Possibilities in an abductive perspective: Creating affordances as cognitive chances

Abstract

Recent studies on the so-called EEEE (extended, embodied, embedded, and enacted) cognition have demonstrated that the “environmental situatedness” of human cognition and its evolutionary component may be used to better understand cognition in general. This indicates that humans do not keep in their memory ample representations of the surroundings and their variables, but instead, they richly manipulate it by picking up information and resources, when possible and needed, that are already accessible, or that are extracted/created: it is in this perspective that we can conceptualize in a useful and deep way the concept of possibility. Information, resources, cognitive opportunities, and possibilities are actively pursued for and even created: in light of this, we may consider human cognition to be a possibility-seeking mechanism. In particular, new possibilities can be usefully seen as new “affordances”: for example, environmental anchors that enable us to more effectively utilize external resources. Of course, the availability of the proper affordances, which in turn offer cognitive possibilities, is connected to important new found concepts of discoverability and diagnosticability. Abduction is still significant in these cognitive processes because it refers to all those hypothetical inferences made by human and non-human animals that are based on deft manipulations of their surroundings, either to merely “detect” affordances or to “create” manufactured external objects (e.g. artifacts) that in turn provide new affordances and cues and so new cognitive possibilities.