Situating Attention and Habit in the Landscape of Affordances

The paper argues that affordances—opportunities for action in the environment—can be understood as dispositions, contrary to some views in embodied cognition. It distinguishes habit from skill and reassesses the phenomenology of dispositions, proposing that dispositions are motivational factors depending on sensitivity to context clues (regulated by habit and attention) and the subject's positionality (inseparable from context-awareness). Drawing on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, it contends that both elements support a dispositional view of affordances, reconciling relational and skill-based accounts.

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Abstract

This paper aims to situate the roles of attention and habit in contemporary approaches to embodied cognition with particular regard to the conceptualisation of affordances. While Chemero has argued that affordances have a relational character that rules out dispositions, Rietveld and Kiverstein have suggested that engaging with affordances amounts to exercising skills. By critically reconsidering the distinction between dispositions and abilities proposed by Chemero, as well as the standard theory of habit that underpins accounts of skilful coping (including Rietveld’s and Dreyfus’), I propose to disambiguate habit from skill and to reassess the phenomenology of dispositions. Dispositions are motivational factors that depend on two elements: (i) sensitivity to context clues, which is regulated by habit and attention, and (ii) the positionality of the subject, which is inseparable from context-awareness. Drawing on Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s insights, I argue that both (i) and (ii) can accommodate a dispositional view of affordances.