1. Plans and Situated Actions

2. Planning View
Plans are prerequisite to and prescribe action at every level of detail
Plans must exist, even if changed during execution, for action to occur
Mutual intelligibility results from recognition of plans and shared knowledge

3. Plan Generation Early robot planner NOAH
STRIPS – backward chaining planner
PLANEX
modeled execution of STRIPS plan by computing cumulative error
When error exceeded threshold, camera would be used to more accurately determine position
NOAH
Planning where human apprentice is executing plan
Needed to communicate about state of world and relation of goals and actions

4. Interaction and Plan Recognition
Interaction (e.g. communication) requires planning where other actors are environmental conditions
Recognition of plans requires
Generating hypotheses
Modifying or replacing as new evidence is observed
Plans and Intentions
Intention – “the uncompleted part of a plan whose execution has already begun”

5. Speech Acts Language is a form of action Actors have
Communication subsumed by planning
Actors have
A model of the world
Model of one another’s model of the world
Goals in changing other’s model

6. Speech Acts Searle’s speech acts as precondition->outcomes rules
Searle argued against possibility of rule-based inference of meaning
How much knowledge is needed to understand conversation
Example of implied request for break

7. Background Knowledge
Where does observation end and interpretation begin?
Represent knowledge in domains and general “common sense”
Scripts as representation of common sense situations
But how do scripts recover from errors/ interruptions
Error recovery scripts

8. What knowledge is relevant?
Is the information relevant to a situation enumerable?
Deciding what to include is ad hoc
What about tacit knowledge?

9. How Much is Said
Communication must reflect principle of communicative economy
Things said or not said based on assumptions of other’s understanding
Design communication vs. design documentation
Garfinkel’s students unable to write “everything” communicated in short conversation because act of creating list enlarged the content
Assumptions only exist when premise is questioned

10. Situated Action Plans are part of context for practical activity
One definition:
Every course of action depends in essential ways on its material and social circumstances
Implications
Need to study how people use circumstances to achieve intelligent action rather than abstract action away from circumstances
How people produce and find evidence for plans in the course of action rather than build a theory of action out of a theory of plans

11. Plans as Representation of Action
Plans abstract away and generalize potential/ previous actions
Example of canoe
Post hoc analysis may turn actions into plan
Representation and breakdown
Heidegger's notion of unreflective action, breakdown, and reflection
Only during reflection are plans made conscious
When situated action becomes problematic then plans are used for deliberation

12. Practical Objectivity of Situations
Changing views in social science
Move from traditional view of external, antecedent, and coercive social facts influencing action to one of actions occurring in a world “under interpretation”
Ethnomethodology
Studies methods of society in making sense of the world
Asks how objective grounding is accomplished
Looks to describe the practices that produce the typifications which make schemas and rules
Makes common sense the product rather than the precondition of action

13. Indexicality of Language
Language takes on meaning by being embedded in the world
Indexical expressions rely on situation for significance
Pronouns, tenses, time/place adverbs, deictic references, metaphor?
“That is a nice one” => nice is also indexical
Indefinite range of features can influence interpretation
Instructions can never be fully articulated and must be interpreted by the instruction follower

14. Mutual Intelligibility of Action
Language and action are part of the situation
Study of work practices (things typically taken for granted)
Documentary method
Ascribe intent based on evidence
Interpretation of evidence in ascribed intent
Not reducible to rules about action and context
Example of sense making by students receiving random yes/no answers from “counselor”
Social structure
Not a prescribed set of rules/alternatives
Emerges from idiosyncratic interactions
This emergence should be focus of social science