Formalizing Affordance

The idea that to perceive an object is to perceive its affordances—that is, the interactions of the perceiver with the world that the object supports or affords—is attractive from the point of view of theories in cognitive science that emphasize the fundamental role of actionsin representing an agent’s knowledge about the world. However, in this general form, the notion has so far lacked a formal expression. This paper offers a representation for objects in terms of their affordances using Linear Dynamic Event Calculus, a formalism for reasoning about causal relations over events. It argues that a representation of this kind, linking objects to the events which they are characteristically involved in, underlies some universal operations of natural language syntactic and semantic composition that are postulated in Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). These observations imply that the language faculty is more directly related to prelinguistic cognitive apparatus used for planning action than formal theories in either domain have previously seemed to allow.

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