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Gibsonian Affordances for Roboticists

Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind Program, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA, tony.chemero{at}fandm.edu

Michael T. Turvey

Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

Using hypersets as an analytic tool, we compare traditionally Gibsonian (Chemero 2003; Turvey 1992) and representationalist (Sahin et al. this issue) understandings of the notion `affordance'. We show that representationalist understandings are incompatible with direct perception and erect barriers between animal and environment. They are, therefore, scarcely recognizable as understandings of `affordance'. In contrast, Gibsonian understandings are shown to treat animal-environment systems as unified complex systems and to be compatible with direct perception. We discuss the fruitful connections between Gibsonian affordances and dynamical systems explanation in the behavioral sciences and point to prior fruitful application of Gibsonian affordances in robotics. We conclude that it is unnecessary to re-imagine affordances as representations in order to make them useful for researchers in robotics.

Key Words: affordances • Gibson • hypersets

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