ABSTRACT
Affordances are opportunities for action. They offer entry into a lawful account of direct perception in which full-bodied organisms are causal players in perceptual, cognitive outcomes. However, the ecological-psychological discourse has split on the issue of affordance’s proper scale. Viewing affordances as native to a so-called scale of behavior needs eventual appeals to indirect perception for organism contact with scales beyond immediate anatomical reach. A competing view treats affordances as inhabiting a wide range of scales, perhaps in the hierarchical organization, and it would allow means for direct perception to continue without abatement across all aspects of organism experience. Lawful approaches might require us to pursue a concept of affordance in the latter scale-independent sense. Ecological psychology certainly needs to recognize scale-dependent constraints as part of the layout. However, if we conflate so-called lawful affordances with scale-dependent constraints, we risk giving renewed license to computational explanations of perception and action that privilege inferential mediation over embodied nesting relationships. Moreover, the organism’s perceptual use of affordances for supporting dexterous action appears to proceed across multiple scales, as indicated by both the original estimation of affordances as dimensionless and more recent modeling of perception and action as a cascading, scale-invariant process.
