Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

primarily is the work” (p. 99). Another example of readiness-to-hand is the blind person’s
cane, which is not experienced as such when it is being used to navigate, but is
instead experienced as an extension of the person themselves (Bateson, 1972, p. 465):
“The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted.”
Heidegger’s philosophy played a dominant role in the embodied theory proposed
by Winograd and Flores (1987b). They took readiness-to-hand as evidence
of direct engagement with the world; we only become aware of equipment itself
when the structural coupling between world, equipment, and agent breaks down.
Winograd and Flores took the goal of designing equipment, such as human-computer
interfaces, to be creating artifacts that are invisible to us when they are used.
“A successful word processing device lets a person operate on the words and paragraphs
displayed on the screen, without being aware of formulating and giving
commands” (Winograd & Flores, 1987b, p. 164). The invisibility of artifacts—the
readiness-to-hand of equipment—is frequently characterized as being evidence of
good design (Dourish, 2001; Norman, 1998, 2002, 2004).
Importantly, readiness-to-hand was also used by Winograd and Flores (1987b)
as evidence for rejecting the need for classical representations, and to counter
the claim that tool use is mediated by symbolic thinking or planning (Miller,
Galanter, & Pribram, 1960). From the classical perspective, it might be expected
that an agent is consciously aware of his or her plans; the absence of such awareness,
or readiness-to-hand, must therefore indicate the absence of planning. Thus
readiness-to-hand reflects direct, non-symbolic links between sensing and acting.
If we focus on concernful activity instead of on detached contemplation, the status
of this representation is called into question. In driving a nail with a hammer (as
opposed to thinking about a hammer), I need not make use of any explicit representation
of the hammer. (Winograd & Flores, 1987b, p. 33)
Vera and Simon (1993, p. 19) correctly noted, though, that our conscious awareness
of entities is mute with respect to either the nature or the existence of representational
formats: “Awareness has nothing to do with whether something is represented
symbolically, or in some other way, or not at all.” That is, consciousness of
contents is not a defining feature of physical symbol systems. This position is a deft
dismissal of using readiness-to-hand to support an anti-representational position.
After dealing with the implications of readiness-to-hand, Vera and Simon
(1993) considered alternate formulations of the critiques raised by situated action
researchers. Perhaps the prime concern of embodied cognitive science is that the
classical approach emphasizes internal, symbolic processing to the near total exclusion
of sensing and acting. We saw in Chapter 3 that production system pioneers
admitted that their earlier efforts ignored sensing and acting (Newell, 1990). (We
also saw an attempt to rectify this in more recent production system architectures
[Meyer et al., 2001; Meyer & Kieras, 1997a, 1997b]).
320 Chapter 7