Publication: The risk of trivializing affordances: mental and cognitive affordances examined
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Date
2023-06-25
Authors
Segundo Ortín, Miguel ; Heras Escribano, Manuel
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Publisher
Taylor and Francis Group
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2228341
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
© 2023 Los autores. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This document is the Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Philosophical Psychology. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2228341
Abstract
In the last years, we have attended to different attempts to extend the notion of affordance to include mental or cognitive actions. In short, the idea is that our capacity to perform some cognitive functions such as counting, imagining, mathematical reasoning, and so on, is preceded by our awareness of cognitive or mental affordances. In this paper, we analyze two of these attempts, Mental Affordance Hypothesis, and cognitive horizons, and conclude that they fail to deliver their promise. Our argument is two-fold. First, we show that both proposals lack an explanation for how these affordances can be perceived or experienced by the individuals. Second, we argue, focusing on the examples provided by the authors, that the introduction of cognitive affordances is not justified on explanatory grounds. In other words, neither of these proposals offers a compelling justification for thinking that performing said “mental acts” requires the perception of mental or cognitive affordances. Hence, the existence of mental or cognitive affordances remains both scientifically mysterious and explanatorily unjustified.
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Citation
Philosophical Psychology, 2023, Vol. 37, N. 7, pp. 1639-1655
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