Scripts and Social Cognition

Book excerpt: This book argues that our success in navigating the social world depends heavily on scripts. Scripts play a central role in our ability to understand social interactions shaped by different contextual factors. In philosophy of social cognition, scholars have asked what mechanisms we employ when interacting with other people or when cognizing about other people. Recent approaches acknowledge that social cognition and interaction depend heavily on contextual, cultural, and social factors that contribute to the way individuals make sense of the social interactions they take part in. This book offers the first integrative account of scripts in social cognition and interaction. It argues that we need to make contextual factors and social identity central when trying to explain how social interaction works, and that this is possible via scripts. Additionally, scripts can help us understand bias and injustice in social interaction. The author’s approach combines several different areas of philosophy – philosophy of mind, social epistemology, feminist philosophy – as well as sociology and psychology to show why paying attention to injustice in interaction is much needed in social cognition research, and in philosophy of mind more generally. Scripts and Social Cognition: How We Interact with Others will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, social epistemology, social ontology, sociology, and social psychology.