Comment on “Affordances in "Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back”
Comment on “Affordances in "Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back”

Summary/Abstract: I am grateful to Zuzanna Rucińska for her wide-ranging discussion of different definitions and understandings of affordances, but I am not persuaded by her that the difficulties she exposes are not “just philosophers’” difficulties. By this I mean that philosophers can tie themselves in knots over whether colors are “external” properties or “internal” or “mental” properties or whether colors even exist, but the science of color and its related and constituent phenomena is hardly touched by these engaging puzzles. Color is actually one of the few phenomena of the manifest image that does occasionally mislead scientists into avoidable culs-de-sac, encouraging them to take the Hard Problem seriously, for instance, but in general, our understanding of what color is and isn’t is steadily improving thanks to scientists leaving these ontological problems to the philosophers, who are welcome to them. (For the record, I declared colors to be real “lovely” properties in Consciousness Explained (pp. 379–80), a distinction picked up usefully by my student Tony Chemero. They are not definable-more precisely they would not be defined-without reference to a class of “observers.”) Affordances are, like colors, lovely properties. […]

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