Seeing Meaning: The Promise and Problem of Gibson’s Ecological Realism

Seeing Meaning: The Promise and Problem of Gibson’s Ecological Approach

James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception has often been celebrated for reframing perception not as a passive reception of sensory inputs but as an active engagement with an environment rich in possibilities. At the heart of this model is the concept of affordances: action possibilities that the environment offers to an organism, specified in terms of the organism’s capacities. A rock may afford sitting, a stream drinking, a handle grasping.

What makes Gibson’s model striking is its attempt to reject the subject-object dualism of classical empiricism. Perception, for Gibson, is not mediated by internal representations or mental constructions; it is direct. Organisms do not infer the world—they encounter it. Affordances are neither subjective projections nor intrinsic properties; they are relational, residing in the interplay between perceiver and environment.

This idea has deep intuitive appeal. It reorients our understanding of perception toward the functional, embodied, and situated. It reminds us that we perceive the world not as abstract geometry, but as a structure of meaningful possibilities.

The Slippage: Affordance as Meaning?

But herein lies a subtle and unresolved tension. Gibson frequently claims that affordances are meaningful—even that they are the real meaning of the world. In Chapter 8 of his book, he writes:

“The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.”

This move—identifying affordances as meaningful—invites questions that Gibson leaves largely unanswered. Chief among them: what does it mean to say that meaning exists in the world itself, prior to semiotic systems?

From a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective, this is where the model begins to fray. In SFL, meaning is the product of a semiotic system—a structured set of potential choices that are actualised as instances in context. Meaning, in this view, does not pre-exist the act of semiosis; it is made through it. SFL is, in this respect, a kind of semiotic realism: it identifies reality with meaning, but meaning with the structure and instantiation of a system.

Gibson, by contrast, seems to treat affordances as pre-semiotic meanings: elements of the environment that are already meaningful before being construed. This appears to mistake potential for instance—or more precisely, to reify affordances as instances of meaning in their own right, rather than as potentials for meaning-making.

Meaning Potential vs. Affordance

To draw the contrast clearly: in SFL, what is “sittable” or “drinkable” is not itself meaningful until it is construed in context—as a clause, a figure, a token of process. The affordance is a possible construal, but not yet a meaning. To treat the affordance itself as a meaning is a category error.

Moreover, SFL stratifies meaning. “Sittable” is not simply a quality of the environment, but a semantic potential that must be realised through lexicogrammar and eventually sounded through phonology. The model is inherently symbolic and social. Gibson’s is neither.

Ontological Trouble

This difference is not merely terminological. It signals a deeper ontological divergence. Gibson seems to be groping toward an ontology in which the real is meaningful. But without a robust theory of semiosis, he conflates being meaningful with being useful. This collapses the difference between perception and construal—between seeing a flat surface and construing it as “a chair”.

Finally, Gibson’s model is largely silent on the role of the observer as a meaning-maker. In quantum terms, one might say he resists the idea that observation collapses potential into instance. His perceiver encounters a world already meaningful. But if meaning is constituted in the act of construal, as SFL contends, then the perceiver is not merely passive but ontologically generative.

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Coda: Interpretation and Consciousness

If Gibson’s affordances are not themselves meanings but potentials for meaning, this reframes not only how we understand perception, but how we understand consciousness and interpretation.

In Gibson’s model, perception is direct—meaning is in the world, awaiting discovery. Interpretation, then, appears redundant or secondary. But from a semiotic perspective, especially that of SFL, interpretation is primary: it is the act of transforming potential into instance, construing the environment into meaning.

This has profound implications for consciousness. A consciousness that merely detects is very different from one that construes. The former is a sensor; the latter, a semiotic agent. The ecological model, elegant though it is, risks reducing consciousness to a navigational tool: a function of what the world affords for action. SFL instead invites us to see consciousness as the locus of meaning-making—not the place where the world is simply seen, but where it is interpreted, structured, and symbolised.

Gibson’s move to locate meaning “in the world” is a corrective to solipsism and representationalism—but if taken too far, it risks erasing the interpreter altogether. It forgets that meaning is not found, but made. The environment affords possibilities, but it is the conscious subject that renders those affordances meaningful. Not just “this can be sat on,” but “this is a throne, a trap, a token of hospitality, or an insult”—all possibilities determined not by physical structure alone, but by semiotic and cultural systems.

In this light, the world is not a landscape of meanings waiting to be picked up. It is a landscape of meaning potential, made actual through consciousness, culture, and the symbolic work of interpretation.