Re: CHAT and Gibson

Russ Hunt (HUNT who-is-at academic.stu.StThomasU.ca)
Tue, 5 Mar 1996 08:03:51 AST

When Doug Vipond and I were working on "literary reading" ten years
ago it seemed clear to us that Gibson offered the most useful
psychological language around for talking about understanding
language as a transaction (in Dewey's sense). At that time the
notion of an ecological system wasn't a metaphor that offered itself
to us, though I'd see that as equally powerful now. So I'm very
interested in Paul Prior's comment that

> In my own work, I've been considering ways that semiotic artifacts
> (like published texts and research data), the existence of
> particular institutional forums for future publication, and certain
> literate practices may work in conjuction to form semiotic
> affordances that help constitute disciplinary genres. I'd be
> interested in hearing from others thinking about these
> relationships.

One of the things I liked about Gibson's language of affordance is
that it gave us a way to talk about what I might now call "meaning
potential" without, on the one hand, ascribing particular meaning to
texts or claiming that texts could only mean one thing (what _we_ saw
them meaning), or, on the other, saying with some theorists that the
text didn't have effective properties and thus was pretty much
irrelevant to what people did with it.

-- Russ
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