How to Situate Cognition: Letting Nature Take its Course

1. The Situation in Cognition The situated cognition movement in the cognitive sciences, like those sciences themselves, is a loose-knit family of approaches to understanding the mind and cognition. While it has both philosophical and psychological antecedents in thought stretching back over the last century (see Gallagher, this volume, Clancey, this volume,), it has developed primarily since the late 1970s as an alternative to, or a modification of, the then predominant paradigms for exploring the mind within the cognitive sciences. For this reason it has been common to characterize situated cognition in terms of what it is not, a cluster of "anti-isms". Situated cognition has thus been described as opposed to Platonism, Cartesianism, individualism, representationalism, and even