p.468 The purposiveness and context sensitivity of inference reflect, in some way, designs of future action
on the basis of the judgment or uses of information. The centrality of action has been a long-standing theme in numerous works...
The second chapter of Poetics emphatically begins with the argument that "Artists imitate men involved in action"...
All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not
a quality.
p.468 Cognition is rooted in action... "...knowledge is constantly linked with actions or operations"
(Piaget, 1970, p.704).
p.469 it has been suggested that young children first organize knowledge around events in episodic
systems
p.474 the narrative mode [of thinking]... is characteristic of many everyday judgments... Narrative
arguments are articulated in temporal sequences, around intentionality and action. The narrative mode is highly context-sensitive...
its formal expression is through the topic-comment structure
p.475 The narrative orientation is... concerned with developing or uncovering sequential relationships of
concatenation, conjunction, or combination. The narrative mode emphasizes "action-related" structuring and the "pulling
together" of the available information into a connected narrative and pattern or network
p.495 Most observers of human behavior have insisted that one essential, distinctive feature of
social behaviors - and, one might add, of inferential acts - is their purposefulness and their orientation
to the context... sociologist M. Weber... "We shall speak of 'action' insofar as the acting individual attaches a
subjective meaning to his behavior... action is 'social' insofar as it is... oriented in its course" (p.4). This is echoed
by the philosopher R. Nozick (1981), who remarks in the concluding pages of his Philosophical Explanations that "unlike
physics and chemistry, the social sciences are studying subjects who have a view of what they are doing which affects their
action." Hence, he emphasizes the "purposeful nature of human action within a network of intentions and goals"
