Abstract
The concept of affordance, proposed by James J. Gibson as an opportunity for action offered by the environment to the organism, has been adopted in various fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and robotics. However, different interpretations exist as to whether it is a feature of a relation between the environment and the organism and therefore cannot exist independently of the organism, or a “resource” that exists in the environment independent of the organism’s presence and is waiting to be used, or both, or neither. In this paper, we defend the position that affordances are both relational and resources using a category-theoretic approach. This idea is formalized by the concept of “natural transformations” in category theory, which are structure-preserving transformations between “functors” – mathematical expressions representing “seeing from a particular perspective.” We propose that formalizing the realism of affordance in terms of natural transformations offers a more rigorous and lucid understanding of this concept. Furthermore, our formalization enables us to relate the reality of affordances to a broader context, especially the shift in the meaning of “reality” in modern physics. Our category-theoretic approach offers a potential solution to the problems and limitations associated with existing set theory-based frameworks for affordances, paving the way for a future theory that better accounts for the openended interplay between organisms and their environments.