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One precondition for this effect seems to be that you understand the reasons
for the recipe's instructions, but this turns out to be a complicated idea. In
any event, there's a sense in which the representation never goes away. Even
when you're routinely deciding to turn left or add salt, you're still - in some
sense I wish I understood - saying the utterance “turn left” or “salt to taste”
to yourself, and you're still interpreting it just like any other natural-language
utterance that you need to relate to a concrete situation.
Acknowledgements
ConversationswithMartyHillerandJeffShragerhelpedmethinkaboutwhat
people do with instructions and directions. David Chapman and Beth Pre-
ston carefully read a draft of this paper. Michael Mateas helped with the final
revisions.
Patricia Morison helped with Latin etymology.
The “Upper Elk Tree Road” directions in the introduction and the com-
puter message in “A story about photocopier supplies” are reproduced with the
permission of their authors. I have altered them slightly to suppress identities
and remove some comments on other matters.
Author's notes
This is a heavily abridged and revised version of a paper that I circulated in-
formally in 1989. I have not tried to bring it up to date. Some parts of the
argument are developed further in (Agre 1997). Another subsequent work that
treats these issues is (Hutchins 1995).
References
Agre, Philip E. (1985a). The structures of everyday life. Working Paper 267, MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory.
Agre, Philip E. (1985b). Routines. AI Memo 828, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Agre,
Philip, E.
(1997). Computation and human experience .
Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Amerine, Ronald. & Jack Bilmes (1988). Following instructions. Human studies , 11 , 327-
339.
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