The Social Mind

Social mind front cover

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Copyright © 2014, Common Ground Research Networks, All Rights Reserved

Abstract

The Social Mind was first published in 1990. It was meant to show that there was no conflict between sociocultural views of language, learning, and thinking and new psychological views of the mind/brain. Neural network approaches to the mind argue that the mind is furnished by an unbelievably large network of neural associations. These associations are based on our lived experiences, which are different for all of us. It is our social and cultural affiliations that shape and mentor our experiences so that we can share, collaborate, and communicate in terms of a social mind that we all partially share and nonetheless also contribute to in unique ways. The book still stands as a leading statement of how work on situated and embodied cognition leads us to, and contributes to, sociocultural theories of language and learning.