Epistemology and conceptual resources for the development of learning technologies

To repeat, the main point of the argument here is not the strengths and
weaknesses of the concept of affordance as Gibson originally applied it to the matter
of perception, but the problems that occur when it is used in a more reductive way as
a component in accounts of learning. In this connection what is especially important is
the issue of epistemology, of the carrying over from what for the sake of argument
may be considered by some a relatively straightforward question of perception to the
far more complex issue of learning. For example it is one thing to perceive that this
object is for hammering. It is quite another to determine that this event is historical
(E.H.Carr’s What is History) or, to choose another example, where to decide the part
played by judgment is in the practice of medicine. Although he may not have spelled
it out in this way, Gibson’s notion of affordances would seem to imply the idea that
perception occurs through „mechanical’ causation whereby the actual relation of the
object to the senses of the subject determines information. For example, seeing and
feeling an object that is heavy at one end communicates that what is felt and seen
affords hammering, according to the position of the actor. Although at odds with
Gibson’s own claim for the epistemological basis of his work, the line of thinking
originates in a categorical separation of mind and world. This separation, from the
time of its formulation by Descartes in the seventeenth century, has defined the
problem of knowledge - how can a mind totally apart from the world ever gain
knowledge of it? A considerable amount of philosophic work since that time has been
dedicated to resolving this problem. Outside philosophy and in the applied social
sciences and psychology the difficulties posed by dualism have been less acute with
the question of the validity of knowledge taking precedence over how it is constituted

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