The concept is definitely relational; no disagreement there.
My objection is more narrowly linguistic: the syntactic structure used to describe the “affordance” relationship is Object affords Action to Agent. All of your quotes from Wikipedia follow this example, eg. the “set of steps… does not afford climbing to the crawling infant” (emphasis mine). I find no examples of this syntactic structure being inverted to allow Agent affords Action. Consequently, it seems that the noun “affordance” is best applied to the Object’s side of this relationship, and not the Agent side, since the Object is the syntactic subject.
Conceptually, this does matter because the affordance relationship is non-symmetric: what the Object does (“affords”) is very different from what the Agent does! Aside from the syntactic objection, I think that it obscures the topic to have the same word used for both sides of a non-symmetrical relation. Your suggestion of using “have an affordance” is possibly usable though I still think that it invites confusion. I do like the phrase ” behavioural repertoire”, mentioned in another comment, but it does not lend itself to being verbed very well. Another suggestion might be “reciprocate” or “engage”: an Agent engages the affordance by carrying out the Action in the manner intended. (Does the existing literature have a verb that slots into this construction?)
I don’t know. Words are hard. I still think that it’s important to have different words for the Object’s and the Agent’s respective contributions to the activity.
The concept is definitely relational; no disagreement there.
My objection is more narrowly linguistic: the syntactic structure used to describe the “affordance” relationship is Object affords Action to Agent. All of your quotes from Wikipedia follow this example, eg. the “set of steps… does not afford climbing to the crawling infant” (emphasis mine). I find no examples of this syntactic structure being inverted to allow Agent affords Action. Consequently, it seems that the noun “affordance” is best applied to the Object’s side of this relationship, and not the Agent side, since the Object is the syntactic subject.
Conceptually, this does matter because the affordance relationship is non-symmetric: what the Object does (“affords”) is very different from what the Agent does! Aside from the syntactic objection, I think that it obscures the topic to have the same word used for both sides of a non-symmetrical relation. Your suggestion of using “have an affordance” is possibly usable though I still think that it invites confusion. I do like the phrase ” behavioural repertoire”, mentioned in another comment, but it does not lend itself to being verbed very well. Another suggestion might be “reciprocate” or “engage”: an Agent engages the affordance by carrying out the Action in the manner intended. (Does the existing literature have a verb that slots into this construction?)
I don’t know. Words are hard. I still think that it’s important to have different words for the Object’s and the Agent’s respective contributions to the activity.