Previous steps toward an affordance-based approach to concepts

Abstract

Since some years ago, there have been several approaches that took affordances as a basis for explaining cognitive processes beyond perception and action, such as language, imagination, social practices, etc. Another key aspect of our mental life that is susceptible to be explained from an affordance-based perspective is the nature of concepts. The perceptual basis of concepts is a traditional theme in the history of philosophy, one that has been approached from either a nativist or an empiricist perspective. Here, we want to offer the minimal methodological and conceptual requirements for approaching the problem of the perceptual basis of concepts from an affordance-based perspective that overcome the traditional nativist vs. empiricist debate. We argue that affordances are a key idea to make sense of our experience, but also to make sense of our concepts, as they provide the materials from which we can build them up. For this, we sketch our own methodological and theoretical requirements or conditions for offering a successful affordance-based approach to concepts, and we offer a positive, constructive story to develop the idea in the future. In particular, we propose the idea of embodied concepts as a non-discursive link between basic and discursive cognition. These embodied concepts are a kind of bodily know-how in which we patternize the world. This bodily know-how is formed thanks to the experience we gain through dealing with affordances. Thus, embodied concepts can be considered as affordance-based states that are the missing link between merely reactive contentless states and discursive, contentful states.