Obstacles to Understanding Cognition As Situated

Greeno (1997) argued that these are misreadings of situative positions, occasioned paradigmatic differences in presupposition and language: discussions of the situative and cognitive perspectives, proponents of the two sides tend to talk and write past each other because they address different questions (pp. 5-6). Greeno is optimistic that by identifying the presuppositions of the different questions, we can clarify differences between the perspectives and thereby understand better what theoretical and educational issues are at stake in the debate (p. 6). But despite his notable effort to contrast the cognitive and situative presuppositions, Anderson, Reder, and Simon (1997) continue to see the problems as more linguistic than substantive (p. 19): For the life of us, we fail to see the difference between these questions (p. 19); A rhetorical language game is being played (p. 19); If it were not for Greeno's labeling we would not have been able to guess which was the cognitive and which was the situated question (p. 20). In this response, we explore the current state of situated cognition theory and point to underlying issues that remain to be clarified for the differences be-