Cognition as a Product of Social Interaction: A Pragmatist Point of View

The purpose of this paper is to look into the different types of relationships that might exist between the concepts "interaction" and "cognition". I do so from the standpoint of social psychology: firstly, by stressing the place occupied by social interaction in this discipline and by showing that this place is reserved for verbal interaction; secondly, by pointing out that most studies conducted on this subject are self- and brain-centered, in a social psychology more interested in individuals in interaction than in the relationships that shape those individuals, and more inclined to adopt a representationalist and mentalist approach whenever it looks at cognition-related phenomena; thirdly, by proposing a description of social interaction as the modeling of linguistic, bodily, and artifactual forms, inscribed in the domain of situated and distributed cognition; fourthly, by providing some empirical facts illustrating how the cognition process is generated by an interactional dynamic that mobilizes both what is said and what is done by actors who, in an instrumented space, are at the origin of a joint production of forms. In other words, as a social psychologist of collaborative cognitive processes -- and from that angle - I will defend an approach that makes cognition a product of social interaction.