Re: minds of our own?

p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
Thu, 10 Jul 1997 11:07:04 -0500

Jay Lemke writes:

>Paul Prior reasonably asks if we can get to 'persons with a
>brain' having 'affordances of their own' without resorting to 'a
>sovereign mind behind a hard boundary'.
>
>The problem I guess is 'affordances of their own'. I cannot even
>quite understand the notion of 'affordance' apart from
>participation in the larger system. Aren't affordances
>fundamentally _relational_, rather than intrinsic properties?
>isn't that the appeal of the idea?

Affordances are relational, multiple, open-ended, emergent,etc. The
genesis of affordances is also relational, co-genetic. But affordances are
also object-ive, i.e., there are things being related. A hammer, a book,
and a feather have an infinite number of affordances, but all of those
affordances relate to the object-ive properties of the hammer, book,
feather, just as they relate to the object-ive properties of the person,
dog, spider interacting with them, the physical envrionoment of the surface
of the earth where the interaction is taking place, and so on. Isn't it
central to the notion of the ideality/materiality of artifacts that they be
*objects* capable of, to some degree, having prefabricated properties?

Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign