All Affordances Are Social: Foundations of a Gibsonian Social Ontology

Abstract Ecological psychology is built on a perception-oriented ontology. The primary focus has been on explaining the perception and action behavior of individual animals. To accommodate social phenomena within the ecological approach, it is necessary to expand the ontology, however theorists have been unclear about how to do this. The paper presents a negative argument and a positive programmatic outline. The negative argument is against the use of the term ‘social affordance’, a term that confuses the perspective of the researcher with that of the animal. Instead, it is advocated that we adopt, as a working hypothesis, the claim that all affordances are social; that is, all affordances are public and are, in principle, observable by a third party. The programmatic outline then shows that affordances alone are insufficient for describing social meaning. An ecological social ontology requires new tools for describing interaction processes, symbolic meaning, and material culture as structures occurring within the populated environment.