I'm with Lubomir.   Blame Gibson. (That's fun, as well.)

I am probably the only one on this huge list who actually talked with
Gibson about this. Not once, many times over a period of, oh I don't know,
decades. The best conversations being held at night, with many glasses of
wine. (I never realized before how many of my wonderful recollections of
interactions took part over wine. And I am not a big drinker.)

Once he even agreed with me, much to the consternation of his wife, the
well-known child psychologist Eleanor Gibson: "JJ!! she shouted What did
you say? You don't mean that!"

Gibson was delightful. Full of wonderful insights. But he and I disagreed
fundamentally about one important point.  The role of the brain. I wanted
to know how the brain/mind accomplished what it does. What kind of
processing goes on inside the head: Hence my early textbook "Human
Information processing," my fundamental work on semantic networks, schemas,
and then the revolutionary jump to neural networks 9which were developed in
my laboratory primarily by Dave Rumelhart, Jay McClelland, and our two
postdocs, Geoff Hinton and Paul Smolensky. But he took great delight in our
arguments. Me too. I learned a lot from them.

Gibson wanted nothing to do with explanations of how the brain worked. It
was all by the mystical magic of "Direct Perception" and "information
pickup."  I argued that the phenomena he talked about were important and
powerful, but that the brain had to be interpreting the information. Nope.
That was a conversation stopper. And Gibson loved to stop conversations by
ripping out his hearing aids and slamming them on the table, making believe
that he couldn't hear anything without them.

I think it was an overreaction to his childhood. In his youth, he was a
Gestalt Psychologist (and I spent a few lovely evenings with Gibson and one
of the early German Gestalt psychologists ( can no longer remember which
one), again drinking, and reminiscing about those golden days. Since that
was way before my time, I simply sat back and enjoyed the anecdotes.

Gibson had rebelled against Gestalt principles and their fuzzy notion of
how the brain worked. So instead of understanding mechanisms, he named the
process: information pickup, Direct Perception, and then "affordance."
This is a sin I have to wean graduate students from thinking that once
something is named, you can move on, because the name itself indicated
understanding.

Gibson refused to talk about the difference between conscious and
subconscious processing (because that required one to talk about
processes and mechanisms), so the distinction I make between perceived
affordances and actual affordances did not truly exist in his mind, because
to make that distinction would be difficult. (Although you can see his
struggle in the passages that Derek quoted.)

My interpretation of affordance is NOT the same as Gibson's. I have tried
to make that clear in my writing. I give him credit for the observations
and the name. But science advances and is continually revising definitions
and terms and understanding as new evidence accumulates and as our
theoretical understanding deepens.  I make no apologies for changing my
mind or reframing another person's ideas (always with credit to the
originator).  In fact, if I didn't change my mind when there is new
evidence or better explanations, I would be remiss.  When i took his
concepts and applied them to design, I had to change them for this new
purpose.  And then, when people completely misunderstood "affordance,"
especially graphic designers who thought that adding an icon to the screen
was adding an affordance,  I had to invent a new word -- Signifier   (but
in actuality, taken from semiotics, but used in a slightly different way
than semioticians use it). Once I had signifiers, all sorts of new
possibilities arose -- hence my review of Jenny Davi's new book "How
artifacts afford: the power and politics of everyday things."  The only
problem I have with the book is that most of the power of affordance is
actually from the "signifier" component (and she and I have had some lovely
private emails about this. No wine -- both because of COVID but also
because she is in Canberra and I am in San Diego -- too many time zones
apart--17 to be precise).

--
As for the word "affordance". In science, it is always better to invent a
new word rather than use existing words. A new word has no prior meanings
to get in the way.

======
But we are stuck with the word affordance.

How shall it be translated?

One thing is clear. One cannot look at the translated word in a language
for which you are not a fluent speaker, retranslate that word back into
English, and decide if it was a good translation. Words do not have fixed
meanings -- their meaning is heavilty dependent upon context and patterns
of usage. Think of slang: there, words can take on the opposite of their
normal meanings.  Words and concepts change each time they are translated,
as every good translater understands.

What is the best Spanish term for Affordance? Is it "Prestación " as is
sometimes used, or is it "posibilades"?  Worse, what do we mean when we say
"Spanish translation"? Do we we mean Spanish from  Madrid or Barcelona. Or
Argentina, or Mexico: I will tell you that Latin Americans do not like the
translations of my books that are done in Spain (and the Spanish do not
like the translations done in Latin America).

Look how much trouble native English speakers have in agreeing what
"affordance" means in English, let alone how it should be translated into a
different language -- or dialect of the language.

(When I worked at Apple, I soon learned that you had to use native speakers
to translate languages -- and by native, we meant people actually living in
the country.  We had multiple versions of English, Spanish, etc. Not one.
Not two -- 6 or 7 different translations of the very same American English
into other Englishes.)

I remember how I had some of my slides translated into Japanese by Native
Japanese speakers wh lived in California,  Several days after my talk, my
Japanese friends (yes, over many glasses of Sake) told me how amusing my
slides were: the translations were from an older era-- nobody used those
phrases anymore.

*ON BOOK TITLES*

On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 3:25 PM carolina <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Just starting with the translation of the book’s name I am not sure if we
> should look into particular words. The title “La psicología de los
> objects cotidianos” does not translate well into the book’s title in my
> opinion. Why not use the word “diseño” instead…
>

Design is a very difficult word to translate because it truly means very
different things in different languages.  I remember a heated debate with
Dieter Rams (yes, after a huge amount of wine)  over the proper German word
for Design with his preference being gestaltung.

The Title "La psicología de los objects cotidianos" is an excellent
translation of the book "The Psychology of Everyday Things."  But it loses
the lovely Anagram POET. (The book was subsequently renamed "Design of
Everyday Things." (hence the less poetic anagram: DOET.)

In Italy, the book was named "La caffettiera del masochistas" (after the
French name of the iconic difficult to use coffeepot on the cover.  The
subtitle of the book was "Psicopatologia degli oggetti quotidiani" which is
close to the Spanish, except for Psychopathology -- which is one of the
chapter titles.

In Dutch, the title was Dictatuur van het design. And in Germany the title
becomes Dinges des Alltags: Gutes Design und Psychologie für
Gebrauchsgegenstände.   (Both Germany and the Netherlands stopped
translating my books, saying that everyone prefers the Engish versions. But
the Italians translate everything.)

see -- excellent attempts by the translators to capture the intention, not
the words.  Note that the German title uses the word "design" not Dieter's
preferred "gestatung."
-

>


Enough of my rambling.  Bye.

Don


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