The idea that every organism has its ontology (in the elevator sense) was prefigured in Jakob von Uexküll’s (1934) concept of the organism’s Umwelt, the behavioral environment that consists of all the things that matter to its well-being. A close kin to this idea is the psychologist J. J. Gibson’s (1979) concept of affordances: “What the environment offers the animal for good or ill.” Affordances are the relevant opportunities in the environment of any organism: things to eat or mate with, openings to walk through or look out of, holes to hide in, things to stand on, and so forth.
