On the Utility of Virtuality for Relating Abilities and Affordances

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of virtuality into the question of the ontological status of ability-affordance relations in ecological psychology. By differentiating concrete affordances and animal activities from the somatic-environmental networks they actualize, I argue that ecological-psychological thought is brought into a better position from which to think the ability-affordance relation as a ground for the developmental entanglements of organisms and their subjective environments (i.e., the affordances that constitute their niches). I begin by sketching the aporia to be filled in ecological psychology by an introduction of the virtual. Then, I turn toward a brief elucidation of the concept of virtuality. In the terms developed here, abilities and affordances together comprise a virtual meshwork or field of dynamically linked rates of change, capacities, and tendencies that are actualized or instantiated in terms of individual instances of organismic behavior, environmental configuration, and coevolution. Armed with these conceptual tools, I endeavor, in the article's final section, to provide in terms of virtuality a properly genetic analysis of the dynamic reciprocity between organismic abilities and the recursive configuration of their subjective worlds (or fields of affordances) without recourse to teleological functions, hylomorphic animal perception, or unknowable environments.

Notes

¹ It is perhaps worth noting here that Shaw (2003) does invoke a language of virtuality but only in reference to ideas, images, or memories (p. 101). In that sense, to say that the ability to climb is virtual would be to say that it exists first as an idea or internal mental intention to be externalized in the actual act of climbing. This is emphatically not the case for the present position.

² For a more sophisticated exposition of the niche, see Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman (2003).