Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life (Learning in Doing)

In this innovative study, Jean Lave moves the analysis of one particular form of cognitive activity--arithmetic problem-solving--out of the laboratory and into the domain of everyday life. In so doing, she shows how mathematics in the real world , such as that entailed in grocery shopping or dieting, is, like all thinking, shaped by the dynamic encounter between the culturally-endowed mind and its total context, a subtle interaction that shapes both the human subject and the world within which it acts.