Jean Lave — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Jean Lave — On AI. 14 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Community of Practice
Wenger's foundational unit of social learning — a group bound together by shared domain, mutual engagement, and a collective repertoire developed over time through joint work.
Legitimate Peripheral Participation
Lave and Wenger's 1991 concept for the process by which newcomers become practitioners — not by receiving knowledge but by participating at the edge of a community's practice and moving gradually toward its center.
Recontextualization
The deliberate, institutional practice of embedding AI-mediated information within situated engagement — On AI's prescriptive response to the decontextualization that AI tools perform as their fundamental operation.
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 enga…
Tacit Knowledge (Polanyi-Collins Reading)
Michael Polanyi's 1966 insight that we know more than we can tell — refined by Collins into a taxonomy of three species that has become the decisive framework for understanding what AI systems can and cannot absorb from human practice.
The Decontextualization Machine
The structural characterization of large language models in Lave's framework — systems whose specific contribution to cognition is the extraction of patterns from context, producing outputs that are plausible across contexts without being …
Thin Knowledge, Thick Knowledge
Lave's foundational distinction — pressed into service by On AI — between the propositional, transferable, context-free knowledge that AI produces with extraordinary efficiency and the situated, embodied, contextually embedded knowledge th…
What the Struggle Deposits
The specific mechanism through which situated engagement produces thick understanding — each encounter with the resistance of real materials depositing a thin stratum of contextual knowledge that builds, over time, into the bedrock of profe…
Etienne Wenger
Swiss-born learning theorist (b. 1952) who co-authored Situated Learning with Lave and extended the framework of communities of practice into organizational theory — whose prior doctorate in artificial intelligence gave his critique of co…
Jean Lave
American social anthropologist (1939–2023) whose ethnographic fieldwork in Liberian tailoring workshops and Orange County supermarkets produced the most rigorous empirical challenge to the cognitivist model of mind — and the theoretical fra…
Lucy Suchman
American anthropologist (b. 1946) whose 1987 Plans and Situated Actions mounted the most sustained ethnographic challenge to computational models of mind from within the AI research community — and whose 2007 update extends the framework …
