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classification as part of a larger project of revisioning cognition (e.g., Suchman 1988, Hutchins 1996, Keller and Keller 1996, Lave 1988). |
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Within anthropology, psychology, and the sociology of science, the last two decades have seen a resurgence of the struggle to understand the material, social, and ecological aspects of cognition. The work in this book has been deeply informed by that intellectual movement. In brief, the research in this tradition seeks to ground activities previously seen as individual, mental, and nonsocial as situated, collective, and historically specific. On this view, for example, solving a mathematical problem is not a matter of mentally using an algorithm and coming up with the correct answer in a fashion that exists outside of time or culture, rather, it is a process of assembling materials close to hand and using them with others in specific contexts. Jean Lave, for example, studied mathematical problem solving in everyday life and contrasted it with formal testing situations (1988). She followed adults shopping for the best buy in a supermarket, people in Weight Watchers weighing cottage cheese to get the correct unit for the diet's specifications, and a variety of other mundane activities. She observed people performing highly abstract, creative mathematical problem solving in these circumstances. They were creating new units of analysis transposed against given ones in order to measure units, literally cutting up the cottage cheese, moving these material units around, or holding one can against another. These tasks were performed successfully by people who tested badly in a traditional math test. There was, she argued, no way to separate the material circumstances of the problem solving from the mathematical challenges. Those who appear to solve mathematics problems without such outside help are not working in a putative realm of pure number; rather, they and their observers have so naturalized the structures within which they are operating that they have become invisible. Lucy Suchman makes a similar argument for the process of planning as material resource, Ed Hutchins for navigation problems (1995), and Janet and Charles Keller (1996) for designing and measuring in doing iron blacksmithing work. In this book we join their effort at reforming the notion of categorizing and classifying so often seen as purely mental. |
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The problem of conceptualizing classifications is also akin to Cole's (1996) search for the nature of artifacts in mediated action. Cole notes, |
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