ABSTRACT
This chapter figures out what is meant by the environment of an animal. James Gibson’s first move is to distinguish very clearly between ‘the animal environment’ and the ‘physical world’. His next step is to show that the fundamental constituents of any environment comprise what he calls affordances. Much as Gibson was later to do, Jakob von Uexkull set out to understand how the world exists for the animal, given its own particular morphology, sensibilities and action potentials. The life of every creature, von Uexkull thought, is so wrapped up in its own Umwelt that no other worlds are accessible to it. Although the animal is encircled within what Martin Heidegger called a ‘disinhibiting ring’, precisely equivalent to the Umwelt, this encirclement is absolutely not an encapsulation. Organisms inhabit what Annemarie Mol and John Law have called ‘fluid space’.
