Understanding the interface between society and cognition

The aim of the special issue "Understanding Social Cognition" is to transfer Aristotelian claim about humans as social beings from the political into the cognitive domain, as well as explore its implications for philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences.Recent decades have made it increasingly evident that cognition is deeply embedded into the collective lives of groups, institutions and societies.Being raised by others, cooperating and coming into conflict with them, inheriting material and institutional environments do not happen by chance but constitute the essential features of the way we are.The Aristotelian dictum that "he who by nature and not by a mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it" (Politics, 1253a2-4) has been echoed by recent trends in situated cognition, largely inspired by Daniel Dennett, who argues that "Every human mind (...) is a product not just of natural selection but of cultural redesign of enormous proportions" (Dennett, 1996, p. 153).If, as argued by Dennett, human minded behavior is a product of bio-cultural co-evolution, the "machine" for a distinctively human way of thinking is not inscribed in the brain alone but has to be installed in a society that relies on the coordination by embodied agents.This means that socio-cultural dynamics does not just enhance or aid brain-bounded cognition from the outside but cognition itself is intrinsically social.This inference is almost a platitude among the social scientists, since they agree that groups exhibit dynamics which cannot be reductively explained or predicted solely by reference to actions and properties of their individual members.Classic research in social psychology delivers convincing evidence to support this claim.For instance, the structure of a working group and its patterns of communication can substantially improve the efficiency and reliability of problem solving.This can be observed even in small, fiveperson groups.Such collectives with centralized communication patterns perform consistently better than decentralized groups, when confronted with a simple task (Bavelas, 1948).In this kind of tasks, the structural properties of the group act as an amplifier, enabling the collective