The concept of affordance is one of the most controversial and debated features of James J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception. With this concept Gibson offers a new approach to a knotty problem in perception theory; namely, the problem of accounting for meaning in perceptual experience. The controversial nature of the affordance concept stems largely from the fact of its growing out of an approach to perception that is a significant departure from standard formulations. The aims of this paper are two-fold. The first is to provide a detailed analysis of the concept of affordance, and in the process to draw out some of its implicit theoretical claims concerning the nature of perception. This analysis will be presented in the first part of the paper. Exploration of the implicit assumptions of the affordance concept will reveal the underlying intentional character of the ecological approach to perception.The second aim of the paper is to consider the applicability of the affordance concept to features of the human world whose meanings are sociocultural in origin. As will be clear shortly, affordances seem most plausibly applied to features of the environment that have species-specific or transcultural significance. However, the concept of affordance has sometimes been applied to features that have significance only within a particular sociocultural context. These applications have been a source of some debate. I will argue that this extension of the affordance concept is warranted once affordances are carefully grounded in an intentional analysis of perception. Moreover, the resolution of this controversy will provide the basis for maintaining the broad and fundamental character of affordances in perceptual experience. Toward these ends, we will examine in parts two and three of the paper some issues concerning intentionality in perception and its relationship to Gibson's ecological theory of perception.

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Why is it that affordances have received attention within psychology only in recent decades if they are supposedly what individuals perceive most fundamentally? This paradox can be explained, in part, by the fact that psychologists have usually considered the character of perceiving from a detached stance, and then reified the results of this analysis-an error that William James called the psychologist's fallacy-rather than attending to the immediate flow of perception-action. By the same token, if ecological psychologists were to take stimulus information as what is perceived, rather than as part of a conceptual framework offered to explain how we perceive, they would be committing a similar reification error. Ecological optics as a conceptual framework is always open to revision, even while the reality of affordances is assumed. Bearing in mind this distinction between what is perceived and how it is perceived, investigators need to return regularly to immediate experience, both as a means of verifying that our concepts connect back to our experience of the world and as a way of uncovering new qualities of perceptual experience for investigation. From this perspective, several exemplars of phenomenologically driven perceptual research are examined. Furthermore, the multidimensionality of affordances is considered, with an emphasis on their place in the flow of immediate experience, development, and sociocultural processes.Theoretic knowledge, which is knowledge about things, as distinguished from living or sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of reality.-William James (1909/1996, pp. 249-250) If James Gibson is correct, that we experience the environment in terms of its affordances, then why have affordances so easily eluded the attention of experimental psychologists over the years? As the supposed ground of all perceptual ex- ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, 15(2),

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Even though the term "ecology" was introduced into scientific discourse in the 1860s, and by century's end much of experimental psychology had embraced an evolutionary perspective, it took more than another half century before proposals for an ecological psychology began to appear. Even so, ecological psychology was marginalized from the mainstream of the discipline, and it remains so today. This disjunction between psychology's embrace of evolutionary theory and its resistance to ecological thinking can be explained, in large part, historically. It was Herbert Spencer's evolutionary framework, that assumes an environment-mind dichotomy, which was embraced by most early psychologists, and its influence remains today. A Darwinian perspective, in contrast, stresses the activity of an organism in the context of the dynamic mutual relations of its econiche. At the heart of Darwinian thinking, and in turn ecological psychology, are dynamic organism-environment relations, functionally meaningful environmental properties, as well as change and variation. An ecological psychology also recognizes that humans, like other living things, adapt to their econiche, in part, by altering it and thereby modifying the econiche's functional properties. The human econiche, in particular, is characterized by functionally significant, socially normative meanings owing to the sociocultural systems that naturally stem from the character of hominid evolution.

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