I'm drawing on James Gibson's notion of affordances (e.g., The Ecological
Approach to Visual Perception, 1979). Gibson talked about affordances in
terms of things like, a lake affords walking on to a water insect but not
to a person, a ceiling affords walking on to fly, but not a cat, and so on.
In this sense, affordances are relational and open-ended, so what a
feather affords cannot be predetermined. It may be food to one creature, a
place to lay eggs for another, a material for another's nest. I might use
the feather as a a piece of clothing, as a pen to write with, as part of an
art work, as part of a science lecture, as a prop for describing how a
plane went through the sky one evening, etc. Of course, I can't put the
feather in my gas tank and drive to Chicago, though maybe if I were Doc in
the movie Back to the Future I could do this with Mr. Fusion. In this
sense, the affordances are infinite. What unites all these relations
between feathers and organisms in some environment would be the properties
of the feather, whatever those properties are, as an object (e.g., the
feather is made of certain elements not purified plutonium, its size and
shape is such and such, etc.).
Paul
>Paul,
>
>Would you clarify your definition of affordances? If affordances are the
>*perceived* uses of an artifact, then I would argue that there are not
>infinite affordances to a feather or hammer.
>
>Bill B