Affordances as Response-Dependent Properties: Beyond Dispositionalism and Relationalism

It is common to define affordances (the action possibilities offered by the environment) either as dispositions of objects in the environment or subject-environment relations. Drawing on Gibson’s original framework and subsequent developments, I identify four core criteria for evaluating comprehensive theories of affordances: environmental basis, subject-relativity, socio-cultural situatedness, and empirical tractability. I argue that neither of the common approaches adequately satisfies all four. Dispositionalism properly captures environmental basis and empirical tractability but struggles with subject-relativity and socio-cultural situatedness. Relationalism shows the reverse pattern. To move beyond this impasse, I propose a response-dependent account: an environmental feature affords an action just in case it would elicit the relevant action-oriented responsiveness in suitable subjects under empirically specifiable conditions, where that counterfactual responsiveness constitutes the feature’s affording that action. This treats affordances as environmental properties while explaining systematic variation across subjects and contexts without reducing them either to dispositions or to organism–environment relations, thereby offering a more unified framework that integrates the core insights of both views and provides a stable foundation for empirical research.