Heijmeskamp Thijs
Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2024 Jul 23;15:1392995. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1392995. eCollection 2024.
Despite the intimacy between the situation and our agency, "situation" remains an ambiguous concept in theory. Even within the context of situated theories of cognition and agency that take the organism-environment system as central in their investigations, the notion of "situation" has been undertheorized. Yet, whether affordances are relevant depends on the situation. Therefore, Van Dijk and Rietveld argue that we must understand the practical situation in which behavior occurs in order to know how we respond to the affordances that the materials and other people offer. Taking John Dewey's notion of "situation" as the basis for investigation, I follow Shaun Gallagher's analysis of how we are not just part of a situation, but we understand what an action is only in relation to a situation. Situations act like large-scale affordances, but this does not mean that affordances are inviting or soliciting as such. Because of the situational transactions with the environment that an agent has, the environment pushes and pulls the agent from and toward certain actions. This means that environments have expressive qualitative features that are non-subjective emotional qualities and social gestalt. I propose four overlapping but distinct features or axes of analysis of situations that can be identified and analyzed in terms of how they shape our agency: complexity, determinedness, the establishment of expectations, and restrictiveness. Situations can be more or less complex in a spatial, temporal, or layered way. They can also be more or less determined, meaning that the agent's actions are more or less obvious. Third, they can be characterized as socially established, meaning that certain behavior is expected. Finally, situations are more or less restricted, denoting the number of activities available to an agent.
尽管这种情境与我们的能动性之间关系密切，但“情境”在理论上仍是一个模糊的概念。即使在以有机体 - 环境系统为核心进行研究的情境认知与能动性理论的背景下，“情境”的概念也尚未得到充分的理论阐释。然而，可供性是否相关取决于情境。因此，范·迪克和里特维尔德认为，我们必须理解行为发生时的实际情境，以便了解我们如何对物质和他人提供的可供性做出反应。以约翰·杜威的“情境”概念为研究基础，我借鉴肖恩·加拉格尔的分析，即我们不仅是情境的一部分，而且只有在与情境相关的情况下才能理解一个行为是什么。情境就像大规模的可供性，但这并不意味着可供性本身具有吸引力或诱导性。由于主体与环境的情境性互动，环境会推动和拉动主体采取或不采取某些行动。这意味着环境具有表达性的质性特征，这些特征是非主观的情感特质和社会格式塔。我提出了情境分析的四个相互重叠但又不同的特征或维度，可以根据它们如何塑造我们的能动性来识别和分析：复杂性、确定性、期望的建立和限制性。情境在空间、时间或层次上可能或多或少地复杂。它们也可能或多或少地具有确定性，这意味着主体的行动或多或少是明显的。第三，它们可以被描述为社会既定的，即意味着某些行为是被期望的。最后，情境或多或少是受限的，这表示主体可进行的活动数量。
