Publication: Neither mindful nor mindless, but minded: habits, ecological psychology, and skilled performance
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Date
2021-06-30
Authors
Segundo-Ortin, Miguel ; Heras-Escribano, Manuel
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Publisher
Springer
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03238-w
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
© The Author(s) 2021. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This document is the Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Synthese. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03238-w
Abstract
A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we ofer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specifc perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent’s conscious attention to the afordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for afordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (fexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them.
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Citation
Synthese 199(6):1-25
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Este ítem está sujeto a una licencia Creative Commons. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/