Cognition, Context, and Learning: A Social Semiotic Perspective

Abstract

Lave, in a series of classic studies, observed people in the routine activities of their lives, engaged in what for us is problem solving, but which for them is simply a way of participating in immediate, concrete, specific, meaning-rich situations. Whitson and St. Julien praise Lave’s model for helping us see why abstract mental entities need not automatically transfer from one context to another because there is now no purely mental cognition anymore, independent of the specificity of the present context. Whitson provides a helpful introduction to the Saussurean and Peircean traditions of formal semiotics. Every act of semiosis, every occurrence of semiosis, every semiotic practice in a community is necessarily also a material process in some physical, perhaps also biological, perhaps also social and human system. Ecosocial systems, and most living organisms, are developmental systems, they have a relevant history, a trajectory of development in which each stage sets up conditions without which the next stage could not occur.

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