An alternative view of human action

An alternative account of the relation of plans to situated actions

The user as a resourceful person

Situated actions as ...

Lucy Suchman, 1987 Anthropologist,

– Philosophy ( Dreyfus)

– Phenomenology (Merleau- Ponty )

– Symbolic Interactionism (Garfinkel, Goffman)

Interested in producing an adequate base of descriptions of human practices

– What’s happens when someone does something ?

Suchman’s central concern

The relation between observable behaviour and the processes not available to direct observation, that make behaviour meaningful,

What constitutes purposeful actions and how is it understood ?

About the European and the Trukese navigator

The European navigator exemplifies the cognitive science model of purposeful action

The Trukese navigator exemplifies the situated action perspective

The view of action exemplified by the European navigator is being reified in the design of intelligent machines– The logical form of plans makes them attractive for the purpose of

constructing a computational model of action

The view that purposeful action is determined by plans, is deeply rooted in the Western human sciences as the correct model of the rational actor

Two alternative views of action

i) The planning view

The organization and significance of human action is located in underlying plans (artificial intelligence)

ii) The situated actions view

The prescriptive significance of intentions for situated actions is inherently vague (ethnomethodology)

The planning view

Plans are prerequisite to and prescribe actions at every level of detail

Mutual intelligibility is a matter of reciprocal recognizability of our plans

The planning view has to do with : – The planning model (Miller, Galanter and Pribram, 1960)

– Speech act theory (Searle, 1969 )

– The idea of shared background knowledge as the common resource that is given (Durkheim, 1938)

.

Plans are a sequence of actions designed to accomplish a preconceived end,

Action is a form of problem solving and are described in terms of preconditions and their consequences,

Goals define the actor’s relationship to the situation of action,

The situation is those conditions that obstruct or advance the actor’s progress toward his/her goal

The planning model in cognitive science

Searle’s speech act theory : some initial guidelines for

computational models of communication

The hypothesis is that people maintain as part of their models of the world, symbolic descriptions of the world models of the people

Speech act are regarded as actions whose effects are primarily on the models that speakers and hearers maintain of each other

Background knowledge Gumperz shows that an action significance seems to

lie as much in what it presupposes and implies about its situation

He questions the view that background assumptions are part of the actor’s mental state prior of action

The background knowledge is not taken for granted Significance depends on a particular context that is

always open-endlessness Common sense are resources

According to cognitive science

The mind is viewed as an abstractable structure implementable in any number of possible physical substrates– intelligence is only incidentally embodied in the

neurobiology of the human brain,

– what is essential about intelligence can be abstracted from that particular substrate and embodied in an unknown range of alternative forms

Artificial Intelligence

People act on the basis of symbolic representation, a kind of cognitive code,

Cognition is not just potentially like computation it literally is computational

The view that intelligence is the manipulation of symbols finds practical implementation both in so called expert systems and industrial robots

What is a plan ?

”[…] When we speak of a plan the term will refer to a hierarchy of instructions

A plan is any hierarchical process in the organism that can control the order in which a sequence of operations is to be performed.

A plan is for an organism essentially the same as a program for a computer […]” Miller, Galanter and Pribram, 1960

The situated action view

Focus on practice as different to the study of the formal cognitive properties of artifacts

Unit of analysis is the activity of persons-acting in setting

The prescriptive significance of intentions for situated action is inherently vague,

Improvisatory nature of human action Human action is contingent

Situated action view Every course of action depends in essential ways upon its

material and social circumstances

1- Plans are representations of situated actions

2- In the course of situated action representation occurs where there is a breakdown

3-The objectivity of the situation of our action is achieved rather than given

4- Central resource for achieving the objectivity of situations is language

5-Mutual intelligibility is achieved in every occasion of interaction

The problem of human-machine communication

”Expert help system” – a computer-based system attached to a photocopier,

intended to instruct the user

The design objective – to provide timely and relevant information to the user

regarding the operation of the copier

The system must recognize the action of the user

The expert help system identifies ... the user’s purposes with a job specification and the

specification invokes a associated plan the plan is ascribed to the user as a basis for interpreting her

actions the plan is conveyed in the form of instructions for a step-wise

procedure the design assumes that there is correspondence of the

system’s plan to the user’s purposes that enables the interaction

Which are the consequences of taking a statement of intent and an ascribed plan as grounds for the

interpretation of situated action ?

Troubles for the resourceful user...

Plans and states

machine

Situated inquiries

Problems of understanding due to the disparityof their respective resources

instructions

actions

The system’s resources

The machine has access only to a very small subset of user action – i.e.Doors being opened and closed, buttons being

pushed, papers trays being filled…

The machine is watching the user’s actions through a very small key hole, mapping what it saw back onto a pre specified template of possible interpretations

The user’s resources

Human interaction succeeds due not simply to the abilities to construct meaningfulness but to the possibility of mutually constituting intelligibility– i.e.Detection and repair of misunderstandings

Interactive program exploits certain characteristics of human conversation

Language of interactivity and the dynamics of computational artifacts obscure enduring asymmetries that users discover in practice

Speech acts tell us nothing further about the significance

A : Are you going to be here for ten minutes ?

B: Go ahead and take your break. Take longer if you want

A: I’ll just be outside on the porch. Call me if you need me

B: Ok, Don’t worry (Gumperz, 1982)

How B arrives at the right inference ?

Indexicality of language

Efficiency of language lies in :– expressions with conventional meanings

– its relationship to circumstances (conditional meanings)

– The indexicality of instructions means that an instruction ’s significance with respect to action does not inhere in the instruction but must be found in the situation of use

The mutual intelligibility of actions

Within the normative paradigm actors share a system of culturally established symbols and meanings

The stability of the social world is not due to an eternal structure but to situated actions that create and sustain shared understanding on specific situations of interaction

Relation of plans to situated actions

In the planning model of human interaction, – plans are mental constructs, abstractions over

action, representations of situated actions Plans do not take sufficient account of the

situatedness of most social behaviour The planning model confuses plans with situated

actions

Alternative account of the relation of plans to situated actions

The foundation of action is not plans but local interactions with the environment

The function of plans is to orient or position us, to exploit some contingencies of our environment and to avoid others – plans are weak resources

Critiques

Confined to the analysis of actions and operations Slightly behaviouristic undercurrent in that it is

the subject’s reaction to the environment that determines action

Primacy of the situation What constitutes a situation is defined by the

researcher Resourceful user or …. ?