ABSTRACT
The defining feature of biological agents is that they strive to control encounters with the environment to obtain beneficial encounters while preventing harmful encounters. Perceiving the “affordances” of things is perceiving what encounters with them would afford. In so doing, agents are coordinated to a particular scale of nature in which meanings and problems reside, whose behavior being a constant function of what encounters with the environment would afford. Naturally, an effort to understand perception and behavior of agents requires an adequate level of description of the world that their evolution, development, and behavior fit into; otherwise, it would be like watching a tennis match with half the court occluded from view. What a thing affords an agent is determined by what it is—an invariant combination of properties of the thing (e.g., its surface layout, passive dynamics, resistance to stress, stiffness, viscosity, size)—taken with reference to the agent. In this article, I discuss how the notion of affordance paves a new way of penetrating the centuries-old division between the physical world (what a thing is) and its meaning (what a thing affords) by developing an adequate level of description of the world that evolving agential systems fit into.
