Distal engagement: Intentions in perception

Abstract

Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of longterm planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecologicalenactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for "high-level" or "representationhungry" capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a nonrepresentational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating prereflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use.

Meaningful affordances

“…The affordances are said to "unfold" and thereby set up the conditions for continuing agency. This sheds light on how diachronic agency might take place (for another proposal on how our engagement with distal affordances might be understood, see Brancazio and Segundo-Ortin 2020).…”

“…Similarly, whilst affordances are sometimes said to be relevant or salient (cf. Rietveld 2012 on 'real relevance'; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014;Brancazio and Segundo-Ortin 2020), things can be relevant and salient in various ways. So, how can the 'affordance' concept capture the many ways in which something could matter or be significant?…”

Agency From a Radical Embodied Standpoint: An Ecological-Enactive Proposal

“…Whether or not the ecological-enactive theory of agency fully takes off is yet to be seen. If we aim to fully explain human agency, we must be shown whether an ecological-enactive theory of agency can explain complex phenomena such as group action (Marsh et al, 2009) or long-term planning (Brancazio and Segundo-Ortin, 2020). Nonetheless, it seems that a combined approach along the lines I have suggested here can be mutually beneficial and opens up new and promising lines of research.…”

Situated imagination

“…7 We've argued elsewhere that a long term project of making an art installation can be understood as enacting a large-scale affordance (Van Dijk and Rietveld 2018). Our aim there was not to deny a role of articulable goals in this process, but to foreground the 7 It has for instance recently been argued that our (2018) view requires the addition of "distal intentions" (Brancazio and Segundo-Ortin 2020). Without distal intentions, so the worry goes, we lack a story about what "pre-dates" activity and "links affordances across a timescale" (ibid., p. 4).…”