Distal engagement: Intentions in perception

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Philosophy of Mind
• Ecological Psychology

Background:

• Non-representational cognitive theories face challenges in explaining long-term planning.
• Cognitivist accounts typically rely on mental representations for planning and action coordination.
• Ecological-enactivist approaches have proposed ways to account for high-level cognitive capacities without representations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate an explanatory gap in current non-representational accounts of long-term planning.
• To argue for the importance of long-term intentions in action coordination and perception within ecological frameworks.
• To propose a non-representational conception of intentions and their role in coordinating action.

Main Methods:

• Critically analyze existing ecological-enactivist proposals for long-term planning.
• Utilize recent enactive accounts of language to inform the conception of intentions.
• Develop a theoretical account of "distal engagement" for coordinating present actions towards future goals.

Main Results:

• Identified an explanatory gap in non-representational accounts due to the exclusion of long-term intentions.
• Argued that intentions can be understood non-representationally, emerging from linguistically scaffolded practices.
• Proposed "distal engagement" as a skill for coordinating actions toward distant goals without explicit representations.

Conclusions:

• Long-term intentions are crucial for explaining planning and action coordination, even in non-representational frameworks.
• A non-representational understanding of intentions, informed by language use, can bridge the explanatory gap.
• The concept of distal engagement offers a novel way to understand goal-directed behavior without recourse to mental representations.