Sharing Representations and Creating Chances through Cognitive Niche Construction. The Role of Affordances and Abduction

Abstract

As a matter of fact, humans continuously delegate and distribute cognitive functions to the environment to lessen their limits. They build models, representations, and other various mediating structures, that are considered to aid thought. In doing these, humans are engaged in a process of cognitive niche construction. In this sense, we argue that a cognitive niche emerges from a network of continuous interplays between individuals and the environment, in which people alter and modify the environment by mimetically externalizing fleeting thoughts, private ideas, etc., into external supports. For cognitive niche construction may also contribute to make available a great portion of knowledge that otherwise would remain simply unexpressed or unreachable. This can turn to be useful especially for all those situations that require to transmit and share knowledge, information, and, more generally, cognitive resources. In dealing with the exploitation of cognitive resources embedded in the environment, the notion of affordance, originally proposed by Gibson [1] to illustrate the hybrid character of visual perception, together with the proximal/distal distinction described by Brunswik [2], are extremely relevant. In order to solve various controversies on the concept of affordance and on the status of the proximal/distal dichotomy, we will take advantage of some useful insights that come from the study on abduction. Abduction may also fruitfully describe all those human and animal hypothetical inferences that are operated through actions which consist in smart manipulations to both detect new affordances and to create manufactured external objects that offer new affordances/cues.