Abstract
Recent empirical findings from social psychology, ecological psychology, and embodied cognitive science indicate that situational factors crucially shape the course of human behavior. For instance, it has been shown that finding a dime, being under the influence of an authority figure, or just being presented with food in easy reach often influences behavior tremendously. These findings raise important new questions for the philosophy of action: Are these findings a threat to classical conceptions of human agency? Are humans passively pushed around by situational factors, or are there agential aspects in the way we spontaneously experience and react to situations? How can one conceptualize the pervasive influence of situational factors on human action? What are situations in the first place, and how should the influence of these situations on action be thought of? This paper sets out to develop a new conceptual repertoire for thinking about the influence of situations on action, drawing on research from ecological psychology as well as from embodied and enactive cognitive science. The key proposal is the development of a philosophical sensorimotor account of agency: Action, it is proposed, should be conceived of as constant dynamical interaction of agential and environmental factors – factors which should all be conceptualized in new ways.
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Notes
Obviously, the analysis that humans experience their environment as making demands is made on a personal level of description. But this description on a personal level might then guide investigations of the sub-personal mechanisms underlying those personal level experiences. For instance, one might investigate the neural mechanisms responsible for giving in or for resisting to those situational demands (cf. Richard Ridderinkhof et al. 2011), or one might investigate the brain mechanisms responsible for reacting to one situational feature and not to another (cf. Cisek 2007).
The point that unreflective and “involuntary” actions can express an agent’s character more authentically than reflective and “voluntary” actions has been made by different thinkers such as Friedrich Schiller (in “On Grace and Dignity”) (1793), Bernard Willams (1985) and Arpaly (2003). Moreover, other authors such as Dreyfus (2005, 2013), Di Nucci (2013) and Brownstein and Madva (2012) have already emphasized the moral significance of spontaneous and “automatic” action.
Even before Mele and Shepard, Andrew Sneddon has done important work on connecting findings from situationist social psychology to the philosophy of action (Sneddon 2008, Sneddon 2011: ch. 5). In one sense, Sneddon is a pessimist in Mele and Shepard’s sense, because he argues that humans often do not have conscious access to the causes of their actions (Sneddon 2011: 184–6). But in another sense, Sneddon’s position remains very conservative, because he argues that the situationist findings can be accounted for by a (modified) Davidsonian theory (Sneddon 2011: 186). Even though the position to be developed in this paper shares a lot with Sneddon’s account, a crucial difference between Sneddon’s work and the account proposed here is that the account proposed here suggests to entirely replace the Davidsonian approach with an affordance-based theory – as it will be explained below.
Below, it will be suggested that the distinction between “inner” and “outer” is itself unfortunate. But given that the standard accounts clearly favor what might be called “inner” factors, it can be helpful to say that “outer” factors are likewise of highest relevance for the unfolding of human behavior.
This idea is in part inspired by work from neurobiologist Francisco Varela (1988), who also offers a brilliant formal logical model of the minimal kind of meaning appealed to above. It should be clear that the mentioned conception of (minimal) meaning is very different from (maximal) linguistic meaning. The first kind of meaning is available to all animals which can structurally react to situational factors, whereas linguistic meaning is arguably available only to those humans who are participating in a complex social practice. One might take Merleau-Ponty (2002) to have argued that linguistic meaning is in part based upon the more minimal kind of meaning prevalent in bodily engagement with the world, but this idea is not directly of relevance for the present paper.
Of course, there can be more complex cases. For example, an approaching Frisbee might also be experienced as “demanding” to quickly think whether or not one should catch it.
Obviously, the word “world” is used a technical sense here, similar to Heidegger’s third of his four notions of “Welt” (Heidegger 1927: §14). The idea is that a “world”, in the respective sense, encompasses all the possibilities for action for a certain agent. For example, climbing a tree is a possibility for action in the world of a cat, but not in the world of a dog. Making a jump with a motorbike is a possibility for action in the world of a professional stuntman, but not in the world of a layman, etc.
STA suggests that situations, or environments, should be defined in relation to agents. But how important is the plural in “agents”? Could there be an environment which would be inhabited by only one lonely organism? As a conceptual point, one lonely organism – STA suggests – would be enough: The point is that the environment should be defined in relation to an organism that can act on it. For making this point, it is not important that there is more than one organism. For example, if all but one organisms on earth died due a cosmic accident, the remaining organism would still inhabit an environment which is meaningful to it. And even if all organisms died, we might say that there would then be lots of unused nutrients on planet earth – but when we are making this judgment, we are making the judgment, from our perspective, and with hypothetical organisms in mind to which the nutrients would be nutritious. Moreover, it seems that each organism has its own, particular and unique point of view. Consequently, each organism experiences its world in a way which is unique. In this sense, STA suggests, every creature lives in its own world. But it is of course also true that many organisms are, as a matter of fact, social beings who, in a sense, share a world. Moreover, it seems essential to the full-fledged human social world that it is shared world, a world which can exist only if there are several beings that live in it. For example, having a conception of objective reality might require the presence of at least two persons (according to Davidson 1982). Being able to make a mistake might require a shared social practice which is independent from the mind of one particular person (according to Wittgenstein 1953: §202). Maybe being a person requires others who treat and respect one as a person (Mead 1934; Weichold 2017).
Against this background, STA might also help to overcome the dichotomy between activity and passivity, or agency and “patiency”, or at least some problematic interpretations of them. In our everyday moral practices, we arguably think of ourselves as active moral agents who constantly work at changing and improving the world according to our free will. As a reaction against this emphasis of activity, philosophers such as Soran Reader (2007, 2010) and Hubert Dreyfus (1991, 2005, 2013) have emphasized the importance of passivity in human existence. As human beings, we seem to be not only strong and free, but also fragile, vulnerable, and dependent (Reader 2007); we seem to be not only active, but also passive, for instance, when we lift a glass and feel its weight as resistance (Reader 2007). STA suggests that this emphasis of passivity is helpful to counterbalance the predominant emphasis of activity. However, STA also wishes to suggest that the dichotomy of activity and passivity might itself be unhelpful if we want to understand the real psychological nature of human action. According to STA, human action is shaped by both situational features and by subjective background conditions such as habits, skills, moods, emotions, expectations, etc. But then, it seems not even possible to tell apart active and passive elements.
Of course, there are theories which hold that beliefs are involved in some of the “inner” factors mentioned here. Cognitivist theories of emotion, for instance, suggest that emotions involve propositional attitudes (Solomon 1980, Nussbaum 2001). For example, it is said that being happy involves the belief, or judgment, that there is a reason for being happy. However, there are many well-known problems with cognitivist theories of emotion. Animals and infants also seem to have emotions, even though they lack the cognitive and linguistic resources for forming beliefs (Deigh 1994). In addition, beliefs and emotions might come apart, e.g. when one believes that flying is safe, but still feels anxious about it (Stocker and Hegeman 1992). Moreover, even if cognitivist theories of emotion were correct, there would be many other “inner” factors which shape action and which do not involve beliefs, for instance moods, feelings, or routines. It seems, for instance, impossible to specify a propositional attitude which would be involved in certain moods. Consequently, it seems reasonable to assume that (a) there are many “inner” factors which contribute to explaining action and which are different from beliefs (e.g., moods, feelings, and routines), and that (b) there are actions which can be explained without reference to beliefs, but with reference to those factors which are different from beliefs (e.g. the action of catching a Frisbee on the spur of the moment, see below).
In a sense, there is a parallelism between this criticism of Davidson’s account of agency and McDowell’s famous criticism of Davidson’s account of experience (McDowell 1994), namely that Davidson understands the connection between agent and world as merely causal – may it be in the case of sensory input in experience or in the case of an onslaught on pro attitudes in action. But the parallelism is not important for the present line of argument.
Cf. Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014 on action readiness.
Arguably, it happens quite often that solicitations which we experience are “blocked” before we can act (cf. Richard Ridderinkhof et al. 2011, see below). But this case has to be distinguished from a case where a nominal situational feature could be a solicitation for an agent (given the objective properties of the situational feature and the abilities, habits etc. of the agent), but is not experienced as a solicitation on the current occasion.
It is natural to think that commands and utterances in general can be solicitations. Consider, for instance, Wittgenstein’s builders (from §2 of the Philosophical Investigations): Whenever one builder shouts “slab”, the other one has to bring a slab. Here the command has clearly the form of a solicitation. – Concerning Milgram’s obedience experiment, one might assume that some of the persons in the experiment experienced “contradicting” solicitations: The commands of the alleged scientist could then be analyzed as solicitations for giving further electric shocks, and the protesting screams of the alleged victims could be analyzed as solicitations for stopping the procedure.
Of course, there could be an extensive discussion about whether or not the behavior of the persons in the Milgram experiment can be explained by appeal to beliefs, desires, and intentions. But at least within psychology, it is commonly accepted that the behavior cannot be explained by appeal to beliefs, desires, and intentions, but rather needs to be explained by appeal to situational factors (Sabini and Silver 2005). Again, some reasons in favor of this conclusion are these: If the actions are guided by beliefs and pro attitudes, why do the persons in the experiment obey to the experimenter at all? Of course, one might say that they both have a pro attitude towards not harming the victim, and a pro attitude to be friendly to the experimenter. But still, their pro attitude towards not harming an innocent person should be much stronger. Moreover, people state that they have good intentions to not hurt others; and people predicted that only between 0.125 to 2% of the persons would obey to the end (Milgram 1974). So do people not know their pro attitudes, beliefs, and intentions? Moreover, Milgram found that factors like the proximity to the victim influences the obedience rate (Milgram 1974) – but how can such a factor have an influence on beliefs and pro attitudes?
Obviously, affordances are very different from reasons, even if “reasons” are conceived of in the realistic fashion proposed by Dancy (2000, 2004) and Bittner (2001): Reasons are propositional, but affordances are not, reasons are (arguably) objective, but affordances are subject-dependent, reasons (probably) cannot be reacted to by animals, but affordances can, “seeing” a reason does not necessarily lead to action readiness (e.g., if the agent is irrational or weak-willed), but experiencing solicitations does.
Cf. also van Ludger et al. 2015 for an interpretation of Gibson according to which Gibson does not hold on to a strong realism about meaning.
Arguably, the idea of analyzing the environment as consisting of potentially meaningful possibilities for action can be traced back to Martin Heidegger (cf. Heidegger 1927: 184).
Even though enactivism shares some central ideas with ecological psychology, many researchers regard enactivism and ecological as competing theories (Varela et al. 1991: 202–205, Stewart et al. 2013). By contrast, this paper sides here with Anthony Chemero (2009) in holding that Gibsionian ecological psychology and enactivism might be fruitfully combined to the benefit of both parties and to the benefit of the philosophy of action – in particular, if the problematic strong realism about meaning is dropped.
Of course, it is a highly controversial matter whether or not all or most actions can and should be explained by means of representations. For arguments to the effect that this should not be done, see Dreyfus 2005, Wheeler 2005, Hutto and Myin 2013, and, classically, Haugeland 1998, who offers a battery of arguments to the effect that the rich, “wide bandwidth” coupling with situational features cannot be accounted for by appeal to symbolic representations, because the sensory input had first to be translated into representational content, this content had then to be computed, the output had then to be translated back into motor output.
The notion of an acceptance is meant to be a new conceptual tool for referring to the subjective relatum of an agent-environment-relation. Consequently, the notion of an acceptance in STA’s sense should not be confused with the notion of acceptances in epistemology. Here, epistemologists have suggested that one might sometimes not strongly or to a certain degree, and sometimes involuntarily believe a proposition, but rather, after much inquiry, voluntarily decide to accept a certain proposition – e.g. a scientific hypothesis – as true (cf. Cohen 1989).
The agential relatum of the agent-affordance-relation is not often analyzed in ecological psychology. Anthony Chemero (2009) and Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014) analyze it mainly as abilities (to be sure, they are using the term “affordance” as referring to the relation between environmental and agential relata). And Michael Turvey (Turvey and Shaw 1979) has created the term “effectivity” for the agential relatum. Yet acceptances are ultimately different from abilities and effectivities. For instance, acceptances are influenced by moods, emotions, and energy. Moreover, the fact that a given agent has a particular acceptance contributes to constituting that a particular situational feature is an affordance for her. By contrast, abilities and effectivities are often conceived of as capacities for picking up pre-existing affordances.
For the sake of clarity, it might be helpful to contrast the conceptual tool of “acceptances” with a recently much discussed conception: Tamar Gendler’s aliefs. An alief is “an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way” (Gendler 2008a: 552, cf. Gendler 2008b). Now, if aliefs are described in this way, they have important resemblance to acceptances. However, given how Gendler characterizes aliefs, there are many important differences between aliefs and acceptances. First, aliefs seem to be mental states with content (Gendler 2008a: 559), whereas this is not true for acceptances. Second, acceptances are defined in relation to the environment, and contribute to constituting that the environment of an agent is the environment it is – but this does not seem to be true of aliefs. Third, at least some aliefs seem to be innate and relatively static (Gendler 2008a: 568). By contrast, STA suggests that human beings can shape their acceptances in many ways, and that there are many different factors which influence which acceptances are activated in a particular context. Fourthly, aliefs are characterized as “arational” (Gendler 2008a: 557). However, STA would emphasize that the way humans spontaneously and unreflectively react to solicitations can be perfectly rational. For instance, consider an agent who spontaneously and unreflectively rushes towards a person in need, or who, on the spur of the moment, jumps into a river as he spots a drowning child. These spontaneous reactions to solicitations seem perfectly rational and morally praiseworthy. And in this context, it makes sense to also characterize the corresponding subjective background conditions, the acceptances, as perfectly rational. Fifthly and finally, aliefs seem to be still parts of a traditional dual-process, or two-system theory of the human mind: Sometimes, it is supposed, humans act on classical mental states such as explicit beliefs; but sometimes an entirely different system, the aliefs, tries to take over (cf. Gendler 2008a: 554). By contrast, STA is more progressive on this matter and suggests that acceptances shape all human actions.
A deeper analysis of this can be found in cognitive neuroscience, where Ridderinhkof and colleagues suggest that the process of solicitations effectuating behavior can be blocked by the emission of certain neurotransmitters (Richard Ridderinkhof et al. 2011).
There might also be the case that an agent experiences several solicitations but can react to only one of them. This leads to the problem of action selection. Neuroscientist Paul Cisek (2007) suggests the following solution, called “affordance competition hypothesis”: The brain prepares different motor responses to several sensory inputs at once, and these motor responses then compete against each other, based on further sensory input. Finally, one motor response is selected and carried out. This conception of action selection is obviously very different from the classical Aristotelian conception (Aristotle 1999, Nicomachean Ethics, book 3), according to which an agent starts with pre-given goals, deliberates about the best means to achieve the goals, makes a decision for one course of action, and carries it out. Based on the empirical data Cisek presents, it seems safe to say that Aristotle’s model has been proven wrong for at least some instances of action selection. But the “affordance competition hypothesis” is very well compatible with STA. (For a full integration of the “affordance competition hypothesis” and STA, some terminological issues would have to be resolved; for instance, Cisek does not distinguish between solicitations and affordances, and STA would prefer calling Cisek’s theory “solicitation competition hypothesis”.)
For very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, I would like to thank Julian Kiverstein, Tyler Q. Sproule, Zuzanna Rucinska, Hannes Worthmann, and two anonymous reviewers.
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Weichold, M. Situated agency: towards an affordance-based, sensorimotor theory of action. Phenom Cogn Sci 17, 761–785 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9548-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9548-5