Les Treilles 2015

Dispositions and Affordances

A Metaphysics of Practices rather
than of Properties and Qualities of
Things

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 Affordances
1. `Affordance’ has evolved into two expressions with different but
related meanings:

a. A practice or procedure made possible for a certain kind of agent by

certain material things singly or in a group. `A pond affords
swimming but only to those who can swim, provided it is not frozen’
b. A product of carrying out a possible procedure or practice in such a
situation by a certain kind of agent. `Using a bread knife on a loaf of
bread by someone competent afford slices’.

For example in chemistry Early has argued that there is no salt in the
sea. The apparent paradox is resolved when we realise:

Sea plus salt pan plus affords crystalizing.

Crystalizing affords salt.

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 Attributes of Hybrid Set-ups 1
Equipment and Agent
The entity to which the attributes revealed by an experimental
programme are ascribed is not the apparent analysandum, the
substances acted upon, but an indissoluble hybrid of the apparent
analysandum and the equipment required to carry out the analysis.
Each analysis of the apparent analysandum conducted by the use of a
different analytical equipment is a property of a different hybrid
entity.
The agent must also be included in the hybrid since analyses
conducted by agents of different skills and knowledge are likely to be
different.

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 Attributes of Hybrid Set-ups 2
Environment
How much of the total environmental setting must be included in the hybrid? J.
J. Gibson took the environment to be a stable and common to each situation in
which our perceptual systems afforded actions and so irrelevant as a contributor
to the characteristics of an affordance, since it was a equal contributor to every
affordance of the kind in question.
In many experimental programs the environment is an ineliminable feature of
the hybrid entity whose affordances for a certain class of agents we are eliciting.
Stabilising the environment and so eliminating it as an attribute oif the relevant
hybrid is a feature of many experiments – e.g. Michelson and Morley operating
their apparatus only when the Cleveland trams were not running

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 Language and the relation of people to the world.
People are not related to the world via their languages and symbolic systems by
denotation of objects, that is referentially.

People are related to the world via their affordance related practices, that is as
acting on hybrid material systems in specific situations.

Compare Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus (all words are names) with his
account in the Investigations (words have a role in practices).

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 Affordances

Already in the mid 20th century J. J. Gibson had proposed a general account of perception
in terms of affordances – what we know about substances and material situations is what
they afford to a human observer or a human actor in quite definite circumstances.

A material set-up affords certain activities to a person or animal – such as

diner/knife/cutting; wolf/ice/walking, but not to other animals. The same ice does not
afford walking to an elk.

The Action potentials of situations are only as read by specific actors.

These chains are of central epistemological importance

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 Nested Affordances
I develop the idea of `affordance’ by generalising Gibson’s proposal from human
actors to experimental apparatus, in a way that supports Niels Bohr’s somewhat
opaque philosophy of science and which is of prime importance in the philosophy
of particle physics and chemistry.

We should note that Gibsonian affordances include features relevant to core

human practices – e.g. a sharp knife affords cutting – which can be extended into
perceptual affordances, a drum affords audible beats and so affords the human
practice of dancing, a radio-telescope plus computers affords galaxies and so
affords the human practice of cosmology.

Here we encounter the idea of Nested Affordances –

a. person/situation affords certain possibilities of action
b. One or more of those possibilities of action when realised affords another
open set of possibilities for action for a person ( apparatus, or animal)
engaged with the first person/situation complex.

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 The range of the concept of `affordance’.
1. Gibson: the human being and the nature of human perceptual systems and
activities cannot be detached from the perceptual phenomena
experienced by human beings. So perception affords the possibilities of
action generated experiences - it does not mirror material properties.

2. Manipulating and its results are as important as sensory activity and its
results.

3. NB: the apparatus, its nature and way of working cannot be detached from
physical phenomena (observations). So experimentation affords chemical
phenomena - it does not mirror a material property.

We could call this `muted mereology’ - an experiment with electron producing

apparatus is not displaying particulate constituents of the atoms from which
they seem to come - but affords distinct and unique tracks.

Particle physics arises when we assume that tracks are tracks of particles. But
an other experiment in which `streams of electrons’ are produced affords an
interference pattern.

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 Affordances and Solipsism

We use equipment to discover the affordances of the complex created by attaching that
equipment to the world and activating it.

We presume the world is always generally continuously activated! Our probes impose a
secondary activation not on the world, but on the equipment/world complex.

However: we can take note only of what the equipment/world complex affords to each
human being as agent who is an indissoluble part of person/equipment/world complex.

Bohr was right – ordinary language links one observer’s affordances to those of each and
all others

Affordance analysis implies that we cannot have unmediated

access to what is responsible for the coming to be of phenomena
– apparatus is never transparent.

We can make plausible models of agencies and causal mechanisms.

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 Affordances and Relativism

If the concept of an affordances is used to describe an indissoluble union of an indeterminate

feature of the world and a determinate method of interacting with the world, then does not this
entail that the way the world reacts to the practices of human knowledge is relative to the mode
with which we interact with it.

Indeed it is; each mode permits a certain gamut of activities to human beings and other organisms
some of which are afforded by other modes of interaction; that is other hybrid systems.

We will link this insight to the concept of the Umwelt, the region of the world (Welt) within which
human beings can live.

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 Affordances in physics
We can make use of the concept of `affordance’ in interpreting post-
Newtonian physics.

a. To make sense of Bohr’s misty notion of `complementarity’ as

affordance related situationally exclusive practices.

b. To account for the puzzling ontology of `particle’ physics – asked to be

shown a Higgs boson, I am shown a track. This what the relevant hybrid
system, and its human managers affords.

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 Three Recent Concepts
In this presentation I want to connect up the concept of an affordance
with some other concepts either newly revived or newly created.

1. Dispositions

2. Welt and Umwelt

3. Mereological Semantic Fallacies

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 Premodern Ontology
What the analysis of physics and chemistry in terms of affordances frees us from.

The distinction between the attributes we ascribe to substances on the basis of

common observation and the attributes we cite in explanation of what we
observe.
Locke made famous the distinction between nominal essences, the attributes we
use in classifying substances on the basis of observation, and real essences, the
material constitutions of such substances which they possess independent of
observation and which we infer from our theory of matter.

Real essences are structured assemblies of bounded, stable particles.

Only some attributes of observable material things are also attributes of real
essences particles.

The ontology of premodern chemistry is a simple mereology, more or less along

Lesniewski’s lines.
For example `if A is a part of B and B is a part of C then A is a part of C’.

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 The Lockean Tradition
In an ideal science there would be a discrete set of criteria for identifying
substances by their observable or experimentally displayed attributes and a second
discrete set of `deep’ properties that would distinguish substances at a
fundamental level and the two sets of criteria would match perfectly.
Cf Boyle, The Sceptical Chemist.

Once displayed these properties could be detached from the epoch, person,
equipment and philosophical background that prompted their discovery to provide
stable, permanent scientific knowledge. `Water is H2O’ whenever, wherever, and
for everyone pace Putnam.

However: this scheme presumes that observation and experiment yield attributes
of substances that are context free, or can be made so by various devices, such as
CP clauses.

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 Dispositions
One way of linking observations to the supposed permanent independent
characteristics of substances given the variations of what is said to have been
observed relative to the environment, the observing devices and the observer, is the
concept of `disposition’. To call something `red’ in the scientific mode was to make a
conditional statement of the form `if seen in a good light the substance will (would,
should, might) looks red’. Philosophers of that time noticed the ineliminable
involvement of the observer in the choice of what attributes to include in the
nominal essence of a substance.
Only those which did not vary with the state of the observer, including state of
relative motion.
For example Galileo!

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 The Basic `Relativism’ Insight
Despite Galileo’s insight apparatus was often taken to be a transparent window on the
world.

The `relativitism’ insight was a simple background assumption: Red’ could the word for
a sensory experience, or for a ʎ reading on a spectrometer. It was assumed that a
simple more or less determinate causal relation linked the wave length of the light with
the sensory experience.

This assumption was queried when it was realised that the physical properties displayed
by sub-atomic particles depended on the chose of experimental technique and
apparatus, and that these displays could not be mutually reduced..

The electron diffraction experiments should have been the premises for a fundamental
conclusion: the kind of apparatus was an ineliminable part of the apparently descriptive
concept and the apparatus could not be deleted from the core of the basic empirical
concepts.

`No hidden variables’ is a necessary consequence of an affordance metaphysics!

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 Umwelten: The Biology of von Uexküll
Each species of animal and plant inhabits a unique region of the world (Welt) : this
is its Umwelt.

The wide and indeterminate world (the Welt) is not available as a living space to
each and every species of animal or plant.

Each species has a determinate domain (its Umwelt) as its life space, its scope and
availability determined by the of its members capacities to perceive, manipulate
and think.

The Umwelt of a species is determined by its powers and capacities which are
partly determined by its anatomy and physiology and partly by its `culture’.

Each technical innovation (material or cognitive) opens up more of the Welt to be part of the
human Umwelt.

There may be distinct Umwelten for each person at each stage in their lives.

The Umwelt as an open set of available affordances as action potentials reshaped

by each species. 17
 The Human Umwelt
For most species of animals and plants the Umwelt is more or less fixed and limited.
Human beings have been able to enlarge the species Umwelt by innovations – clothes
to inhabit cold regions, ships to explore distant regions, microscopes to examine regions
too small to be seen and so on.

Human beings enlarge their Umwelten by incorporating regions of the indeterminate

Welt making them determinate.
We assign wave lengths to electromagnetic radiations. We made maps of the American
content and now make maps of the far side of the Moon.

Note the importance of techno-science and the role of equipment in the enlargement
of the human Umwelt.

Reshaping OUR umwelt.

For use, preparing the ground for gardening and farming.

Developing plant species to do well in given environments.
 The Mereological Fallacies

The First Mereological Fallacy

It is [sometimes] a fallacy to ascribe a predicate to a part of an entity that gets its

meaning from its use for an attribute of the whole entity.

Paradigm Example: Bennett and Hacker: it is a fallacy to ascribe a cognitive skill or

mental state and so on the meaning of which is fixed by its use for a whole human
being to a part of that being, for example declaring that the hippocampi remember.

Reservation: this fallacy may be a special case of the is-ought fallacy since
psychological concepts like `remembering’ are normative and the neurological
concepts are empirical.

Some properties an be predicated of both wholes and their parts, e.g. mass.

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 The Second Mereological Fallacy

Taking the products of an analytical interaction with a material

substance, mass or individual, as the constituents of the original
material substance.

This is not always a fallacy – dismantling a bicycle with spanner and

screwdriver yields parts of the intact bicycle. Different analytical tools
(e.g. acetylene cutter) yields different constituents of the original
object.

When is it a fallacy? When the products are of the wrong ontological

category to be parts of the original material entity.

Electrons as constituents of molecules

Memories as constituents of brains.

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 Affordances and the Second Mereological Fallacy

In some cases the projection of products of an interaction, that is what a

procedure affords, are constituents of the object acted upon and sometimes they
are not.

As a general rule the projection principle fails if the ontological category of the
relevant affordances is incompatible with the ontological category of the whole.

Paradigm Example: Chemistry: it is a fallacy to take for granted that the products
of an analytical process are the constituents of the being whiuch has been
analysed. Mulliken interpreted molecular orbitals as an electronic model of
atomic structure, rather than a verisimilitudinous picture.

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 Examples from Other Sciences

Psychological example: A memory is afforded by a human being when that

person is prompted to recollect something. The recollection is usually
expressed as a meaningful symbol.

The human brain does not contain meaningful symbols.

Chemical example: Salt is afforded by the sea when it is evaporated.

Expands into Sea + salt pans + people affords evaporation, and
evaporation affords salt. Salt usually takes the form of a white crystalline
substance. Here we have both contemporary senses of `affordance’ in play.
The sea does not contains a white crystalline substance.

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 The Welt

Our world is the ever changing umwelt.

The Welt is known only as that which is involved in innumerable affordances

but is never able to be detached and examined independently – attempting that
would add yet another affordance to the catalogue of those that characterise
the Welt.

Making pragmatic use of the mereological reasoning that taken realistically

would commit the second mereological fallacy we can construct working
models of what could be the conditions for some of the affordances we can
elicit.

But these have no ontological significance since the Welt is forever closed to us
as such.

Let us call the Welt `glub’.

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 An Epistemology that conforms to this Metaphysics

What if we really abandon Boylean corpuscularianism and its primary and

secondary quality metaphysics?

The stuff of the world is nothing but glub. `It’ is formless and timeless, that is
predications of form, moment and location are vacuous.

But we do know a lot about the glub.

We know what practices (affordances-1) an indissoluble blend of apparatus,

experimenter and glub affords, and we know what products the carrying out of
such practices affords (affordances-2).

Models derived by mereological reasoning are useful heuristic devices but one
runs the risk of committing the second mereological fallacy if one takes them to
be representative of states of the glub.

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 Conclusions

Developing the concept of an affordance we reach a philosophical account of the attributes of material
beings that partakes of realism (ice really does afford walking to some creatures) and partakes of
phenomenology, material attributes are always attributes of an indissoluble complex of world and
instrument – apparatus, sensory systems and so on.

We note the development of the concept of `affordance’ from possible practice to the product of
performing a possible practice.

Knowledge is not relative to equipment, material and cognitive, but each set up and manipulation
generates its own body of knowledge. We know many things, that is each person's body of knowledge is
multiple – it is not a question of how to subsume all pockets of knowledge under one grand scheme but
to ask how multiple knowledge corpora hang together if and when they do.

C.f. Cartwright’s `dappled world’.

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