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I don't disagree; you confirm teh implications of
my previous note.
Defining affordances is related to the discipline using
the term. Gibsonian psychology, like others, is a pschology of the
individual mind. Culture, on the other hand, is the vehicle to create ideas, customs, and
material objects. It is a collective programming of the minds of the
group that distinguish one group of people from another. Culture clearly is
derived from individual mental process, since it reflects the
species.
For communication to take place, individuals
must have a shared interpretation of the signs that are exchanged, and which
point to the signified entities in the world. Culture, the repeatable action of
signs and interpretations, is observed through social interactions taking place
in changing contexts. This takes us into the realm of organizational semiotics.
There are several ways in which cultural patterns are observed in organizational
semiotics. In the Stamper school, the focus is on behavior.
-- Jeff Schiffel
From: Pat
Hayes
On Oct 6, 2008, at 12:55 PM,
Schiffel, Jeffrey A wrote:
...... An
affordance, for those not familiar with the term, is a
pattern of
behavior in a culture.
Not in Gibsonian psychology. There - and I believe it was Gibson who
coined the term - an affordance is a property of the perceived world which is
(1) germane to the concerns of an organism, in that it provides useful
information about the world, and (2) easy for the perceptual system of the
organism to compute. It is the combination of salience and 'fit' to the
sensory apparatus which makes affordances noteworthy. Methodologically, their
importance is in providing an alternative to behaviorism's insistence on
observing and theorizing only about behavior:, while being
objectively definable and measurable.
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