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| estudos:dreyfus:rouse-coping-intentionality [16/01/2026 06:04] – mccastro | estudos:dreyfus:rouse-coping-intentionality [16/01/2026 14:40] (current) – external edit 127.0.0.1 |
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| *In everyday absorbed coping,. .. when one’s situation deviates from some optimal body-environment relationship, one’s movement takes one close to that optimal form and thereby relieves the “tension” of the deviation. One’s body is solicited by the situation to get into the right relation to it... . Our activity is completely geared into the demands of the situation.[^Hubert L. Dreyfus, “The Hermeneutic Approach to Intentionality,” presented to the 18th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Montreal, Quebec, 1992, 3.] | *In everyday absorbed coping,. .. when one’s situation deviates from some optimal body-environment relationship, one’s movement takes one close to that optimal form and thereby relieves the “tension” of the deviation. One’s body is solicited by the situation to get into the right relation to it... . Our activity is completely geared into the demands of the situation.[^Hubert L. Dreyfus, “The Hermeneutic Approach to Intentionality,” presented to the 18th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Montreal, Quebec, 1992, 3.] |
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| The situation is significant, and configured as a field of relevance, at least for the body that is set to respond appropriately. | The situation is significant, and configured as a field of relevance, at least for the body that is set to respond appropriately. |
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| This feature of the intentionality of practical comportment highlights Dreyfus’s conjoining of two points that have often been conceived in opposition to one another. Practical comportment is a thoroughly material responsiveness to a material world. The hand that gently conforms itself to the contours of a teacup in a well-balanced grasp, the softball player who tracks the incoming fly ball and the tagging runner at third as she sets herself to catch and throw home in a single fluid response, or the conversationalist whose stance, expressions, gestures, and tones register and respond to the expressive posture of her interlocutor are bodily engagements with a material configuration of the world. Yet these are also meaningfully configured situations. For the softball player, the looping fly and the tagging runner stand out as salient, while the airplane passing overhead and the brawl in the stands behind third base recede into indeterminate background, even though the airplane and the brawl may be bigger, louder, and more “dramatic,” than the ball and the runner along similar sight lines. The meaningfulness of bodily responsiveness to situations becomes obtrusive when a philosophical or psychological analysis omits it. Thus, Dreyfus tellingly objected to attempts to reduce situations to “merely” physical juxtapositions of things: | This feature of the intentionality of practical comportment highlights Dreyfus’s conjoining of two points that have often been conceived in opposition to one another. Practical comportment is a thoroughly material responsiveness to a material world. The hand that gently conforms itself to the contours of a teacup in a well-balanced grasp, the softball player who tracks the incoming fly ball and the tagging runner at third as she sets herself to catch and throw home in a single fluid response, or the conversationalist whose stance, expressions, gestures, and tones register and respond to the expressive posture of her interlocutor are bodily engagements with a material configuration of the world. Yet these are also meaningfully configured situations. For the softball player, the looping fly and the tagging runner stand out as salient, while the airplane passing overhead and the brawl in the stands behind third base recede into indeterminate background, even though the airplane and the brawl may be bigger, louder, and more “dramatic,” than the ball and the runner along similar sight lines. The meaningfulness of bodily responsiveness to situations becomes obtrusive when a philosophical or psychological analysis omits it. Thus, Dreyfus tellingly objected to attempts to reduce situations to “merely” physical juxtapositions of things: |
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| * McCarthy seems to assume that [“being at home"] is the same thing as being in my house, that is, that it is a physical state. But I can be at home and be in the backyard, that is, not physically in my house at all. I can also be physically in my house and not be at home; for example, if I own the house but have not yet moved my furniture in. Being at home is a human situation.[^Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence, rev. ed.. New York: Harper Sc Row, 1979, 214.]* | * McCarthy seems to assume that [“being at home"] is the same thing as being in my house, that is, that it is a physical state. But I can be at home and be in the backyard, that is, not physically in my house at all. I can also be physically in my house and not be at home; for example, if I own the house but have not yet moved my furniture in. Being at home is a human situation.[^Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence, rev. ed.. New York: Harper Sc Row, 1979, 214.]* |
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| There “is” nothing there in the situation besides its material constituents, but the situation is a meaningful configuration of those constituents. As Dreyfus put it, “the meaningful objects embedded in their context of references among which we live are not a model of the world, . . . they are the world itself.”[^Ibid., 266.] | There “is” nothing there in the situation besides its material constituents, but the situation is a meaningful configuration of those constituents. As Dreyfus put it, “the meaningful objects embedded in their context of references among which we live are not a model of the world, . . . they are the world itself.”[^Ibid., 266.] |
| To recapitulate briefly, practical coping is “intentional” in two crucial respects. First, it is directed toward a situation under an aspect, which is constituted by the interrelations between how one comports oneself toward it, and what that comportment is for. How one reaches for, grasps, lifts, and tilts a cup gets its coherence from the cup’s being for-sipping-from, and from the ways coffee-drinking belongs to a larger held of activity. Second, its directedness is normative, it can succeed or fail. Yet coping diverges from familiar renditions of intentionality in several crucial ways. It involves no psychological or semantic intermediaries, not even tacitly predetermined success conditions (which are instead flexible and openended). Nor is the body an intermediary, but is instead the intentional directedness itself: one does not form one’s hand into a cup shape and move it to a presumed cup-location; one’s hand reaches for and adjusts to the cup itself. Coping is thus always directed toward actual possibilities rather than a possible actuality. Its success is not the fulfillment of some determinately projected end, but an ongoing accommodation to what is afforded by circumstances. Failure, in turn, is not the expression of an unfulfilled sense, but an unconsummated expressiveness. One partially loses a grip on one’s surroundings, without thereby getting hold of a setting that does not happen to exist. Finally, while bodily comportment is complex, it is not compositional: its “constituents” are not separable component movements, but merely distinguishable moments of a unified whole. Indeed, while one often acquires coping skills by practicing discrete component movements, their residual discreteness marks a possible failure of intentionality; they succeed only when transformed by assimilation into a relatively fluid unity. | To recapitulate briefly, practical coping is “intentional” in two crucial respects. First, it is directed toward a situation under an aspect, which is constituted by the interrelations between how one comports oneself toward it, and what that comportment is for. How one reaches for, grasps, lifts, and tilts a cup gets its coherence from the cup’s being for-sipping-from, and from the ways coffee-drinking belongs to a larger held of activity. Second, its directedness is normative, it can succeed or fail. Yet coping diverges from familiar renditions of intentionality in several crucial ways. It involves no psychological or semantic intermediaries, not even tacitly predetermined success conditions (which are instead flexible and openended). Nor is the body an intermediary, but is instead the intentional directedness itself: one does not form one’s hand into a cup shape and move it to a presumed cup-location; one’s hand reaches for and adjusts to the cup itself. Coping is thus always directed toward actual possibilities rather than a possible actuality. Its success is not the fulfillment of some determinately projected end, but an ongoing accommodation to what is afforded by circumstances. Failure, in turn, is not the expression of an unfulfilled sense, but an unconsummated expressiveness. One partially loses a grip on one’s surroundings, without thereby getting hold of a setting that does not happen to exist. Finally, while bodily comportment is complex, it is not compositional: its “constituents” are not separable component movements, but merely distinguishable moments of a unified whole. Indeed, while one often acquires coping skills by practicing discrete component movements, their residual discreteness marks a possible failure of intentionality; they succeed only when transformed by assimilation into a relatively fluid unity. |
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