ABSTRACT
With the overall consensus that affordances cannot merely be features of the environment, recent literature has taken a relational approach to affordances to account for how complex interpersonal, social, and cultural dimensions constitute affordances in the human environmental niche. These recent trends draw on phenomenology and discussions in enactivist literature to apply “affordance” to capture a broader spectrum of human experience, but the question remains as to the scope of the term’s use. On a relational and dynamic definition, affordances are enmeshed in temporal scale, can be acquired by learning, and depend on both cultural niches and individual ability. In sum, because affordances are dependent on the ability of an organism, affordances for humans are colored by the full spectrum of human abilities. Debates on potential expansions of the term have thus taken up the social and cultural dimensions of phenomenological experience, increasingly taking on questions of ethics and normativity.
