CONCEPT
Situated Cognition
Lave's foundational thesis that cognition is not a property of individual minds but of the relationship between a mind and its context — a relationship that includes physical environment, social situation, tools, goals, and history of engagement.
Situated cognition is the theoretical framework Jean Lave developed across four decades of ethnographic fieldwork to challenge the dominant assumption that knowledge is a portable, context-free substance. The framework holds that cognition itself is situated: the mind does not contain knowledge the way a container holds water, passively and indifferently. Rather, the mind produces knowledge in interaction with its environment, and the knowledge produced bears the shape of that interaction as indelibly as a river bears the shape of its bed. The supermarket shoppers who achieved 98% arithmetic accuracy in the aisles and 59% on paper tests were not demonstrating a performance gap. They were demonstrating that two different kinds of knowledge had been produced by two different kinds of engagement.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from Lave's dissatisfaction with the cognitivist paradigm that dominated psychology and early artificial intelligence. That paradigm assumed intelligence was computation — the manipulation of representations according to