From: Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic, and Psychological Perspectives. Contributors: David Kirshner - editor, James A. Whitson - editor. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Mahwah, NJ. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 37.

Cognition, Context, and Learning: A Social Semiotic Perspective

Jay L. Lemke

City University of New York Brooklyn College School of Education

SITUATING COGNITION

We blame the early Moderns of Rene Descartes' 17th-century Europe for cleaving Mind from Body and Society from Nature (e.g., Latour, 1993; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). From them, we inherited a chain--cognition in the mind, mind "in" a material brain, brain in a mindless body, body in a natural environment separate from society, society made up of persons not bodies, persons defined by cultures, cultures created by minds--a chain that binds us still and runs us around and around in ever smaller circles.

We rebel, we transgress. We want the freedom to construct a materiality of mind, an intelligence of the body. We want meaning to arise from material processes and Culture to be once again a part of Nature. We want to resituate cognition in a larger meaning-making system of which our bodies and brains are only one part. We are willing to pay the price, to abdicate our Lordship over Creation, to become part-ners rather than over-seers. Creation, after all, has been getting pretty unruly anyway.

We are not the first rebels. Peirce (see Buchler, 1955; Houser & Kloesel, 1992; and Whitson, chapter 7, this volume) wanted to fuse Logic and Nature into a single system of meaning-making processes: a natural semiosis, a semiotic Nature. Bateson ( 1972) followed the chain of differences that make a difference outward from the mind-brain into the motor-body that wielded the cultural tool that engaged the material environment that reacted back on the tool, changing the dynamic state of nerves, muscles, heart rate, adrenalin,