“Scaffolding” and “affordance” as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences

AbstractThere are (at least) two ways to think of the differences in basic concepts and typologies that one can find in the different scientific practices that constitute a research tradition. One is the fundamentalist view: the fewer the better. The other is a non-fundamentalist view of science whereby the integration of different concepts into the right abstraction grounds an explanation that is not grounded as the sum of the explanations supported by the parts. Integrative concepts are often associated with idealizations that can successfully set the stage for different phenomena to be compared or for explanations of different phenomena to be considered as jointly increasing our understanding of reality beyond that which each explanation provides separately. In this paper, our aim is to argue for the importance of the notions of an "affordance" and "scaffolding" as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences. The integrational role of the concept of affordance is closely related with the capacity of affordances to generate the scaffoldings leading to the integration. The capacities of affordances that turn them into (stable) scaffoldings explain why such notions are often used interchangeably (as we shall see). On this basis, we aim to show that the concepts of affordance and scaffolding provide the sort of epistemic perspective that can overcome common complaints about the limits and unity of the cognitive sciences once claims about extended cognition are taken seriously.Keywords:: AffordanceDistributed CognitionExtended CognitionIntegrative ConceptScaffolding AcknowledgementsFinancial support for this research was received from the Spanish Government's DGICYT research project: FFI2011-23238, "Innovation in Scientific Practice: Cognitive Approaches and Their Philosophical Consequences," and from project: 133345 CONACYT, Mexico.Notes [1] In this paper, we assume that understanding can be characterized as an important epistemic aim of science that is not reducible to the aim of increasing factual knowledge. For views defending different versions of this view of understanding, see De Regt, Leonelli, and Eigner (Citation2009). [2] Evo-devo is not a clear-cut label. Roughly, evo-devo refers to a new discipline focusing on the search for the integration of different traditions (theoretical as well as experimental) of studying biological development that grew rather separately during the twentieth century (Laubichler & Maienschein, Citation2007). As Hall puts it: "evo-devo is a synthesis of evolution and development with emergent properties not found from analysis of development or evolution alone" (Citation2000, p. 177). [3] See, for example, the section "On surfaces and the ecological laws of surfaces" in chapter 2 of Gibson (Citation1986). The chapter concludes with a telling summary. The first sentence of the summary is the following: "we live in an environment consisting of substances that are more or less substantial; of a medium, the gaseous atmosphere; and of the surfaces that separate the substances from the medium. We do not live in 'space'." [4] See Chemero (Citation2009) for an elaboration of such a view. [5] In section 2, we will see other ways to understand scaffolding and affordance that do not exactly match our position. [6] An example of the interdisciplinary field of the cognitive sciences formed by various disciplines centered on the study of cognition is the report Cognitive science, 1978 (Walker, Citation1978), under the auspices of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. [7] Some authors deem that the English term 'scaffolding' predates Vygotsky's writings (Wood et al., Citation1976), and that the corresponding concept changed under the influence of his work. Be that as it may, the meaning of 'scaffolding' in the current scientific literature comes from Vygotsky's work. [8] Hutchins may have been influenced by the writing of Vygotsky but it certainly is not the case that they belong to the same theoretical tradition. Firstly, Vygotsky's work comes from psychology and Hutchins's from anthropology, and one of his closest influences is that of Andrade. Therefore, there does not seem to be a direct relation between Hutchins and Vygotsky. [9] For a detailed account of this discussion, see Theiner (Citation2011).[10] See the introduction to Caporael, Griesemer, and Wimsatt (Citation2013) and Martínez (Citation2013) for an elaboration of this view.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAnna EstanyAnna Estany is a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.Sergio MartínezSergio Martínez is a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.