Interview with Erik Rietveld on Affordances and Freedom in Skilled Action
Erik Rietveld
University of Amsterdam
Dec. 1, 2016, 2 p.m. UTC // Dec. 1, 2016, 2 p.m. in UTC
In this interview Erik Rietveld will introduce The Skilled Intentionality Framework for dealing with so-called ‘higher’ cognition. It is an Ecological-Enactive approach to cognition that aim to bring together the embodied/enactive program (e.g. Chemero 2009; Thompson 2007) with the ecological program originally developed by James Gibson, in which affordances are central (e.g. Gibson 1979). The Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF) is a philosophical approach to understanding the situated and affective embodied mind. It is a new conceptual framework for the field of 4E cognitive science that focuses on skilled action and builds upon an enriched notion of affordances, including affordances for ‘higher’ cognition, which we have recently argued for in Ecological Psychology (Rietveld & Kiverstein 2014). We define Skilled Intentionality as the selective engagement with multiple affordances simultaneously (Rietveld, De Haan & Denys 2013; Bruineberg & Rietveld 2014; Kiverstein & Rietveld 2015; Bruineberg, Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2016). The long-term ambition of the SIF research program is to understand the entire spectrum of skilled human action - including social interaction, creativity, planning, and language-use - in terms of Skilled Intentionality.
