Jim Wertsch
Department of Education
Washington University
St. Louis, MO 63130
On Thu, 28 Mar 1996, Mike Cole wrote:
>
> My reading of Gibson's notion of affordance is that it is a relational,
> systemic concept. In other words, an affordance is not just "in" an
> environment; it is in the relation between some aspect of the environment
> (seen as dynamic, not static) and an organism (e.g., the surface of a lake
> does not afford walking to a human, but does to some kinds of insects).
> For humans and other organisms that learn, affordances then are not simply
> biological. And as activity theory points out, the "environment" is itself
> massively transformed by human activity.
>
> In this sense, it seems to me both true that mediational means transform
> affordances and that they afford. In other words, the unit of analysis is
> something more like a notion of functional systems as dynamic, fluid,
> distributed, and situated constructions (I'm thinking here particularly of
> Hutchin's use of functional systems in _Cognition in the Wild_). In this
> sense then, you can't *really* separate out the activity setting from the
> persons from the tools, although our language and our need to analyze
> activity may encourage or require us to do so.
>
> ------
> I recommend Ed Hutchin's book-- and the symposium about it
> in MCA-- most highly for discussion of these issues. However,
> its interesting the Ed does not mention Gibson and I do noit
> recall him using the notion of affordances.
> mike
>