An affordance is a relational property of both a System and its Environment.
It is “an action possibility available in the environment [that] exists relative to the action capabilities”Evans et al. 2017, 37 of the system and “as such, […] cut[s] across the objective-subjective dichotomy”Harwood & Hafezieh 2017, 2f. .
The totality of a system’s affordances are its Umwelt in the sense of von Uexküll:
an environment-world which is … “constituted by a more or less broad series of elements [called] “carriers of significance” or “marks” which are the only things that interest the animal”.Wikipedia
Affordances contribute to attractors.
References
- Evans et al. (2017): “Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research”
- Harwood & Hafezieh (2017): “‘Affordance’ – what does this mean?”
- Wikipedia: “Jakob Johann von Uexküll”