Elizabeth Anscombe and Ecological Pyschology

Paper Discussion of Intentions in Ecological Psychology:

An Anscombean Proposal with Mirko Prokop and Andrea Hiott

This discussion between Andrea Hiott and Mirko Prokop (PhD at University of the Basque Country) embarks on an intellectual journey, exploring the intricate relationship between intention, agency, and ecological psychology through Anscombe's philosophical lens, exploring a paper by Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Annemarie Kalis. It delves into the nuances of how intentions, as entities embedded in patterns of action, align with ecological psychology's focus on direct interaction with the environment. By discussing how intentions influence the perception of affordances and the importance of a naturalistic approach to understanding cognition, it underscores the need for an interdisciplinary perspective. The conversation also highlights the critical role of social context in comprehending agency and suggests adopting a nuanced view that integrates insights from philosophical, psychological, and enactivist lenses to better understand human and non-human agency. Overall, it presents a compelling argument for reassessing traditional views on cognition, intention, and environmental interaction.

#anscombe #psychology #enactivism #philosophy

The paper discussed here is by Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Annemarie Kalis and is called Intentions in Ecological Psychology: An Anscombean Proposal and is available to read here.

Thoreau quote discussed: "In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well–known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

00:00 Introduction to the Conversation and Guest

00:19 Exploring Intentions in Cognitive Sciences

01:08 The Paper in Focus: Intentions in Ecological Psychology

04:27 Diving into Ecological Psychology and Enactivism

10:02 Understanding Affordances and Perception

21:43 The Role of Intentions in Shaping Perception

25:50 Philosophical Perspectives on Action and Intention

37:02 The Importance of Understanding Agency and Intention

42:05 Reflecting on the Broader Implications of Agency

48:07 Exploring Human and Animal Agency

49:15 Intention and Patterns of Organization

50:30 Anscombe's Perspective

54:23 Naturalistic Notions

56:23 Embodied Cognition and Practical Knowledge

01:02:22 Language, Social Context

01:17:26 Teleology and Goal-Oriented Behavior

01:30:39 Affordances and Intention in Ecological Psychology

01:34:23 Concluding Thoughts on Interdisciplinary Approaches

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361114681_Ecological_Memory_towards_assessing_intelligence_as_navigability

Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy started as research conversations across disciplines. There was so much I wanted to explore but I was being told I shouldn't explore beyond certain bounds because it didn't fit into this or that discipline, or because this or that idea was too wild or too uncomfortable or too popular or unpopular, but because I study and work in so many, those barriers just no longer made sense. The same felt true relative to passions and love.

So I decided to open myself to all of it beyond traditional distinctions, towards learning and development, so long as love and health were the intentions behind those doing the work I was exploring. This podcast is where those voices gather together in one space as I try and notice the patterns that connect.

It's part of my life work and research, but it's also something I hope to share with you and to invite you to share your perspective and position. Thank you for being here.

If you want to go deeper and build philosophy together, please sign up for the Substack at https://communityphilosophy.substack.com/

Mirko will be hosting episodes soon too from his own research angle. Stay tuned!

Transcript:

An Elizabeth Anscombean Perspective

Andrea Hiott: [00:00:00] Hey, so this is a little bit of a different conversation. We decided to just read a paper together and talk about some ideas, but before we get started with that, maybe you want to introduce yourself,

Mirko Prokop: uh, my name is Mirko Prokop. I'm a second year, just about starting my second year PhD student. Interested in everything related to agency, cognitive science, and trying to, well, in particular, uh, find a sort of naturalistic angle onto the notion of intention and intentional action. Within the context of more, more recent, , approaches in the cognitive sciences that maybe we'll get to talk about today a little bit. Yeah. And look at intention. I'm excited to see where it goes.

Andrea Hiott: So we met in Portugal, right? At the, yeah, the conference. Yeah, it was a philosophy of mind conference. So we just realized that we both have a lot of similar interests, but we're coming from different places. So we thought it might be fun to just have a conversation [00:01:00] and, um, see where it leads about some of these issues. And you already mentioned one, which is intention.

Um, another is. Well, we chose this paper. Maybe you want to talk about the name of the paper and introduce that just for a second

Mirko Prokop: well, the name of the paper is Intentions in Ecological Psychology, an Anscombian Perspective by Miguel Segundo Ortin and Annamarie Calles. I think it was published in 2022 in Review of Philosophy and Psychology. So yeah, I guess we can put it in the show notes. Yeah. But again, it's an interesting paper because. It tries to introduce, as I understand it, an approach in the philosophy of action that used to be a bit unorthodox and maybe misunderstood for a while by Elizabeth Anscombe, into the field of ecological psychology and tries to sort of bridge or bring these two fields together. And I thought that was a really [00:02:00] interesting.

Proposal. We're not going to be able to really dive deep into their arguments, I guess, but yeah, but, um, but it might

Andrea Hiott: be just a few of these like bigger terms. So, like, philosophy of action, um, is one. And then we have an enactivism. And we have ecological psychology. Those are maybe three. Yeah, and

Mirko Prokop: enactivism is sort of the perspective that I bring into, or that that's sort of what I'm working within. I don't, I'm not sure if, um, if the authors of the paper would identify themselves as sort of enactivist. I think they're coming mostly from this ecological perspective, but yeah, it would be good to, you know, clarify.

Well, I

Andrea Hiott: think there's maybe Chimero and Baggs isn't, I think those papers are Uh, referenced in this paper. Actually, I'm not entirely sure, but there's been this movement probably in the last maybe five, five years of trying to figure out how an enactivism and ecological psychology fit together.

And I found a lot of those themes coming up in this [00:03:00] paper, which basically comes back to this idea of uh, the cognition that's kind of like the sandwich model of Elizabeth Hurley, uh, her kind of, that she makes fun of versus this kind of direct perception of something like a Gibsonian point of view, um, thinking, I think there's a way in which these have been thought of as opposites. Especially when it comes to something like action, and of course in the philosophy of action, I mean, maybe you can speak to this a bit, but, uh, it's this idea of that intention, for example, would be something mental going on, in the brain, which wouldn't fit with ecological psychology.

Because that would be like a direct perception. So you wouldn't have this sandwich thing happening between perception and action. But again, this is another thing I hope we can explore a bit, because I feel like even in this paper and definitely in the literature, What is perception and what is action, and are they opposites, are they different things, are they, you know, what are they, what is the relationship?

I think this is actually usually at the heart of these discussions and of this paper too. And [00:04:00] that's kind of the dichotomy I'd like to, to talk about.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree that that's sort of, I think that and there are a lot of ideas in the paper that speak directly to this kind of contrasts of dichotomy, um, that I guess we, we can talk about, yeah, maybe it would be good to just introduce, the ideas of in, you know, ecological psychology, some central ideas that frame the discussion, like the notion of affordance, for example.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, well, I guess we should talk about ecological psychology. First of all, neither of us are trying to be experts. So feel free to, um, to disagree with whatever we say here. In fact, we welcome that because that's part of it. But just kind of trying to talk off the top of my head, that's all we're trying to do here, then I would say ecological psychology is this embodied, situated, non representational approach, that, Of course is mostly associated with JJ Gibson, although his wife worked a lot on it [00:05:00] later and there's different notions of it depending on what you read and which time you read it and who you read

but I think in the big picture, from my point of view, we can say non representation is very important. Which means they don't believe there's representations in the brain that, um, are necessary for perception and action and that it's situated, contextual. Yeah. Go ahead. No,

Mirko Prokop: no, I think I was just thinking I often find that that divide between people saying, Oh, I, I'm an anti representation lists. I'm a representative. I think everything about cognition is about representations and the brain and so on. I, I mean, people use these terms very differently, and I often find it easier and helpful to to draw these kind of sharp distinctions but so I was just thinking you know different way of of thinking about, specifically the notion of, or the understanding of perception and ecological psychology, uh, as something that's not necessarily [00:06:00] mediated so that when you perceive an object or a situation or something, it's not like. There is a step between the perception, then the processing in your brain, and then you're becoming aware of what's in front of you.

It's just that, the perception of what you see is sort of direct in this non mediated sense, And if you have that view, I guess you can dispense with the notion of representation and say, there's no need for, for, um, some sense internalizing what you see in terms of this mental item that's called a representation that can then be worked on inside your brain.

Um, but yeah,

Andrea Hiott: that's where it gets into a lot of trouble, of course, that's where the Gibsonian framework is caught is so criticized because even just, uh, the way we in a very common everyday sense, we feel like we have thoughts which don't seem that direct perception account doesn't seem. If you put it in the most kind of cartoonish way, it doesn't seem [00:07:00] plausible.

Of course, there's tons of, literature about this that really gets into the specifics, but just for an everyday kind of approach, like you, you do feel like there's some, it's not that there's just perception and action. It does feel like there's something like rumination, for example, that could happen. As if this mental action isn't action. It's something different. And this is where a lot of these debates come in about, as far as I understand it, ecological psychology in the Gibsonian sense, especially J. J. Gibson was kind of this third way, right? Between cognitivism and behaviorism. So you had this behaviorism model where it was more, let's just study behavior, which might be associated with this. Okay. It's just action. There's nothing going on in the brain. We're not going to think about that because it was then associated with consciousness, right?

And that was kind of thought of as like you can't you can't touch on that It's too mystical or spiritual or you don't need it, right? Just look just study behavior and then you had the cognitivism which was sort of went the other way around and started really focusing on cognition [00:08:00] as the subject and thinking more in terms of it language and mathematical models and the brain And this approach went the other way.

And I think the ecological approach, at least what I've, because as you know, I'm coming at this from my own research and so are you, but what interests me about the ecological is J. J. Gibson's early writing, where he's talking about trying to overcome the psychotomy of mind and body or mental and physical or cognitive and behavior.

And to see this in a very different way, which is a really hard thing to do. To come up with an eye with a way of seeing that that isn't linear and isn't fitting into any of these places. And I feel like ecological psychology was trying to do that in the beginning.

 But then of course it's got all these different interpretations about. Affordances, perception, action, um, yeah, so I don't know how that relates to your work exactly or what you think about that,

Mirko Prokop: yeah, I mean, I have to say , I'm not too familiar with ecological psychology and the early writings of Gibson, uh, although I would love to [00:09:00] read, it's definitely on my reading list.

Andrea Hiott: Um, yeah, you're more coming at it from the intention. You've read a lot of Anscombe, right? And well,

Mirko Prokop: I've tried to read her book Intention of a few times. It's very few times. I mean, yeah, I guess I read it. Um, but, or at least certain sections of it, but, you know, I, um, many people say it's a lifetime exercise to really try to understand it properly,

Andrea Hiott: but all of this,

Mirko Prokop: it's definitely, yeah, it's very inspiring.

And I think it's a great, you know, the authors in that paper, they do a great job of trying to bring her kind of perspective. Which initially seems a bit hard to combine with a naturalistic, approach to the mind and to action. And they tried to bring her, that perspective nonetheless into a field that, you know, ecological psychology thinks of itself as, as a kind of scientific approach to the mind, I guess.

 Yeah, and that's why I found it very interesting. But I do think, it leaves a lot of questions open still and, [00:10:00] um, yeah, let's

Andrea Hiott: get into what the proposal of the paper is. But first, I know we mentioned affordance, you did, that we should sort of think about that.

And basically, affordance is usually Defined as opportunities for behavior. It's basically sort of what, from a particular subjective point of view, if we go with like von Uexküll, for what that subject's, environment or umwelt, which is different from environment, affords it for behavior.

So it would be very different, for example, for, if, if we think of a river and some logs and grass for a human, this would afford certain things like perhaps exercise, maybe beauty, things like this, the log might be a place to sit and rest for an insect. It would be completely different. It might be a home.

It might be food and so forth. These are kind of the opportunities of behavior, which are relative to the subjective body. That's how I see it. Do you have anything that you'd like to add about that? Yeah, I mean,

Mirko Prokop: I think my basic understanding is exactly what you said, that, but perhaps a different way of thinking about it is, is that that is [00:11:00] also a, a con or an under an understanding of perception that's inherently sort of relational so that you have to, to, uh, consider the kind of bodily structure of the agent, uh, in order to make sense of the particular kinds of things that the environment affords.

 To the agent or the kinds of behaviors that it enables the agent to do. Um, so, a tiny toddler, for him or her, you know, that that's a staircase might be like mountains. It's something that they have to climb up with their hands and feet and so on.

Whereas, whereas for us grown human beings, it's. It's something that we can step on it and walk up, but for the toddler, it's the way that it perceives that staircase is very different from us. So it affords different actions. And of course, if you think about, between different species, the difference might be, or is even greater, you know, that, um, I don't know, I, I'm not able to climb as a [00:12:00] monkey, so a monkey might perceive some particular kind of tree as perfectly climbable, uh, according to

Andrea Hiott: its body,

Mirko Prokop: yeah, like directly, yeah, affording climbing up or escaping from a predator, and, and I don't, because I just don't have the bodily capacities to do that.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's good you bring up this relationship is important, right, between the body itself, not just some kind of subjective idea of, Yeah. Yeah. The body itself. Yeah. And the environment, right? This is an important part of enactivism, of ecological psychology, of philosophy of action, it's body, it's environment, it's, this relationship, right?

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, I think, this is where certainly, my understanding of ecological psychology, merges quite well with sort of the enactive perspective that I've, worked on a bit and then I'm interested in, uh, because as I understand it, it thinks of, of cognition as something that is always a relational process between the organism and its [00:13:00] environment.

It's not enough to just look at sort of one part of the equation, let's say, you know, the brain, and then try to figure out what cognition is. Because if you think of it in that relational way, you always have to take into account both the structure of the environment and the structure of the agent. And that enables this kind of complex, dynamic intelligent behavior to, to occur.

Um, and I think that's a, uh, an understanding of cognition and that an enactivism certainly shares. Um,

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And to go to von Uexküll too a lot of people say niche construction started with him but, you could also trace his work to other things, but what comes through is like what you were saying that, There's a particular kind of body in a particular kind of context, which then you can't, dissociate perception and action from that.

And when you were talking, I was thinking of these loops and cybernetics and how all of this is a similar tradition, right? That kind of [00:14:00] leads into an enactivism and ecological psychology, uh, and that also kind of starts with. who also talks about these loops between a body and the environment.

I'm not sure loop is the right way, because that sounds like you come back to where you started. And I think in terms of dynamical systems and complexity, we never come back exactly to where we started, but in any case, the idea of this, um, Looping between a body and an environment as part of the perception action, uh, , structure, some even call it the perception action loop, is really important in all these contexts, isn't it?

Yeah,

Mirko Prokop: absolutely. I have to also say that, you know, von Uexküll, you've mentioned it, him, him to me, and I've heard about him, but he's definitely also an author that I need to read more and that is on my reading list. Um, but, Just what went through my head as I was listening to you, what you were saying about these, you know, perception action loops or cycles, is that what I've [00:15:00] sometimes found is that especially when you then start to think about agency, it does seem to introduce a kind of, asymmetry in that relationship in the sense that an agent is sort of like the active part of that relationship,

if you observe an organism, how it, how it behaves in its environment, even an organism that we might think of as something relatively simple, a tiny fish or something, um, they're moving about, they're exploring, they're doing things. And of course, if you have a sort of ecological understanding of cognition, then, then you want to say that.

Not everything about that behavior can be explained just by looking like by dissecting the fish and looking at its tiny brain and nervous system and, and doing experiments with it. The environment is certainly important, but then at the same time, uh, it seems to when we think about agency that it's still sort of the [00:16:00] fish who's the main actor who brings forth, uh, this kind of kind of relationship in a way that makes, that organism the source of what's going on and in a very important sense, the sort of seat of the intelligence.

So even though on an ecological approach, Yeah. You do get this idea that you, the structure of the environment is very important and you can't just look at the brain or just the organism, you know, but then when you start to think about agency, um, to me, it often seems like, yeah, but there is definitely some kind of, asymmetry that, what happens within the organism at that time.

Of the action, or perhaps in general, in relation to the concept of cognition, is the, I don't know, central place to look, I guess, when you try to explain. Agency. You know

Andrea Hiott: what I mean? That's really interesting. I, I, yeah. What do you mean by you don't end up, what do you mean by asymmetry there?

Mirko Prokop: I, I guess what I mean is that you don't want to [00:17:00] end up in a place, and I think this relates to some things they talk about in the paper, where everything that an organism is doing is sort of triggered by the perception of affordances.

In the environment without the organism having some way of, you know, actively mediating between which kinds of affordances it perceives, which forces it acts on. Exactly. Yeah. Because otherwise you end up with a very mechanistic view of what's going on, where agency just kind of doesn't seem to have a

Andrea Hiott: place.

That's what I was sort of referencing earlier as the main critique of ecological psychology or of a direct perception, let's say, because there's many different ways of defining ecological psychology, but of direct perception, right? It's exactly that, that there does seem, there's something else, right? Um, and if we define things in these kind of binary ways that we're used to, which in my work, I'm trying [00:18:00] to get out of that, like you, you would be able to understand cognition as, scaled rather than, um, On or off or or only there or not there so that if you really take the whole everything we've been talking about into consideration the body.

As it's developed, um, historically and evolutionary in terms of evolution, but also, of that body itself, be it an insect, a fish, a human, whatever it is, then it's interaction over time and space, which is another important part of all this. The way that the creature, uh, uh, experiences time and space is, is something that a lot of these writers talk about, even going back to von Uexküll, about how you divine perception and action in the first place.

But then you could have many different kinds of, of cognition. And to get to your point, that kind of mediation that you're describing could easily develop out of those loops for something like a human. For something like an animal, in a sense, because [00:19:00] it wouldn't be different from the way that you are, making through that environment or that context or that ecology. At some point you might become aware of those patterns. The agent might become aware of its own patterns. Some people say cells already do this, right? But, and in a way We could understand this kind of middle sandwich thing between perception and action as it feels for us, um, as another way, another loop of that.

And enactivism sort of starts to do that with sense making, for example, starts to kind of think of it in that, in those terms. But,

Mirko Prokop: Although I think. , I think, I mean, my, my research project when I, when I started this, like about a year ago, um, was also coming out of a bit of a dissatisfaction with the notion of sensemaking, for example, as, being this, this bringing forth of meaning, uh, in a, in a, in an interaction that an organism has with its environment.

And, um, as [00:20:00] sort of the basic understanding of cognition. And, and I should say, you know, that I don't think that.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I'm so glad you said that. That's all

Mirko Prokop: that enactivism has to say about what cognition is, but it is very, very wide understanding. And, and even though I really Like, or I'm a fan of thinking about, uh, you know, the continuity between, between us and other organisms, there do seem to be very significant differences in the way that we, for example, are able to, like, we, I mean, human beings are able to act in the world, as opposed to a tiny fish or even, uh, Bacteria or cell. And I think that, you know, one thing they pick up in the paper, which is really important and which I'm interested in is this notion of, of intention, um, that's also throughout the history of philosophy, I guess.. That there's been a kind of, uh, as I understand the idea that intentional action [00:21:00] proper, like acting on a reason intentionally, knowing what you're doing, um, whilst you're doing it with a particular goal in mind and being aware of what you're doing and able to explain what you're doing to others if they ask you why you're doing this, that that's the kind of capacity that is unique in some sense to humans or, you know, specific.

 And I, I'm not really sure if that's the best way to think about the notion of intention. Um, but it does seem to get at something that's, You know, is important to, we, we need to explain when we want to understand certainly human agency and perhaps also agency of other, animals. And well, I guess one way that, that we could, um, that they pick it up in the paper and that I think relates to what we talked about just before, is this idea that, Our intentions do seem to affect the way that we [00:22:00] perceive the environment and the way that we perceive certain affordances, rather than others so if I'm, you know, let's say, in a beautiful city I'm a tourist and I'm just looking around and wanting to see, to see everything but I'm in that particular moment extremely thirsty.

Then. What I will be looking for is not the, the nice architecture or whatever, but, my whole perception is going to be sort of geared towards finding something to drink, like being a water fountain or a shop where I can buy some water. And I think the idea that they have that they want to bring into the paper is that, just talking about affordances is not really enough to explain the way in which intentions affect the way that we perceive.

the environment, because depending on the kinds of goals that I want to achieve in a particular moment, I really just do see or feel or taste or [00:23:00] whatever, different things. And so there is this sense that The intention, really changes the way that we relate to the world.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and that gets to the idea of agency too that you were talking about.

Because agency is like control over the perception action cycle, that's different from an agent, but having agency, so And the way you're describing it sounds more like something like Descartes or Hume or Hobbes, where it's like the intention is almost like a desire or, or a drive or something that's then guiding the organism.

And as you brought up before, there's also a way in which you could Like, let's say you're a meditator and you could maybe sit with this desire and, um, maybe overcome your thirst or something like that. And that seems to be that mediating middle thing that we're talking about. How do you see that in terms of intention?

Mirko Prokop: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's not just the desire, but it's also a really a conceptual Or maybe, you know, a way in which your perception is affected [00:24:00] by your intention. So I think, you know, in the, in the standard view, in the philosophy of action, you often have these two kind of components that people think that are important to make sense of the notion of intention.

The one being the sort of. Conceptual belief component, you know, that when you do something, uh, in order to achieve a certain goal, you, the idea is that you have some kind of belief, uh, that what you're currently doing is maybe the best way of achieving what, what you want. But then on the other hand, you also have, of course, the, the.

this desire component, the affective component, uh, or the emotive component, which is already, you know, in this word, emotion, the kind of thing that, that sets you in motion, that actually brings you to act. Uh, and then that's also essential to making sense of intentional action. Um, and often, you know, people tended to think about these, [00:25:00] I think Hume, for example, might've thought about these as relatively distinct Uh, in the explanation of action, you know, this like sexual and the emotional effective aspect, which is something that is, I think, characteristic of a lot of maybe traditional cognitivist.

views in the cognitive sciences of thinking of intelligence or cognition on the one hand as something that's not directly related to affectivity in the way that that things feel to us. And on the other hand of thinking about things like pain and affect. Um, and I'm, I'm certainly interested in thinking about these two things as much more interconnected.

Then, then, you know, maybe the standard account of, of action or cognition seems to suppose.

Andrea Hiott: There's so much in there. I want to talk about, I want to think about philosophy of action and the Davidson view versus the one they're presenting here, but maybe first we should just give a little abstract of the paper.

 I mean, what is this [00:26:00] paper actually sort of trying to do? What's the issue at stake here?

Mirko Prokop: Yes, I guess that they see, as I read it, the notion of intention kind of lacking in ecological psychology, um, or at least, more sophisticated explanations of what intentions are, people mentioned that notion a lot, but they don't really elaborate.

Apparently that's what they say, uh, , what it really amounts to. And they want to say that it's important precisely because of these kinds of examples that I've given that, intentions do affect the way, or, you know, they, they affect which affordances we actually perceive in the environment in a particular moment, depending on the kind of goal or intention I have.

Um, and so it's not enough to just, uh, talk about affordances, but you also have to bring in this notion of intention. And then

Andrea Hiott: they, I guess we should say too that just, we didn't mention it before, but in ecological psychology, I mean, a lot of [00:27:00] people say that one of the main things it's trying to do is explain, uh, agency.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know if we said that, but we connected, I mean, we talked about agency, but, but yeah. And so you're saying that this paper is kind of saying, okay, but in that like explanation of agency, we don't talk about intention. Um, or if we do, we talk about it in a Davidsonian sense, but okay.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that's a very, very important point to mention that we should have said that, um, that, you know, in the notion of affordance in some sense tries to bridge this like classical, uh, sandwich model that you've mentioned earlier between like, they're trying to distinguish between action and perception, uh, by saying, you know, what, what perceive are not sort of objects that are neutral to us, but what we actually perceive for affordances, which are possibilities for action.

So if I, look at a chair, I'm not just seeing some kind of neutral object, but I'm seeing something to sit on, you know, if I have the goal in that moment to to [00:28:00] find something to sit, um, then that chair will give me the opportunity to realize that so it will afford me sitting. But I think that's the whole idea.

And that's why, you know, the notion of affordance is inherently related to agency. But then in the paper, they want to go a step further and say, um, well, but then when we start to think about intentions and the way that our goals affect Our behavior, which particular intention we're trying to realize in a given moment actually restricts the kind of affordances that we perceive, which is what I tried to explain with this water finding trying to find water case.

And so I think they want to make the point that. Uh, well, you need to provide some kind of account of what intentions are, um, to make the story of ecological psychology complete and explaining agency.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, exactly. So it's trying to use [00:29:00] Anscombe's work. to explain what intentions are, but also to, um, ecological psychology would say, okay, I mean, it wouldn't fit with thinking there's some representational state or like internal mediation if you take it as direct perception.

So there also, aren't they also in this paper saying, okay, well with Anscombe, we can not only provide a definition of intention, but we can show that it doesn't necessarily need to be representational and therefore could work with ecological psychology, rather than Davidsonian intention, which would require this sandwich thing.

Then something mediating or representational, I think is how I understand it. How do you.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. So I think they, they first make this move of saying, well, we need to start thinking about intention and ecological psychology. And then they ask, you know, why hasn't there been more, uh, discussion of that in this particular literature?

And one reason that they [00:30:00] offer is to say, well, because of the fact that most of the most influential, uh, what's sometimes called the standard account of action, which is often attributed to, Donald Davidson, do think of intentions as well, yeah, mental, things, mental objects that, as I said earlier, are often thought of as these passive beliefs and desires, but there are still, um, In the minds of the person who is acting at a particular time and Davidson actually emphasized a lot that this idea that intentions cause behavior.

So he wanted to provide a sort of causal account of that. And if you have that view, they, I think the authors think that, um, that's hard to square with ecological psychology because it has this kind of anti representational approach and wanting to not think of cognition as, or things like [00:31:00] intention as something that primarily takes place in the mind of an agent.

Andrea Hiott: I wanted to ask you, this is something that confuses me. Maybe you have some insight on, but in, in what you were just talking about, or in a Davidsonian model of philosophy of action, how do we really distinguish, like, as I understood him, and I haven't looked at this literature in a while, but it seems that action is mediated in a mental sense, right?

So it's not like movement. It's not just An, um, movement that action, the way we, we're almost redefining action from a normal everyday use as action is now the thing that has become mediated. Do we just think of action and movement as not the same thing? That action is always mediated in a Davidsonian sense? And is it the same in Anscombe? Or is this paper showing us it could be seen differently?

Mirko Prokop: I think there's a lot of things in there that, that make it all very, uh, complicated. Um, most [00:32:00] people would want to distinguish between action in general, and then intentional action. And then you, you might still distinguish between action in general, potential action, and then basic behavior, like behavior.

So if you think of something like reflexes, for example, um, I guess many biologists or people working on. the mechanics of reflexes or whatever, wouldn't want to necessarily think of that as an action. And if I, I don't know, snip my fingers next to your eye and you blink, um, there's some sense in which there's not something that you really do, even apart from the distinction between action and intentional action. I think people have tended to just wanting to distinguish between action in general and then intentional action, which, goes back to this, this question by, um, by Wittgenstein in his philosophical [00:33:00] investigations, where, um, I'm writing it down somewhere, um, just so I get the wording right.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, like the arm thing about what's, what's Yeah,

Mirko Prokop: so where he says, like, what, what is, what is left over when I subtract the fact? That my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arms and the way that he's phrasing that question seems to sort of suggest that there might be two different kinds of projects, or two different things that you want to understand, like one is me raising my arm, which is something that I do intentionally.

And the other thing is. Um, my arm going up. So like in, in the German, it would be that the passive, you know, mine, um, he says that there's something that the arm does to itself. So if I

Andrea Hiott: throw a ball at you and your arm goes up and you catch it, uh, that would be more like a reflex. But if, if you have [00:34:00] awareness that you're going to raise your arm now, and then you raise your arm.

That's intentional action. The first one is just action, and the second one is intentional action, or?

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, the throwing example is interesting, actually. I'm not sure what I would say to this. I wouldn't You know, maybe, yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say that I did it intentionally, but it was also more than just a reflex, maybe, you know, maybe it was something that I'm good at catching balls or something.

So some kind of action. Um, but, to finish the thought from earlier is that you might think of on the one hand being there being, um my intentional action of raising my arm and on the other hand, some kind of happening in the world of my arm going up and you might think that, intentional action is sort of one happening in the world that, that we think of it as an action.

[00:35:00] something extra, which is then the intention. So you want to describe, that extra feature. And then you have an understanding of what distinguishes intentional actions from, non intentional actions or from just actions in general. Um, I mean, there's reasons to think that Wittgenstein thought that the question is not really very helpful.

And Anscombe, certainly, I don't, as I read her, didn't think that it was a good question to ask, so I think she, she wanted to kind of say that, um, you, we shouldn't think of intention as some kind of extra feature that is present, uh, whenever someone acts with an intention, or, you know, acts intentionally, um, and so in some sense, you can't really make sense of the question of what an action in general is, apart from the question what an intentional action is.

So that these are kind of [00:36:00] Interconnected conceptually for her. And so this search for some kind of extra feature, in addition to maybe behavior action in general, there is, I think, just kind of a misguided approach to understanding the nature of of intentional action.

Andrea Hiott: I was just thinking about, um, as you were talking, I was thinking about how You probably know this too, but often in philosophy, when you go to classes, you, one of the things you get told or you are supposed to learn is that when we talk about intention, we don't mean it in the way that we use that word in everyday life.

Do you know what I mean? Like there's this kind of supposedly different way in which the word is used in philosophy, which. I don't know. Maybe we should, we should talk about that a bit too. And also just for people who don't care about all these like specifics of philosophy, which, you know, nerding out on it like we do, like, what are we really talking about here?

Why, why do we care about, um, I mean, I think these are huge things that matter in our lives. Agency and intention [00:37:00] are huge things that matter in our life. And I feel like we can get so caught in just talking about all this like wordplay kind of stuff. Um, Which is important, too, in a context, but I think here I would also like to kind of think of a big picture, too.

What are we trying to, to understand? Um, but first let's talk about that intention. Do you really see that there's some kind of difference between this philosophical idea of directedness uh, in the way that we define intention, um, versus the way we use it in everyday life? Because I even feel like in this paper, the way we use it in everyday life is the way they're using it.

But I don't know. How do you see it? Well, I

Mirko Prokop: mean, that's another reason why I find reading Anscombe quite refreshing in, as well as perplexing, but, but mostly refreshing Because well, she certainly thought that, these are not just philosophically interesting questions of thinking about the nature of attention, but I think, as far as [00:38:00] I'm aware, her thinking about the philosophy of action was, and specifically about the notion of intention was spawned by the the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima.

And, you know, President Truman kind of saying, or, you know, someone might have thought he could have said something like, you know, I didn't do this intentionally. I just signed a piece of paper and I didn't really drop the bomb. So I'm not responsible for this. Whereas she, I think, wanted to really say, no, you are, you are responsible for that.

 And I guess she thought that the reason for that doesn't hang on a particular mental state that Truman had at the time where he signed that paper. Um, but it had more to do with the, with the way in which he knew that when he signed it, he was actually ordering the bombing. Uh, and um, that, you know, wanted to think of, or wants to think of intention as.

As, as she says, a sort of form of description of [00:39:00] actions or events in, in the life, in human life, which usually is sort of goal directed, uh, of actions being done in order to do something else. And so she thinks that whenever we use the term intention, and she's really concerned with the everyday use of intention, uh, there is a kind of pattern, uh, present in, in human life.

That is, if you like teleological, so that then is concerned with, um, us doing certain things in order to achieve other things. Um,

Andrea Hiott: I'm so glad you brought that up. I didn't know that. I didn't know that about that. That was, yeah, I mean, I

Mirko Prokop: think really, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean,

Andrea Hiott: because, you know, I mean, philosophy is a wonderful way to learn how to think critically and things like this, but. At least for me, I don't know, I kind of sensed it when you were saying you got a little annoyed with the sense making thing, but for me, um, [00:40:00] the reason I'm trying to understand cognition is, is, is because I want to understand, uh, how we might reorient our relationship to self in terms of just the difficulty that it can be.

that humans can fill in their interaction with their own bodies and selves and in social context that's, that's ecological for me, but also how we can understand, you know, my little dog here and the trees and like all of this kind of life around us, um, as having some agency and That is always tied to cognition, and that is always tied to these issues that we raised at the beginning about, like, what's really happening between perception and action, and is there some kind of, um, mediation, and that story you just told about dropping the bombs, right?

Uh, for me, that makes me think, okay, There's a reason why we really need to know, uh, [00:41:00] when a subject is aware of themselves as a subject, and what has led to, what they perceive and also what action follows from that perception. And for me, I feel like a lot of this in the paper and even in these studies, what frustrates me is that it's so insular that it's as if there was no history, there was no trajectory.

This is why I tried to bring in this like landscape and trajectory, because I feel like when we really look at all of this, we have to look at a kind of a being as having a trajectory that determines its perception and action and that perception and action are actually just our ways of assessing.

Something that's ongoing and dynamic. They don't need to be thought of as separate or, or whatever, just different ways of assessing this. And this gets brought out a little bit in the literature too, but I'm just talking now, but I wonder what you think about that. And, um, if, if you feel in your philosophical work and study, like, how do you balance that? or how do you [00:42:00] think about these kind of bigger themes and what, how they motivate your work, or? Yeah,

Mirko Prokop: absolutely. I mean, I guess, I got, I really, uh, do think that the philosophy of action, despite being often very technical and also, A lot of the literature that in the last 10 years or so has been, or maybe a bit more, published on, on like the new Anscombian approach to philosophy of action, rediscovering, I mean, Anscomb published her book Intention in the 50s.

But then it's been forgotten for a while, you know, that are not forgotten, but interpreted in ways

that,

we're kind of mistaken. Um, that, you know, I was, I was thinking, I was reading that and thinking, you know, that really, really matters. And, and I do think that, um, also, I mean, uh, I didn't study law or anything, but as far as I'm aware that, you know, German law or probably in, in any uh, criminal law, if you want [00:43:00] to prove someone guilty of a crime, they did something, you have to normally show that they did it intentionally, or at least if they didn't do it intentionally, uh, they would usually get a milder sentence, so it's not like figuring out what the nature of intention is is something that has no impact on the way in which.

Good point.

Andrea Hiott: Good point. Yeah, that is sentence.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah. But, I also like the thing that you were saying, I think you were mentioning the sort of continuity of, of agent, agency across the spectrum of life. And this is something that I find really, um, important to, to not always look at what makes us sort of distinct and interesting and special as human beings, but also would connect us to, uh, to other organisms and their capacities for agency.

Um, Even even fairly simple organisms, and this is [00:44:00] something that, you know, the enactive approach, uh, is happy to embrace to some extent of ascribing agency, even to two cells and unicellular organisms.

And yeah, I think I'm sympathetic to that. I, however, as I said earlier, the content looking at the continuity shouldn't let us. overlook the differences that there are that are very important, you know, because I can't really hold my dog accountable for the kinds of things that he did in the way that maybe I can hold my friends accountable.

Uh, and that seems to have to do with, the form that agency takes in human life and the kind of ways in which we are able to act. Which is often related to the notion of a reason, people say, I'm able to act on a reason and to, to communicate, to explain to you why I did something, which is, [00:45:00] you know, some central in Anscombe's work that she focused a lot on this question, why?

And she thinks that the actions that are intentional, the kinds of actions to which. As she says, a certain sense of the question, why has application where that sense, uh, if you know where the answer is positive gives a reason for what you did. And then she tries to work out that particular sense of the why question, but I can't really ask my dog, you know, why did you, I don't know, wee on the floor or something, and I can't really, uh, hold him accountable for that in the same way if I, as I could maybe my, my drunk friend or something,

Andrea Hiott: that means you can't apply a human definition of cognition to a dog, right, which.

I think is what we, we are all trying to do or think we can do, um, that we can just come up with an idea of what cognition [00:46:00] is and it's going to apply across the board or something or that we can come up with a definition of agency and intention. But to go back to those subjects we raised at the beginning, I think what I'm seeing is that you can think of cognition as something that all creatures have without assuming that it's.

The same and when we look at something like ecological psychology and inenactivism and philosophy of action I think what we're what a lot of people there are trying to figure out is how to Understand that right? Like how do you understand that there for me? I put it in my terms because that's like what I have to do But for me there as your dog has A history, a trajectory within, with its body and its particular affordances that you could hold it accountable relative to that trajectory, but of course you can't hold it accountable relative to a human trajectory of cognition, but that doesn't mean that your dog isn't intelligent and cognitive. It just means that it takes a lot more work, right? Do you think that connects to [00:47:00] Anscombe at all and her idea of practical knowledge or?

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, I mean, absolutely that. There's a, again, there's a lot of things that we could talk about here. I mean, another reason why I found Anscombe nice to read, uh, is that she's very open to the idea of attributing intention to non human animals.

And she actually says explicitly, we often do describe the movements of animals in intentional terms. When you say like, why is the cat crouching like that? Um, because it's stalking the bird and, you know, you might say, well, it's intention in crouching is to catch the bird. And that's a perfectly valid description of what's going on.

Um, and then people might say, oh yeah, but the intention of the cat is very different. And I think Anscombe also says something like, you know, even, even though the cat cannot express its thoughts. In the way that I can, if [00:48:00] you ask me, why are you doing this? Um, we still attribute intention to, to the cat and it's perfectly fine.

But of course, you know, there is still a difference between me and the cat in the way that I act, or that I'm able to act, I think a lot of the things that I do are very cat like in a way, like, so I I want to think of it more as a spectrum of, of different forms of agency.

Um, many of which we share with other animals, but I also feel like there is something, quite specific about, uh, the form that agency takes in human beings without that implying some kind of hierarchy, that we're like better than the rest of something. It's just that right? 'cause of our evolutionary history and cultural, cultural evolution as well.

Probably, our, our agency ended up the way that it is. That it is now and I'm interested in [00:49:00] understanding that, that specificity in, in, in action, which I do think involves the notion of intention without introducing a kind of break in the, in our relationship to all life on earth and possibly somewhere else.

Andrea Hiott: There's somewhere in the paper, I think they talk about intention is like patterns of something, patterns of, um, Organization of pattern. Does that sound familiar? , I think this is kind of a really interesting thought that I liked reading that.

I'm not sure I can relate it to Anscombe. You could probably do better than me, but in practical knowledge and all of this, But I do like thinking of intention as uh, the organization of patterns, or , or, because in that way that, like, we could think of it as continuous, in a sense, of if you, if we think of perception and action, or we just think of cognition and perception and action as ways we're looking at, how a creature makes its way, whatever creature that is.

We would first have to determine the body and the [00:50:00] environment in the way that we were saying before. And there would be certain statistical regularities that this creature is encountering, be it a human, a dog, an insect. And their sort of organization of those relative to their body, would become, would be its cognition.

Knowledge doesn't necessarily mean that you're aware via language or something like this. So, so creatures movement through its world is its knowledge. It's its cognition from our perspective, maybe not from it, it's perspective. But. How do you see this?

Patterns of organization and action in relation to Anscombe,

Mirko Prokop: I mean, certainly that, that's, um, I guess the central, one of the central, uh, pieces of her account. And it's kind of hard to just summarize in a few words.

Because yeah, I guess she also thought you kind of have to do the work yourself and reading through the book and trying to really understand where she's coming from. But yeah, I guess the basic idea, um, is that she wants to think of [00:51:00] intention, um, as a kind of form that, that actions take in the way that they're related to each other in terms of means and ends.

So that when there is an intentional action, you can usually describe what's going on as saying this person , or this animal, uh, does that in order to achieve something else. And then there's the notion of practical knowledge, which is also absolutely essential to Anscombe, which is related to this in the sense that she wants to say that when someone is doing something intentionally, they are aware of how what they're doing right now is a means to an end that they want to achieve. And that sort of, in that sense, the practical knowledge, like when you do something, you know what you're doing and you know why you're doing it, uh, that's constitutive.

For her, I think, of, um, acting intentionally, and she thinks that she can bring that out [00:52:00] by looking at the way in which people answer this why question, if I catch you walking down the stairs and I say, what are you doing or why are you doing this? If you reply something like, Oh, I wasn't aware that I was walking down the stairs or maybe I just woke you up from sleepwalking.

Uh, you know, that answer, Anscombe thinks shows that what you were doing, you weren't really doing it intentionally. You weren't doing it based on knowing what you're doing in that situation. Whereas if you said, I'm going to fetch some milk from the shop or I'm going down in order to go to the shop.

You know, that's an answer that in a sense reveals this pattern being present of you being aware of how what you're doing right now contributes to achieving a goal that you care about. And I think in a sense, Anscombe thinks that working out the structure of this teleological, uh, you know, [00:53:00] goal, means and end oriented pattern, um, really is all we have to say in order to understand.

The notion of intention. And just to try to bring that back to the paper, the reason why it's nice for ecological psychology is that this is a kind of non representational way of thinking of the notion of intention, which you don't have to think of intention as some kind of mental state that is present at the time at which someone is acting, and that then somehow causes you to act.

But at the same time, you know, thinking in Anscombe in terms about intentions, in terms of Sort of forms of descriptions or patterns of organization of action, um, is often a bit unusual and obscure and it takes a while to get into it and I'm certainly still struggling to, to fit that view, um, into a [00:54:00] naturalistic understanding of intentional action where we do have to look at, you know, how is the body of the agent actually Constructed, what role does the nervous system play in the production of intelligent behavior?

All these are, from a naturalistic perspective, essential questions to answer the question, what is intentional action?

Andrea Hiott: You said you want to try to think of a naturalistic notion of intention.

What do you mean by naturalistic for those who, I mean, what's like your way of thinking about that word?

Mirko Prokop: That's another big question. I don't think I can or want to give a definite answer to that, but I guess most generally I just think of it as A notion of intention that is compatible or supported by, our knowledge from the natural sciences, uh, and in particular, biology and the, the bunch of disciplines that make up cognitive science.[00:55:00]

It's like psychology and neuroscience and so on. Um, yeah. For

Andrea Hiott: me that has to do with organization of patterns too, I could see how of naturalistic in a, in a sense of having noticed patterns or having observed patterns and having maybe even data and tested them and they're the kind of scientific method could be understood in that way, which is really far away from the way someone might.

Just think of intention in an everyday sense, which actually feels like this mental, inner kind of thing that's going on, but what I think this paper is trying to do is collapse that a bit through this notion of intention as that, that, you know, that they're trying to Getting from Anscombe and it seems connected in a way to naturalizing intention because what it's doing is it's saying, okay, we can observe something as intention without it being necessarily, something that the subject is [00:56:00] aware of, uh, holding in their, like, present with at the moment that it's taking place or something. But then when you zoom out and you look at it through scales, you can see the trajectory. You can see the pattern of organization, but it doesn't mean the person or or the, the agent necessarily has to hold all that in some kind of mental realm while it's happening.

Mirko Prokop: No, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I'm interested in the idea of thinking of these patterns, these kind of patterns of organization of actions in terms of means and ends that Anscombe is trying to describe as, in many cases, very strongly embodied, like in the sense that your body knows what you're doing.

When you do something intentionally and that the way in which, for example, when you're walking along across the street intentionally. And an absolutely central part of that action is the way [00:57:00] in which your, legs and arms and all movements of your body are coordinated to produce that goal directed behavior.

 I mean, of course, you're aware in some sense that you're walking down the street, but to me, it's much more plausible to say, my, my body is walking or, you know, my knowledge of how, how to walk down the street is really just in my body. That's what I've been doing my, my whole life since I'm, I don't know, one, one, one and a half years old or something.

And I don't need to think about and think about that in, in some kind of, abstract detached way that you then might. You don't want to describe in terms of beliefs about what you're doing and stuff like that. So I'm very interested in this idea of thinking about practical knowledge, which, as I said, is essential, at least on Anscombe's view, to intentional action as something that is very much embodied and [00:58:00] that these cycles of Organization of action are, ingrained in the structure of our body.

I'm so

Andrea Hiott: glad you said the word embodied. We've been talking about the body a lot, which is also very important in all these other contexts, but this is going to be a little messy, but I just have to try to kind of go for it a bit because this idea, that you're talking about in this kind of continuum and it being embodied, the organizational pattern is embodied and that becomes the main problem, right?

And all these things of how do you go from that, from this embodied Cognition that's not necessarily, um, about, it's about the subject, but it's not necessarily about what we think of as subjective awareness of having awareness that you are acting in a certain way . And those always seem very distinct, but I think what I'm seeing and what I think a lot of people are trying to get at is that this is a continuous process with that embodied cognition.

 You as a little boy developed, Your way of you, you made way [00:59:00] and physically how to get to the park, but also, um, in terms of your emotions and your thoughts and all of this, right. And you through language sort of developed in this, in the same way and awareness of your. Organization of those patterns via language, which becomes starts, makes us start to feel like, Oh, there's like a little me in my head or something, but really it's just this kind of, we've organized our patterns of behavior via language in the same way that we organize our patterns in our body as we walk and we learn this. So there becomes this continuity between life and mind of a continuity between the way we make our way. Physically in the way that we come to understand ourselves through, awareness, um, via language or something, but this is where it gets tricky, doesn't it? When you start to think of my dog or your dog or, or an insect or something, um, you really have to think, okay, they're doing the same thing with their body and that's cognition, but there's a very [01:00:00] different sort of language. There probably is language, but it's not what we call human language. So their awareness of their patterns would be different even if the organi organizing pattern is similar. This gets very hard to talk about and

we get really confused, we have trouble not thinking of everything in terms of language based thought or something. Um, so something like practical knowledge, I feel like it's really tied. I mean, it makes sense with Wittgenstein and her coming out of that, that it would be so tied to language in a way.

But I, I feel like in this paper sort of trying to do it, that we could almost try to unstick the language, understand that that's one form of waymaking and one form of knowledge, therefore, one form of practical knowledge. But there's also a practical knowledge in the very way that she introduces it that isn't about being aware through language of your actions.

 But that you could, that could still be very relative to this pattern formation [01:01:00] through just aligning with what you've been moving through your whole life. Whether you're a cell or a human and, I know that's very messy, but I feel like, it's not just, uh, language based and it seems very language based still in her work, but maybe I'm wrong because I haven't read, I haven't read her as much as you,

is she trying to get past that?

Mirko Prokop: Uh, I think, I, this is something that I have to think more about and that I would love to, reread also, uh, aspects of Anscombe. And I think one thing that is, that she does think is that,

That it is essential to the kind of practical knowledge that is constitutive or very important to make sense of intentional actions, at least in humans, that we are able to express. To others, um, our reasons for doing what we did intentionally. This is why this why question is so, so central because or Anscombe seems to think that it is [01:02:00] essential to you, you being an intentional agent capable of acting intentional that you also are able to answer that question. If I ask you, why did you do that? Um, and I love that you, you mentioned, um, language there because of course that is, you know, the way that we typically, communicate our reasons to one to, to each other for what we are doing.

But another thing that I've been really interested in that relates to that is that, um, language and also this why question is something that only really matters in a social context, right? So. Normally, you wouldn't really ask yourself, why am I doing this? And you don't really, there is a sense in which you don't really have to make explicit or express to yourself the reasons for why you're doing something. I mean, that might be related to this, this kind of obscure notion of Anscombe that she wants to think of [01:03:00] practical knowledge is what she calls knowledge without observation. Um, as you know, the way that you know what you're doing is not through observing yourself and then making explicit to yourself, Oh, there is a body that's moving in the world and has these kinds of features.

Andrea Hiott: That's very good. Knowledge without observation. Yeah. That's. Yeah. Because that's different than being able to answer the why question. It's like the water pump example. If what is that? Like there's a guy pumping poisonous water into a house.

And if you ask him why he's doing it, he can answer it. And there's this kind of whole train of why questions, it's kind of the famous example I can link to. But in any case, I was imagining that is the same as understanding why you're doing it. It's not at all actually, uh, or observing yourself.

Um, Well, no, it's

Mirko Prokop: essential. I think it's essential to that example and other cases of intentional action that the person or this man in this case knows what he's doing in pumping water into into a [01:04:00] house.

Andrea Hiott: His answer is I want to kill the family inside or something, I think, right? That's why he's pumping poisonous water or whatever.

Mirko Prokop: Exactly. Um, but I think the, the idea of knowledge without observation, is that, when you ask him, why are you doing this? He's able to answer that question, not because he's sort of looking at himself from a third person perspective. And observing what's going on, as happenings in the world that lead towards there being poison in the house that, is connected to pump that he happens to be operating. But he is. He knows what he's doing without observation, as Anscombe says, he just has this, um, well embodied know how, you could maybe call it, that's sort of the way that I, I like to think about it.

Because he has that knowledge without observation that he's, he's able to answer the why question immediately when you ask him.

[01:05:00] But yeah, I mean, in that in that example, again, it's just sort of essential to that being practical knowledge that he's able to express. His reasons for doing something in some sense, based on a kind of knowledge that is not based on his observation of

Andrea Hiott: himself. Yeah. And as you said, it's a social, I think in a way there's that loops also, I mean, as you said, this is a social thing we don't really ask ourselves, but Actually, I would kind of push back on that a bit too, because I think part of the social reason we ask each other is to awaken the individual to start asking that question for themselves, which we do usually, maybe as children, because we realize we're part of the social environment and we have to Appear in a certain way or, or we have to be able to say like what we're doing, you know, once we start asking those questions, it changes that, cognition of self, um, in a very particular sense.

That's what law is in a way. It's that asking why and having to [01:06:00] answer.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, no, absolutely. I do think that's why it's so important to, to look at social interaction. Especially also in early development, in order to understand the notion of intentional action, because Through being forced to justify your actions or explain your actions to others.

 You also, I think, you know, gain a sort of different relationship to your own actions that when you then start doing or, , do something you're able to sometimes ask yourself. Why am I doing this? Or perhaps in a different way, you know, ask yourself, if someone were asking me, what would I say?

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's very complicated because the man pumping water, for example, if you ask him why, he might not tell you the truth of why. He might tell you, I'm just pumping water to help them or something. There's all kind of weird, weird loops, which the more aware you become. the more you observe these kind of patterns or your own knowledge, the more your knowledge changes and the [01:07:00] more you could use that in different ways, right?

The more you can shift perspectives and see how others might see you and what you should. You know, it reminds me a little bit of, to go back to von Uexkuell, like again, of he, he talks about the umwelt, but he talks about two different kinds, I think it's Werkwelt, it's in German, Werkwelt and Merkwelt, maybe.

And one of them is more like practical knowledge as I see it. This, this Werk is more like, the agent in its environment, uh, aligning with its sensory regularities and developing organizational, organizational patterns. And you don't, it doesn't need to observe it in the sense that we're talking about.

And then the Merit would be the observation and it's more symbolic or semiotic, there's some kind of symbol, like language would be attached. That makes sense with language and a meaning and all this stuff gets ascribed to it. So I guess what I'm trying to push at is can we, and it gets back to the paper and trying to think of perception and action and as ecological and, and bringing intention [01:08:00] into that. Can we imagine that there's, a sense in which this is a kind of a scaling or a continuity, not a linear, linear kind of thing.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, I wouldn't want to, yeah, I mean, what, I, what I said before, about this notion of practical knowledge being somehow embodied or something that we don't really have to, um, make explicit.

And then on the other hand, having the capacity to make it explicit in terms of language, um, you know, the way I sort of think about it now is, is that, they're, yeah, like you said, they're not like, it's not like a linear progression or kind of sharp distinction between one kind of practical knowledge and the other, but that there are sort of intertwined in the way that we act and in the way that we explain ourselves to others.

Thanks. Um, but then in order to make sense of that relationship, it's not enough to just look at individuals, but you also have to look at how [01:09:00] they interact with other individuals or, you have to take into account the, the social dimension.

Andrea Hiott: It gets back to what we were talking about with, You know, it very much, I think, inspired this ecological notion of affordance or something like a niche construction that's often connected to it, yeah. It's the way in which, as you're saying in the context or these particular atmosphere of affordances for a particular body, as we were saying, are always different.

How that actually can't be disengaged from one's development of intention and also how one uses something symbolic like language in order to, to observe that intention, even if it's not in oneself. I think with what we were talking about earlier, too, we often think that means the subject is observing themselves, but what, but there's can be observation that's not from the agent that's being observed, that would still we could still imagine that's intention, especially when it comes to something like law, you might be able to observe a trajectory. And call it intentional and directed, [01:10:00] uh, without necessarily the agent themselves, having an awareness of that trajectory. But then that's not the same as the everyday use of intention that I intended to hurt them and therefore I made this action,

Mirko Prokop: I think that's a, a whole nother, uh, field that I would love to know more about how, because the idea to me that in a trial, for example, you're trying to, figure out, uh, whether there was intention present. And whether and what the intention was, as I guess, for example, in the Trump trial they, they need to somehow prove that he, he was aware of what he was. Doing and inciting that, and in some sense, they're trying to, I think, prove, you know, that he did what he did intentionally and posting all these messages and so on.

Andrea Hiott: And the way to prove that is through language that he spoke or wrote or said something to someone. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Mirko Prokop: In the sense that they're trying, that's what they're trying to, or part [01:11:00] of what they're trying to prove, and, but this idea to me that you're looking at all these, thousands of pieces of information and videos and whatever, in order to, to then retrospectively review.

Say, oh yeah, that person did what they did intentionally and therefore they are culpable and so on. That is like really fascinating but also quite perplexing because I, there is a sense in which I don't think it really gets at what actually happened at that time or went through the person's mind as they did it. Which again, comes idea that you know it's not really about that when we want to think about attention.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. As you speak, I'm reminded of this video I just saw just randomly. I think I was in like an airport or something, but they were interviewing one of the guys from that, who went into the Capitol and he was, and they were trying to kind of say, Oh, you were just like brainwashed by all of this propaganda that was directing your actions that you weren't really intending it.

And he was saying, no, I knew what I was doing. I was, I did [01:12:00] it on my own. Nobody brainwashed me. And that gets very tricky too, doesn't it? Because We think we choose sometimes, but we've just absorbed a certain trajectory of media that is leading us, but we we are also at the same time making the decision to be led.

So you have to get beyond that dichotomy of it only being one way or the other that someone else, or that the inertia of the trajectory is what's leading you and that's the intention. So your intention is like somehow the inertia of a larger intention, for example, the Trump campaign versus,

that you somehow can distinguish between those wider intentions, social intentions and your own intention. I mean, that too is really quite interesting. And I think it also brings us to the paper again about perception and action. And like, how do we really distinguish between perception and action?

 The ecological theory would say perception is action. It is an activity. It's doing something. It's not something that's happening, in some [01:13:00] inner world or something. The paper says it's going to define intention or that it could, Anscombe's theory could sort of define intention in a way.

Did you really get that? Like what, what that definition was in the end? I mean, we've been dancing around all these possible possibilities,

Mirko Prokop: anscombe's understanding of intention or, well, this is the reason it's, it's kind of difficult because Anscombe doesn't really provide, uh, if you like, a kind of positive account of, , what intention is in terms of the necessary insufficient conditions for there being an intention present and so on.

She has this sort of very Wittgenstein inspired approach of looking at the way in which we use the expression intention or someone acted intentionally or the notion of intentional action in everyday language. In the way that we talk [01:14:00] about actions and explain our actions to others, in order to work out this kind of pattern that she thinks is present that I've tried to, elaborate a little bit on.

 This is why reading Anscombe is often a bit frustrating and at the same time extremely fascinating and inspiring, because he doesn't really give you that, direct answer to, I think the authors also are very aware of that they talk about in the end of the paper of integrating the Anscombing kind of approach to intention with, let's say a more empirically oriented scientific approach to agency.

And yeah, I think they do say that there is still a lot of work to be done in that direction. But it's an interesting proposal to try to bring Anscombe's perspective into that field in order to try to think about attention in different ways. And in particular, to get away from this. idea of it being some kind of [01:15:00] mental state or representation in the minds of an agent.

Andrea Hiott: I found it hard to, really understand what they were offering as the definition of intention. But I feel like in the abstract they say that they're going to Um, let's see, we will argue that Anscombe's account can meet the two challenges of bringing intentions into the framework of ecological psychology.

First it can explain what intentions are, if not representational states. Okay. So I guess we, we've kind of talked about that, right? It's more, it's not necessarily explaining or giving a definition of intention so much as showing that it doesn't have to be representational. Right?

Mirko Prokop: Yeah. I think that's probably a good way of putting it.

It's probably not the right way to think about Anscombe's account in this sort of positive way of giving you a theory of that his intention. Um, even though in some sense, of course, she does give you some kind of conception of that notion that is [01:16:00] illuminating. But Yeah, I think what they want to say in the paper as I read it is that her way of approaching it is in principle a lot more compatible than with ecological psychology than the kind of standard approaches in the philosophy of action.

Andrea Hiott: Broadly I can start to understand how we might imagine intention as these patterns of, of activity that are these organizational patterns of activity.

 I could understand how that relates to basically just the statistical regularities of. Of what is encountered from a particular body as it's making its way and how the organization of that the body is is the organizer of that is perception and action, depending which way you want to look at it.

 So, of course, there's a kind of directedness. or intention of the body, even, it doesn't necessarily have to be goal oriented.

Like the body has to make its way, and, um, you develop a kind of directedness as you do that because you Do create these [01:17:00] patterns, that are organizational.

Mirko Prokop: And also one of the potential, uh, criticisms that someone might, level against the paper, when it is, is precisely hanging on that question of whether you want to think of, This making way or moving around in the world in an intentional kind of way as involving goals, you know, as being teaching logical means and goal directed.

And I guess, for, for Anscombe, that notion of a goal is absolutely essential to making sense of attention. So if you wanted to take our approach at sort of face value. I guess you would have to provide some kind of naturalistic explanation or incorporate this notion of teleology or goal directedness into your, whatever your scientific framework is.

If you want to take her kind of approach on board, , and that might involve [01:18:00] explaining away the notion of goal in some other kind of way, or just embracing the notion of, organisms as teleological goal oriented systems, which is something that I guess an enactivism does and has been criticized a lot for, um,

Andrea Hiott: When we're talking about making way or navigation as cognition, when we're looking at cognition, which for me means how any agent is making its way through whatever encounter it finds itself in, there's always something, someone is assessing that.

So from the point of view of the. assessor, the person who's doing the assessing, there will always be teleology. There will always be some possibility of, of a goal because you can see the trajectory and you're looking at one particular trajectory. So um, I guess what I want to do is open up like the scale of that.

So it's not that's not the only way of looking at that. Uh, agent and that behavior or that perception or that action, whatever it is you're, you're looking at, it's one way and it's [01:19:00] probably, like, depending on how you've, um, framed it and what you're looking for, you can put it in those terms, but it's not always and only that sometimes there's just wandering, sometimes we're lost.

You know, and I mean that in all kinds of different ways, um, and this too is a form of way making and there can be intention ascribed to it. I think that's what I was saying before. The fact that it's intention can be ascribed to it doesn't mean that it's intention for the agent, uh, in question, but that would be a whole, whole other, other thing. but it's interesting that you say, so for Anscombe, there's always a goal. You would say. There's always teleology in your reading of it. Yeah. Although,

Mirko Prokop: again, this is like very takes us or would take us into some kind of deep territory about the way that people read Anscombe and there's different interpretations of that.

And I'm not really sure, what mine is or what the correct one is, whatever. Um, but yeah, for her this, um, this kind of [01:20:00] pattern or structure that she's trying to describe, which she thinks is essential to the notion of intention, that is a teleological pattern. So it is this idea that when someone is doing something intentionally, you can describe what they're doing as something that they're doing in order to do something else.

So you're explaining in some sense what they're doing right now. by appealing to some future action or state of affairs that hasn't, realized itself yet, but then in some sense explains what's happening at the moment and identifies what's happening at the moment as an intentional action. and so in order to make sense of that kind of pattern, uh, you need that kind of teleological goal oriented kind of explanation.

And if you, ignore that and you want to say, no, everything is purely causal, mechanistic, physical, and we need to understand organisms on that reductive basis. And there's no teleology allowed at all. [01:21:00] Um, it's just a metaphor. It's just a way of speaking about living organisms. Then I think it becomes very hard to incorporate the kind of Anscombian approach to, to intention and perhaps agency more general.

within, in a scientific framework of that's. It's the way that you want to think about

Andrea Hiott: nature. It's well said. It makes me think of a million things

Mirko Prokop: , I loved what you said about this, um, this idea of this.

Sometimes we are, we are lost. And sometimes we're like, you know, doing something, but we don't. Necessarily have a particular kind of goal in mind or particular kind of intention in mind, uh, and I think that these are actually quite central moments in, in our life as agents,

Andrea Hiott: because it's so, I mean, digression, that's.

That's how many things are discovered. That's what this is.

Mirko Prokop: I was actually reading, reading, [01:22:00] um, Walden yesterday. My good night book at the moment, I've been reading it for over a year now. It's a little piece of cake that I'm always, and, and there was one, uh, one section in it that I marked because I thought it would be relevant.

And it's to our discussion and it's actually exactly about the kind of thing that you said. Which I really love because it made me think about. While doing something in a different way, uh, or do it made me think about the notion of intention in a different way in these moments when we lost. And so he's, he's saying, um, and I'll quote, uh, not till we are lost.

In other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations, end quote. And I love that. And he's like talking about this in the

Andrea Hiott: context of [01:23:00] training.

Mirko Prokop: He's like describing how he walks back at night to his little hut at Walden Pond, and finding his way, uh, in pitch black, just, you know, feeling the, the path that his, his way making trips back and forth have made over the, over the last month. Um, and he's like describing this moment of just, yeah, kind of losing where you are, but you're still in some sense.

You're, you're still an agent in the world. You're still trying to make sense of what's going on. And in some sense, you're actually creating on the spot, the, the meaning that you find in that situation. And I think that, that these moments of being lost, but still, uh, acting with the kind of directness and intentionality, they're quite central to the idea of, of an action of bringing forth.

A world of bringing meaning, uh, through the kind of activity that, [01:24:00] that you, you do as an organism. So yeah. Sorry.

Andrea Hiott: No, thank you so much. That's so good and so true I mean, because as scientists or philosophers who work in scientific environments or even just like a society that's geared towards science and should be, um, we want to just, we want to have teleology, even if we call it, or we want to have patterns or we want to have, um, you know, that's what we're looking for.

 It doesn't mean we're finding our way and it doesn't mean we're navigating, but we have to, there's no choice but to make way through the encounter. That is life. It's making way. Um, and it's not. Intentional always that we've decided which way we're going to make and all of that is so rich.

 I guess this gets to the beyond dichotomy too. I don't see that we have to say, um, That because a teleology can be from some particular position or scale. discovered that it's going to apply to all scales. Just the same way that a body is made [01:25:00] up of cells, and there will be particular things for the body that don't apply to the cell, weirdly, or vice versa, um, but they're still the same process. From some other perspective. That's a really hard thing to hold in mind, and that's what we need new models to understand. So reading these papers. Um, through, you know, this idea of agency it's interesting to bring that back and you're saying you see that always in a goal oriented sense.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, definitely. I don't think I or the authors of that paper would want to say that every, uh, every organism, even every organism, the same species has the same kinds of goals, you know, in that sense, obviously, there are many teleologies, if you like. But I think what I was more trying to say is that when you think about the notion of agency, quite generally, At least I find it quite hard to make sense of that without, um, involving some notion of a goal or of a purpose, which to me doesn't mean [01:26:00] that you're sort of having left, that you've left the field of natural science.

It's just that's a sort of fact about how we understand the concept of agency. Um, and that needs to be explained. But it's sort of important to acknowledge that when you start thinking about a concept that it's so, that's so difficult, um, rather than trying to reduce it to something else that it, that is completely, Devoid of any kind of goal, goal directedness, um, because then agency just kind of seems to, for me at least, my, my intuitive grasp on the concept seems to kind of fade out of the picture.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I worry sometimes about I mean, a lot of these approaches are. Once we start thinking, of course, teleology is still naturalistic science and all of this, it can be, but I do think we have to use caution in, in this rigidity of, often when we, when [01:27:00] we talk about these words.

We do talk about them in a dichotomous way so that it's either or, and that there's only one teleology or somehow we find the right goal or the right, or, you know, and I guess what I, what I want to do is, is, that's why I said teleologies, not teleology, but is of course, from, as I was saying, from any position of assessment, we could see goals, but we can't always ascribe that goal to the thing that we're assessing.

I think we have to be very careful about that. Something like Von Oksko, for example, once you start doing that, you get into really dangerous areas, which he did. I mean, he, he had all these crazy ideas You know, political ideas that were really detrimental and wrong that were very, very tied to believing, uh, oh, we can determine what a goal is for some agent.

So, I guess, that's where I'm trying to open up the space where it's, it's too easy to say everything is goal oriented and only goal oriented. [01:28:00] It's better for me to say. The measuring or the science is always going to be able to see particular goals when assessing particular trajectories

but the overall bigger model we have to remember is not linear ever. And from there's always, you can always see. Many, many overlapping trajectories that then needs a new model for how we understand, uh, what all this is, this, this way making it, which isn't necessarily a linear movement from some place to a goal, you know, that, that mindset is what bothers me and what is so we can so easily get stuck in, I think through these very inspirational and true ideas.

I mean, a lot of the people that inspired me got stuck in those places and it's hard to, I don't want to do that.

Mirko Prokop: I really like your, your idea, as far as I, we've talked about it, of way making, because it does always involve , this historical dimension that [01:29:00] makes it very, uh, unique to each individual.

You know, we all have come our own, our own way to where we are today, and, and we will all, you know, go different paths, which sometimes cross and sometimes they don't. Um, but, but there is a sense that, the kinds of goals that we care about and that we do pursue and that guide our behavior, they are very much, um, yeah, tied to the kind of, um, individual that we have become and that we are in the process of becoming.

Um, and in that sense, yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree that it's, it's treacherous to sort of think of teleology as one thing that applies to all,

Andrea Hiott: Right, there could be even contradictory teleologies. And within the same agent, as part of the same agency. I guess it's just the rigidity of thinking that we're going to look at this system and we were looking at everything. And so if we find the goals of that system, then we've somehow [01:30:00] solved something for multiple perspectives. It gets to what we were talking about, about the cognition of how you can apply human cognition to a dog or whatever, in terms of if you're going to. Punish them, you know, it's more that I feel like we need more nuance in terms of understanding that there's not, there's always multiple goals and multiple trajectories of getting to any one particular goal, and the goal itself might look like a goal from one perspective and from another, not, I guess I'm just trying to open up, up that space, but I do want to get your, your opinion or your perspective about this notion of whether we need affordances.

To have intention because that's also raised in the paper and I feel like the authors say you don't need You can have intentions that they don't depend on on the affordances.

Mirko Prokop: I think, the, the point they make is they want to say that intentional action doesn't always depend on affordances [01:31:00] being present at that moment that are relevant to what you're trying to achieve. So I think they have this example of someone. Looking to, to cut an onion or something or looking, wanting to cut an onion but there's no knife present in the kitchen.

So they're just exploring the environment looking for something to cut the onion. Even though in that particular case there is nothing there that affords them to cut with. And they say that, it's not necessary for that being an object that affords cutting in order to speak about. There being an intentional action, and perhaps even the intention of cutting an onion, that is being realized through exploring the environment in order to find something that you can cut an onion with.

That's a good point.

Andrea Hiott: It's the presence of affordances in that moment. So that would, again, go to that trajectory and that history [01:32:00] that at some point you've understood, you've had a knife to cut the onion. So that would be sort of where the directedness is coming from. But That doesn't mean that the tool itself is present, I guess, that makes sense.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, yeah, and I think the other idea that's really central they want to bring in is what we said earlier. that intentions do modulate the affordances that we do actually perceive, and that this is sort of the central fact that they think is important to take account of, and that's why you need to start thinking about intentions.

Yeah, I guess they want to say that, you know, looking, adopting the kind of Anscombian approach can give an explanation of that without thinking of intentions as internal representations of goals that are somehow projected onto the environment, but it's rather that because when you're engaged. In a particular kind of goal oriented behavior where you're doing something in [01:33:00] order to do something else, like exploring the environment for, you know, looking for something to drink.

Um, this intention, this like teleological connection between, between the actions that you, you, uh, um, trying to sort of trace out in time in order to reach a goal that actually restricts. Which affordances you perceive.

Andrea Hiott: Like you were saying at the beginning, if you arrive in a brand new city but you're thirsty.

Yeah, exactly. You're going to be focused on finding something to drink, not exploring the beauties of the city or whatever.

Mirko Prokop: And so they want to, yeah, I think, as I understand it, they want to use Anscombe in that way to keep hold of the idea of direct perception, that affordances are perceived directly rather than through some mediating representational process.

Yes. Thank you. Whilst also accommodating the idea that our intentions. Affect which affordances [01:34:00] we perceive at any particular moment in time. I have to really think anything about it, but I mean, on the first, first pass, I thought it was very plausible, um, interesting proposal.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's, it's great to have Anscombe brought in like this.

And I think that's really rich. There's, I think they say it in the paper, there's tons more that could be explored did this paper give you anything new in your, your work?

Mirko Prokop: as the authors also say, in the conclusion of that paper, it's more a beginning, you know, than a conclusive account of intention or something, because you have to really do the work of trying to integrate the kind of Anscombian understanding of intention with a, a naturalistic or scientific or empirical, or whatever you want to call it, understanding of. of cognition and the mind and the body. And that's certainly something that I'm very interested in. And I think it's important. And that we should take an [01:35:00] interdisciplinary approach to that question, um, and cognition in general. I mean, this is why I loved, you know, meeting you and talking to you, um, and thinking about, you know, beyond dichotomies, beyond disciplinary, Boundaries and trying to think about this in different ways that are maybe raising eyebrows, but, but can lead to new

Andrea Hiott: things.

That's the point. Just to kind of question and ask and explore. So thanks for offering this paper. I mean, you, you came up with it. It

Mirko Prokop: was great.

Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Yes. Till next time. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I hope you have a good evening.