Affordances. Dispositions, normativity and content

Abstract

The main aim of this dissertation is to offer a systematized view on three main aspects of affordances, the objects of perception for ecological psychology. The three main aspects are dispositionalism, normativity, and the perceptual content that results from our experiencing them. The main idea that I defend is the following: affordances can be understood as dispositions from a non-factualist, Rylean perspective. This non-factualist approach takes inspiration from the work of Ryle, Wittgenstein, Sellars and McDowell. In order to defend that affordances as dispositions from a non-factualist approach, this means that the normative aspect of dispositions is understood in a non-factualist way too, and that the best candidate to explain which is the content of our perceptual experience is an approach that I call minimal conceptualism, which is based on McDowell’s notion of intuition. Chapters 2 to 5 deal with dispositionalism, chapters 6 to 8 delve into normativity, and chapters 9 and 10 analyze perceptual content.