ABSTRACT

The first half-century of American psychology is often represented nowadays as a dark age of rat-running and rote verbal-learning experiments, which ended only when it was overwhelmed by the rise of the new cognitive psychology that started in the 1950s. Environmental transformation and expertise are to be found in every society, but there is a third way of transcending biological givens that is much less common and that represents a far more radical departure from the kinds of cognitive adaptations shared with other species. Situated cognition researchers have contributed substantially to our understanding of the relations between Worlds 1 and 2, arguing that these are much more directly and intimately connected than previous cognitive theories had supposed. Situativity theorists might concede that something like this continuum of abstraction exists, but they would argue that the more abstract kind of mathematical activity is just as situated as the more concrete.