Response to Vera and Simon's Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation

Within the past 10 years, some new dialogues (or more accurately, multilogues) have opened up among researchers in psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science. Some of those who have participated in these discussions have done so from a position within the hybrid field of cognitive science: an enterprise dedicated to explicating those processes of perception and reasoning understood traditionally to go on inside the head. Others, like myself, have come to these discussions, instead, from fields dedicated to constructing accounts of relations among people, and between people and the historically and culturally constituted worlds that they inhabit together. The strategy of these latter investigations is to see what sense we can make of everyday activities if we view them as interactions between the acting person and those social and material circumstances in relation to which she or he acts. While assuming processes of perception and reasoning, the project for some of us has never claimed to be a cognitive one. Rather, we have found ourselves entering into discussion with colleagues in the cognitive sciences through force o f circumstance and through an interest in understanding what an alternative view of cognition, consistent with our own accounts, might be. I take it that the article by Vera and Simon (1993) is inspired by their sense of a need to respond to recent challenges from within cognitive science. In formulating their article as a response to these challenges, they have grouped together a diverse, often incommensurate set oi' positions under the label SA. Within my own field of anthropology, they choose to take up my arguments and those of my colleague, Jean Lave (1988). Whereas Lave and I have each been engaged in quite different enterprises, drawing on different developments in the social sceinces (she on cultural analyses informed by Critical Theory, I on ethnomethodology), we have certainly also been inspired by each other and have been engaged in a lively and enriching