Learning is viewed as connecting to pre-existing meanings (and reminds me a bit of the Piagetian notion of assimilation). "To learn new owrds or ideas, one must make connections to other structures in the mind."
"But one can't learn what something means merely by tying things to names. Each word-idea must also be invested with some causes, actions, purposes, and explanations." The basic move here is for the use of analogy to learn and enrich ideas. Furthermore, the analogy is being drawn between structural descriptions (physical properties) and functional descriptions (affordances).
(NB: To my mind, this isn't a particularly novel idea as presented here. Will an agency approach give a more interesting spin on the role of analogy/metaphor in thinking? Are such operations more natural for agencies than for other proposals about the nature of mind?)
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