Publication:
Distal engagement: intentions in perception

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Authors
Brancazio, Nick ; Segundo Ortin, Miguel
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Publisher
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102897
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All right reserved. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This document is the Submitted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Consciousness and Cognition. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102897
Abstract
Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of longterm planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecologicalenactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for “high-level” or “representationhungry” capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a nonrepresentational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating prereflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use.
Citation
Consciousness and Cognition 79 (2020) 1028
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