Intentions in Ecological Psychology: An Anscombean Proposal

Abstract

According to ecological psychology, agency is a crucial feature of living organisms: therefore many ecological psychologists maintain that explaining agency is one of the core aims of the discipline. This paper aims to contribute to this goal by arguing that an ecological understanding of agency requires an account of intention. So far, intentions have not played a dominant role in ecological accounts of agency. The reluctance to integrate a notion of intention seems to be motivated by the widespread assumption that intentions should be understood as internal states with representational content. This assumption goes against two main tenets of ecological psychology: its anti-representationalist stance and its claim that perception is direct (in the sense of not being mediated by inferential processes). Ecological psychology thus needs a different answer to the question what intentions are. In this paper, we aim to show that Elizabeth Anscombe’s theory of intention can be fruitfully brought to bear on an ecological theory of agency. We will argue that Anscombe’s account can meet the two challenges of bringing intentions into the framework of ecological psychology: firstly it can explain what intentions are, if not representational states; and, secondly, it can show how our perception of affordances is guided by intention without undermining the idea of direct perception.

Productive pluralism: The coming of age of ecological psychology.

“…They propose bridges between strands of ecological psychology, but also connect to a multitude of neighboring fields and theories. Indeed, they actively seek exchange, for instance, with enactivism (Di Paolo et al, 2021; Heras-Escribano, 2019, 2021; McGann et al, 2020; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; van Dijk et al, 2015), developmental systems biology (Lickliter, 2009; Turvey, 2009; Withagen & van der Kamp, 2010), feminism (Paxton et al, 2019), ecological neuroscience (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2019; de Wit & Withagen, 2019; Falandays et al, 2023; Raja & Anderson, 2019), psychoanalysis (Withagen, 2022), philosophy of action (Segundo-Ortin & Kalis, 2022), phenomenology (de Haan et al, 2013; Käufer & Chemero, 2015), linguistics (Cowley, 2011; Raczaszek-Leonardi, 2009; van den Herik, 2018) anthropology, and the environmental humanities (Donald & Bruineberg, 2022; van Dijk, 2021). We hope that our analysis contributes to refining these attempts while keeping an eye on the possible tensions inherent in those (and future) synthetic approaches.…”

Running away from the marshmallow: the relevance of behaviour settings for a situated science of self-control

“…This last point is also connected to an aspect of behaviour settings highlighted by Heft [49]. According to Heft, by joining and participating in behaviour settings, we acquire crucial cognitive skills that make us functioning individuals in our communities: for example, we learn how to do math, how to tell stories and even how to give reasons for our actions and explain the actions of others [10,50], all of this according to the customs and practices dominant in our communities. Following these suggestions, we propose that behaviour settings might have a crucial role to play in understanding self-control as a situated set of extended skills.…”

“…One argument for this is conceptual: self-control is defined as a struggle by individuals who experience both valued goals and tempting motivations, and who take steps to resolve this struggle by deploying various skills (for more extensive arguments for this claim, see [29][30][31]). A second, empirical argument (which we will further develop in this article) is that both the values agents judge as important and the strategies they employ to resist temptations, depend critically on their relationship to the particular behaviour settings they inhabit [10].…”

“…Likewise, an individual does not enter into a behaviour setting as they enter an enclosure but rather 'joins a behavior setting as a participant and in doing so contributes to its ongoing functioning' ([8 p. 109], emphasis original). This means that behaviour settings have a normative dimension to which individuals adapt, at least on most occasions [10,48]. This normative dimension becomes highly visible when children start correcting (or are corrected by) others, but it manifests too in the configuration of the location itself-some places are associated with authority and are thus reserved for those who act as authority figures (the teacher, the priest, etc.…”

“…In short, these theories-often referred to as '4E' theories, an acronym that stands for 'Embodied', 'Embedded', 'Extended' and 'Enactive'-defend that cognition transcends mere brain activity, and that a proper understanding of (most types of) cognitive activity requires thinking of it as spanning the whole body and the environment. In this context, a group of researchers [7][8][9][10] have defended the behaviour-setting paradigm as a promising framework for investigating cognitive activity as an inherently situated phenomenon. The driving hypothesis posits that in order to explain many types of cognitive activity we need to take the environmental properties that constitute a behaviour setting into account.…”