Creating Novel Affordances

Adaptive behavior involves the perception of affordances, or opportunities for action. Since the term’s introduction by psychologist James J. Gibson in the 1960s, affordances have been the subject matter of those disciplines within psychology predominantly concerned with the study of perception. But the concept of affordances is not necessarily restricted to the psychological domain—and indeed, its creation was in the service of naturalizing the phenomenon of perception, giving perception significance for theorizing in biology. A central goal of the naturalization of perception was to provide a bridge between cognition and ecology, placing psychological phenomena in the world rather than in the head. The aim of this paper is to continue the project of the naturalization of perception by examining the particular phenomenon of how novel affordances are created through exploratory action, or “environmental tinkering”. This project is especially relevant for the study of evolutionary dynamics, given, as I will argue, the relevance of novel affordances for generating adaptive evolutionary change.