Situated cognition
Explanation
Situated cognition is the thesis, complementary to embodied and extended cognition, that cognitive processes depend constitutively on the physical, social and cultural context in which they occur. The mind does not operate in a vacuum: solving a problem in a laboratory is radically different from solving it on the street, not because the problem changes, but because the resources and constraints differ.
Lucy Suchman showed in Plans and Situated Actions (1987) that human planning does not work as classical AI systems assumed (compile an abstract plan and execute it step by step), but is sensitive moment by moment to context: plans are resources for orientation, not fixed recipes. This observation transformed the design of human-computer interfaces and cognitive ergonomics.
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger studied learning in "communities of practice" contexts (tailor apprentices in Liberia, butchers, midwives): they showed that expert knowledge is not information stored in the head, but increasing participation in real social practices, with their tools, norms and companions. Knowledge is largely inseparable from the situation.
Edwin Hutchins, in Cognition in the Wild (1995), studied navigation on a U.S. Navy warship: he showed that "knowing where we are" is not the mental state of an individual but a distributed property of the crew-instruments-procedures system. Navigational cognition exists as a collective emergent process, not as an intracranial phenomenon.
For consciousness, situated cognition stresses that we are not minds that "have" a situation, but are constitutively in situations. Our everyday experience is already tinted with context: the same scene (an office, a church, a nightclub) produces different experiences according to the type of place, not because we add judgments about context but because context is woven into perception itself.
Situated cognition connects with phenomenology (Heidegger and his being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty and his body-situation), with Gibson's ecological psychology (which speaks of environmental affordances), with enactivism and with cognitive anthropology. It is one of the central pieces of the 4E paradigm (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) that is transforming the cognitive sciences in the 21st century.
Strengths
- Ethnographic and empirical support in situated studies of practices.
- Coherent with embodied cognition and enactivism.
- Practical implications in design and education.
- Well-founded critique of individualist cognitivism.
Main critiques
- Insufficient articulation with individual neuroscience.
- Risk of strong cultural relativism.
- Hard to theorize consciousness as such, not just cognition.
- Overlaps with embodied cognition and enactivism.