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You are hereby invited to our fourth interdisciplinary series on *Evolution, Complexity and Cognition* <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/>: *When?* Next Thursday, May 29, 2008, 2-4 pm. *Where?* The seminar room is B 0.036 (building B, level 0, close to the human sciences computer rooms), on the VUB Campus Etterbeek. Coffee and drinks are available. Free entrance: everybody welcome! *The social construction of shared concepts: empirical study of a distributed cognitive process.* * * (Geert Biebaut, VUB, psychology department)* * *Abstract: *Recently, different disciplines have come to regard cognition as a social phenomenon, distributed over a group of individuals. Sociologists have noted long ago that knowledge is a social construction (Berger & Luckman, 1967), however without proposing an explicit model of this process. In this project we intend to investigate empirically different socio-cognitive processes through which shared concepts are constructed out of individual concepts. We shall focus in particular on the factors that influence this processes and on the manner in which the resulting "consensual" concepts differ from the initial individual concepts. That, we hope, will give us a better insight into the mechanisms guiding distributed knowledge development, which in turn will allow us to increase the efficiency and reliability of that process. *More informations about the ECCO seminars:* See http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/28 for the full program. Best regards, Clément Vidal. ________________________________________ http://clement.vidal.philosophons.com Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium Tel: +32 2 640 67 37 | Fax: +32 2 644 07 44
