Biblio help needed: Social theories of human cognition

I’m trying to discover who has taken what we might call a social approach to human cognition. By this I mean who has seen our place in a social world as essential to explaining how seemingly individual cognition succeeds in getting at truth, understanding, and so on.

Faced with the news that our vision is more partial than we think it is, we might say that our ordinary reports of what we see are wrong. Alternatively, we might say that such reports draw on much more than just internal visual happenings. We draw on a public language, the ways in which our caretakers ‘taught us to see’ as toddlers, and so on.

Let’s say that the above thought appeals to social setting to show how a possibly error prone individual can get true outcomes, such as true reports of what is seen that leave no hint of the gaps. Sue Campbell has used this approach for memory, and Helen Longino has appealed to community in explaining success in science. I used this approach for vision in a chapter in Neurofeminism and more generally in Keeping the world in Mind.

In The Commons of the Mind, Annette Baier takes a Wittgensteinian approach to our acquisition of truth. Other writers – such an Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Hutton – have also taken a social approach to the mind.

Who else??  Please help!

NeuroGenderings III

Below is a list of podcasts from Neurogenderings III, a conference on the brain and gender, held this year in May. The podcasts are available here.

I heard Jordan-Young at a conference in honor of Anne Fasto-Sterling a week before the conference; I do recommend listening to her. And if you think that sex is purely biological then you will find Anne F-S’s keynote very interesting, I hope. The other speakers are very distinguished scholars.

Dr Cynthia KRAUS, Senior lecturer at the Institute of social sciences of the University of Lausanne. Opening words to NeuroGenderings III: the first international Dissensus** Conference, 8 May 2014, University of Lausanne.

Prof. Franciska KRINGS, Vice-Rector of the University of Lausanne. Welcome words to NeuroGenderings III: the first international Dissensus Conference, 8 May 2014, University of Lausanne.

KEYNOTES

Rebecca JORDAN-YOUNG, Tow Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College. Sex as Chimera: Tools for (Un)Thinking Difference.

Gillian EINSTEIN, Visiting Professor of Neuroscience and Gender Medicine, Linköping University, Associate Professor of Psychology, Dalla Landa School of Public Health, University of Toronto. When Does a Difference Make a Difference? Exemples from Situated Neuroscience.

Georgina RIPPON, Professor of Cognitive NeuroImaging, Aston University. Functional Neuroimaging (FNI) and Sex/Gender Research: of Differences, Dichotomies and Entanglement.

Anne FAUSTO-STERLING, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Biology and Gender Studies, Brown University. How Your Generic Baby Aquires Gender.

**from your dictionary.com: When a large group of people is very unhappy with a certain policy or event, this collective unhappiness is an example of dissensus.