You Cannot Perceive a Relational Affordance

Ever since Gibson proposed the concept of affordances in 1979, ecological psychologists have been arguing about the best way to formalize the idea in a way that can allow us to successfully explain as much of behavior as possible. The first approach was to consider them as dispositional properties of task environments which can support skillful perception and action. These are perceived via lawfully created ecological information variables in ambient perceptual arrays (Turvey, Shaw, Reed & Mace, 1981). A more recent approach considers them more broadly as relations between properties of organisms and their environments. This expands the spatial and temporal scope of affordances; we stand in many kinds of relations to our physical but also social and cultural environments. Relational affordances are therefore offered as an ecological way to explain behaviors in these so-called ‘representation-hungry’ domains (Chemero, 2009; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014). These are perceived via general ecological information (Bruineberg, Chemero & Rietveld, 2018) which allows a wider class of environmental regularities to be informative about the relation. This paper will argue that general ecological information is not actually perceptual information; it does not come into suitable contact with an organism and thus cannot support the perception of anything, let alone the relational affordances that depend on it to be psychologically relevant. I will show that the affordances-as-relations ontology cannot be an ecological solution for explaining a behavior, and point to an ecological information based alternative that can.