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Cognition in Practice
Lave's 1988 landmark — subtitled Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life — that formalized situated cognition as a theoretical framework and established the empirical case for knowledge as inseparable from the context of its production.
Cognition in Practice is Jean Lave's 1988 theoretical masterwork, the book that systematized a decade of ethnographic fieldwork on adult arithmetic into a sustained critique of the cognitivist tradition. The book draws on studies of grocery shoppers, Weight Watchers members, and home cooks to demonstrate that the arithmetic people perform in daily life is fundamentally different from the arithmetic they perform in formal testing environments. The difference is not a matter of degree but of kind: situated arithmetic is improvisational, contextually driven, and shaped by the specific physical, social, and purposive features of the setting in which it occurs. Formal arithmetic, stripped of these features, becomes both more difficult and less reliable — because the features that appear to be obstacles to pure cognition are actually its scaffolding.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book arrived at a moment when cognitive science was dominated by the information-processing paradigm — the view that mind is computation,