Interdisciplinary interest in affordances is increasing. This paper is a philosophical contribution. The question is: Do persons offer affordances? Analysis of the concepts 'person' and 'affordance' supports an affirmative answer. On a widely accepted understanding of what persons are, persons exhibit many of the features typical of socionormative affordances. However, to understand persons as offering affordances requires, on the face of it, stretching traditional understandings of the concept of affordance: persons, in contrast to the organisms that partially constitute persons, do not seem to be available to perception. This and similar worries are responded to. The environment for an individual is filled with animate features, and prominent among them are persons. That being the case, a full accounting of environmental perception would by necessity include consideration of the information and the processes underlying person perception.-Heft, 2007, p. 86 (emphases added). Two great theorists of the mid 20 th century help us think of persons as offering affordances for socionormative interaction. They are James J. Gibson and Wilfrid Sellars. To my knowledge, few have considered the possibility that two theorist, as opposed in interests as these, have a common lesson to tell. J. J. Gibson is a de-mentalizer of intelligence and perceptuomotor capacities. On his approach to capacities for intelligent environmental engagements, mediating inferences are taken out of the picture (e.g., 1979, p. 127; Lobo et al., 2018, p. 2). Sellars, in contrast, is a denier of direct perceptual (or empirical) givenness. Knowing and agency is for him necessarily inferential. Indeed, he spent large parts of his opus classicus (1956) to bury the "Myth of the Given." The myth as he conceived it is the possibility of direct non-inferential knowledge. Thus it seems that Gibsonian ecological psychology cannot account for knowledge or agency from Sellars's inferentialist point of view. Whether this is an apparent or real opposition is discussed in the concluding section (see also footnote 1). Adverse as J. J. Gibson and Sellars seemthe first, a radical empiricist (1967), advocating non-inferential direct perception and agency, the latter attacking radical

It is argued that normativity is an embodied and situated skill that resists explanation in terms of rule-following. Norms are dynamic and negotiable, and are understood in practice by engaging with others. Rules are a subclass of norms and have pragmatic functions, e.g., to impose norms and elucidate implicit normativity. The propositional articulation of norms is secondary to normativity. Norms can be explained within the framework of ecological psychology as a particular kind of affordance that enables actions to be directly understood as correct. This view entails that the niche of human beings is inherently normative. Finally, the ecological account of normativity is used to elucidate the notion of rulefollowing.

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According to direct perception theory (DPT) people understand each other’s minds by way of perceiving each other’s behavioral engagements in the world. I argue that DPT admits of two interpretations. One interpretation is found in Searle’s social ontology. The other interpretation departs from an enactivist account of social cognition. Both can make sense of what it is to perceive other minds, but in two different ways. The first claims that people can directly perceive states of mind shared in a community. In contrast, the second interpretation allows for direct perception of particular individuals’ states of mind in the context of participation in social practices. The two interpretations are argued to be compatible. People can perceive communal states of mind in another’s responsiveness to action possibilities in social environments, not only the particular other’s states of mind.

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