In Defense of Introspective Affordances.
Abstract
Psychological and philosophical studies have extended J. J. Gibson’s notion of affordances. Affordances are possibilities for bodily action presented to us by the objects of our perception. Recent work has argued that we should extend the actions afforded by perception to mental action. I argue that we can extend the notion of affordance itself. What I call ‘Introspective Affordances’ are possibilities for mental action presented to us by introspectively accessible states. While there are some prima facie worries concerning the non-perceptual nature of introspection, I will argue that our internal mental lives share enough commonalities with experiences in our environment to warrant this extension. I will demonstrate the value of introspective affordances by showing how they allow us to explain an underexplored aspect of thought insertion.
Publication Title
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Recommended Citation
Gray, D. M. (2024). In Defense of Introspective Affordances.. Review of Philosophy and Psychology https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-024-00734-z
Comments
The notion of affordance is supposed to capture the relationship between a perceptually capable subject and the environment of that subject (Gibson 1979). The relationship is one in which objects, through information passed by ambient light, present or affordpossibilities for action (Gibson 1979, 132). Additionally, affordances partially constitute the perceptual experience of the subject. This account of a subject’s relation to the environment brings perception and action into closer relation than previous structuralist and gestalt theories of perception.