Scaffolds for Social Meaning

By Richard C. Schmidt. Ecological psychology, 2007

93 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The perception of social meanings traditionally deemed to be private is addressed by contrasting the perception of social affordances with the perception of the physical affordances of environmental objects. Assuming that (a) affordances are defined by relationships between properties of the environment and properties of an actor and that (b) information must exist to specify this relationship for the perception of affordances, the question is whether and how private social meanings can fulfill these criteria. The attack is twofold. First, one needs to take seriously the ontology of the social world by considering social environment properties and actors' social roles as real and embodied—existing in the world and not just in mental representations. Second and more problematically, one needs to understand how information exists that specifies these more abstract and temporally extended aspects of the environment and actor. I propose that these problems can be averted by taking seriously as conceptual scaffolds the reality of functionally defined properties of the environment and actor, J. J. Gibson's primacy of events, and his notion of the occluding edge (1979/1986).

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5219a8022e374320dd7b61854c1c907b852b979

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Citations in the corpus

Communicative Affordances of Mobile Media: Portability, Availability, Locatability, and Multimediality (2015, background): “Affordances in ecological psychology are latent and exist between subjective interpretation and objective qualities of an object (Schmidt, 2007).”
Toward a radically embodied, embedded social psychology (2009, background): “We see neural structures as only part of the epistemic structure of where meaning lives, with the other part being information unfolding from past to future in the environment (Schmidt, 2007).”
Dynamics of Interpersonal Coordination (2008, background): “There has also been for some time an appreciation that many natural actions are performed in a social context [56] and that social and physical environments are nested with their meanings existing side by side in natural perception and action [69].”