries and using affordances in practice.

About my guest

Edward Baggs is assistant professor in humanities at the University of Southern Denmark and a fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. His work focuses on the problem of scaling up embodied cognitive science beyond the individual mind to encompass collaborative activity as well as cognitive development and language. His current interests include direct social perception theory and developing field-based methods for observing cognition in everyday settings.

Links

Ed Baggs on ‘x’ https://x.com/edbaggs/status/1867584095720779812

Preprint full paper DOI https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xu4wk

YouTube clip of the African Fish Eagle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-BSDZ7iqc&pp=ygUWYWZyaWNhbiBmaXNoIGVhZ2xlIGJiYw%3D%3D

Karen Adolph visual cliff research clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WanGt1G6ScA

How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections on Gibson's “ecological approach.' J.A. Fodor, & Z.W. Pylyshyn (1981)  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010027781900093?via%3Dihub

Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981)  Turvey et al. (1981) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/16000703_Ecological_laws_of_perceiving_and_acting_In_reply_to_Fodor_and_Pylyshyn_1981