Afordancje i informacja semantyczna: propozycja formalizacji
Affordances and semantic information: a proposal for formalization

Summary/Abstract: Notions of affordances and information are crucial elements of Gibsonian ecological psychology. They are also directly linked since from the vantage point of a goal-oriented organism functioning in an environment information specifying available actions is of firstrate importance. At the same time it is usually assumed that mathematical theory of information cannot be applied to ecological psychology, because it does not provide appropriate tools for modeling meaning and value, that is, all those things that are important from the vantage point of an organism. In other words, it is accused of inability to capture ecological semantics. In this paper I show that novel ideas from information theory and especially the notion of semantic information can be used to formulate a rigorous and formal definition of affordances. This result not only enriches ongoing discussions on formal definitions and ontology of affordances, but also has a range of practical implications. Proposed formalization, due to its quantitative and generic form, allows for systematic detection of relations between features of organism and environment that generate affordances in arbitrary organism-environment systems as well as normalized quantitative measurement of the degree to which an environment is filled with affordances from the vantage point of a given agent. Computational methods for conducting such analyses are illustrated based on a simple, idealized organism-environment system.

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