Scripts and Social Cognition by Gen Eickers

Scripts and Social Cognition by Gen Eickers

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.

“Scripts have often been mentioned as important aspects of our social cognitive lives, but this is the first book to do them justiceThis book shows just how central scripts are to social interaction, and how they supplant more traditional approaches.”

Suilin Lavelle, University of Edinburgh, UK

"Eickers’ book fluidly weaves together theories of social cognition, AI, and social philosophy. They use the meaningful connections between these disparate areas of research to persuasively argue that scripts are a powerful part of our social interactions. This book is a must-read for those interested in social cognition."

Shannon Spaulding, Professor of Philosophy, Oklahoma State University, USA

"One notable gap in understanding the entrenchment of oppression is the relationship between social structures and the attitudes and motivations of individuals that lead them to conform to them. Eickers’ book makes an original and important contribution to filling this gap, with emphasis on the neglected topic of social scripts."

Sally Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy & Women’s and Gender Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

"A highly original and well-motivated proposal that social cognition consists in script-based, practical knowledge of context-sensitive and normatively constrained, temporally sequenced social interactions - an important corrective to the orthodox focus on representing causal factors inside individual minds."

Tadeusz Zawidzki, Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy, George Washington University, USA

Gen Eickers is a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Bayreuth. Their work focuses on scripts, social interaction, emotion, and social norms, and their research is located at the intersections of philosophy of mind, social ontology, and social epistemology.