The affordance hypothesis

Affordances were introduced to psychology explicitly as a hypothesis about how meaning gets into perception. The affordance hypothesis is an alternative to the classical hypothesis that meaningful perception involves classification. According to the affordance hypothesis, patterns in ambient energy contain information about the meanings of things in the environment. The affordance hypothesis postulates that by detecting this information, the animal is able to directly detect the meaning, without any intervening act of classification or categorization. We identify two longstanding problems for affordances as an empirical research program: 1) the operationalization problem, i.e. how to study affordances without falling back into categorical thinking; 2) the discontinuity problem, i.e. how to explain the fact that humans do classify things, even if others animals do not. We discuss some possible solutions to these problems, and propose some guidelines for future empirical research.