3 Characterising Social Embeddedness

3.1 Being Situated

When Brooks [5] made his now famous critique of AI (as it was then). He was specifically addressing shortcomings with respect to the problem of getting robots to master a physical environment. This spawned a whole field of research based on the premiss that the physical situation was critically important in the design of agents (and in particular robots).

Since then the property of `being situated' has been characterised in many (subtly different) ways. For example, Alonso Vera and Herbert Simon [32] argue that the characteristics of situated action is the utilisation of external rather than internal representations via the functional modelling of the affordances provided by the environment. In their account this allows the paring down of the internal representation so that its processing can occur in real-time.

More recently William Clancey, in attempting to forge some sort of consensus on the subject wrote (page 344 of [8]):

"In summary, the term situated emphasises that perceptual-motor feedback mechanisms causally relate animal cognition to the environment and action in a way that a mechanism based on logical (deductive inference alone does not capture."

What these various approach agree upon is that if you are to effectively model certain domains of action over time then you need to include sufficient detail of the environment so that explanations of choice of action can be made in terms of the detailed causal chains via this environment. In other words, the actions will not be satisfactorily explained with reference to internal inference processes alone, but only by including causal feedback from the environment.

Figure 1. Where the internal inference is a sufficient as the model for action

This can be summarised (a little crudely) by saying that in a non-situated agent the internal `inferential' processes form a sufficient model for the relationship between perception and action (figure 1), whereas when an agent is situated you need to also include the exterior causation to form a sufficient model of this relationship (figure 2). Of course, if the agent was making a one-shot decision the pictures would be equivalent in effect since the causal part of the loop would not be needed in determining the relationship between perception and action, but more usually the loop is traversed many times, with several past actions and perceptions, in order to determine the next action.

Figure 2. Where external causation is also part of the model for action

Being situated has practical considerations for what might be effective decision strategies on behalf of the agent. If internal models alone are likely to be insufficient (or just too difficult), and there are implicit computational and representational resources in the environment it make sense to make use of these by `probing' them frequently for information as to effective action. This fits in with Lucy Suchman's characterisation of situatedness which is as follows (page 179 of [30]):

"... the contingence of action on a complex world ... is no longer treated as an extraneous problem with which the individual actor must contend, but rather is seen as an essential resource that makes knowledge possible and gives action its sense. ... the coherence of action is not adequately explained by either preconceived cognitive schema or institutionalised social norms. Rather the organisation of situated action is an emergent property of moment-by-moment interactions ..."

Capturing Social Embeddedness: a constructivist approach - Bruce Edmonds - 30 OCT 98

[Next] [Previous] [Up] [Top] [Contents]

Generated with CERN WebMaker