Affordances oggettive ma soggettive, dirette ma mediate

Abstract

According to Gibson an affordance at the same time is directly perceived and objective. However, since the human environment is always mediated by social and linguistic representations, this means that an affordance cannot be objective: as Duchamp showed us once and for all, one can always fail to see a urinal as a urinal. In this essay, we propose the apparently oxymoronic notion of “direct but subjective affordance” or “objective but mediate affordance” to try to keep together the “direct” character of affordances on the one hand, with their ineliminable “subjectivity” – i.e. language-mediated characterization – on the other.