// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did commognition say? "I recognize you".

Commognition is a theory of thinking and learning in learning sciences research, introduced by Anna Sfard and set out most fully in her 2008 book Thinking as Communicating: Human Development, the Growth of Discourses, and Mathematizing. The name, a portmanteau of communication and cognition, marks the theory's founding assumption: that thinking is a person's communication with themselves, so that individual cognition and interpersonal communication are two forms of a single phenomenon rather than distinct processes. On this view, mathematics is a historically established discourse, and learning mathematics is the process of becoming a participant in that discourse. The framework has been taken up and extended by other mathematics education researchers, and a 2025 synthesis of Scopus-indexed studies reported that its use has grown since 2020.

Development

Sfard developed commognition in response to what she described as weaknesses in twentieth-century theories of human development. In her account, "acquisitionist" schools such as behaviorism and cognitivism conceptualized learning as the acquisition of entities (behaviors, concepts, mental schemes) and, because they attended only to the individual, could not explain historical change in human ways of acting. "Participationist" thinkers following Lev Vygotsky instead described human learning as growing participation in historically established forms of activity. Commognition, Sfard wrote, took this line one step further by treating domains of knowing, mathematics among them, as discursive activities — a move she traced to two sources: the arguments of Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein against separating thought from its expression, and postmodern philosophers, among them Lyotard, Foucault and Rorty, who described science and knowledge-building as discourse.

The term appeared in Sfard's publications in the early 2000s and was fully outlined in Thinking as Communicating (2008). In the book's introduction, Sfard located the project's beginnings in puzzles from her research on mathematics learning: systematic student errors, young children's non-standard handling of numbers, and the failure of decades of reform to improve mathematics learning in any lasting way. She argued that such puzzles could not be resolved without operationally defined concepts to replace the ambiguous everyday vocabulary of thinking and learning. The first part of the book presents the general theory of thinking as communicating. The second applies it to mathematics.

Sfard continued developing the approach after 2008. In a 2018 chapter she framed commognition as a research discourse defined by its keywords, its data, its methods of analysis and its endorsed claims, and summarized the storylines that commognitive research had by then produced, including accounts of how numerical, algebraic and functional discourses develop in learners and of how identity-building talk interacts with mathematical activity. With Man Ching Esther Chan, she later compared problem-solving dialogues recorded twenty-five years apart in Montreal and Melbourne, using the comparison to develop commognitive methods for analyzing why opportunities to learn are sometimes not taken up.

In a 2025 article, Sfard returned to the distinction with which the project had begun — the contrast she had drawn in 1998 between the acquisition and participation metaphors for learning — and set out the vocabulary her group had arrived at after almost three decades of work. The paper replaced the noun "activity" with "practice", defined as a network of interconnected routines together with the range of situations in which they apply, and presented routines and practices as the framework's units of analysis, in place of the "knowledge" and "concepts" of acquisitionist research. It also proposed a hypothetical five-step action cycle — recognize, simulate, select, interpret, perform — that connects the framework to neuroscientific research on prediction and simulation and is intended to explain why human performance varies from one situation to another.

Sfard wrote the entry on commognition in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education, and the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction devoted a unit of its Awardees Multimedia Online Resources project, recorded by Sfard, to "Learning, Commognition and Mathematics".

Framework

The theory's point of departure is a definition: thinking is "the individualized version of interpersonal communication," a communicative interaction in which one person plays the parts of all interlocutors, and which need not proceed in words. Sfard presented this as a non-dualist position that rejects the Cartesian split between the bodily and the mental. She derived it from Vygotsky's claim that uniquely human capacities originate in historically established collective activities: if thinking is such a capacity, its collective predecessor must be interpersonal communication. Because thinking and communicating are taken to be one kind of process, the theory holds that both can be investigated with a single set of analytic tools.

Within this vocabulary, mathematics is a discourse: a form of communication made distinct by four characteristics. These are its keywords, such as "three", "set" or "function"; its visual mediators, such as numerals, algebraic symbols and graphs; its routines, the patterned ways in which characteristic tasks such as defining or proving are performed; and its endorsed narratives, the theorems, definitions and computational rules that the community of the discourse accepts as true. Learning mathematics is accordingly defined as individualizing mathematical discourse: gradually becoming able to use the discourse agentively, in response to one's own needs.

The model sets mathematics apart from most other discourses in one respect: Sfard described it as autopoietic, a discourse that creates the very objects its participants talk about. New mathematical objects arise, on this account, through objectification, the introduction of nouns that come to be understood as names for new discourse-independent objects. Sfard identified three discursive devices at work: saming, giving a common name to things previously seen as unrelated; encapsulating, replacing talk about many objects with talk about a single entity such as a set; and reifying, turning talk about a process (adding 5 to 7) into talk about an object (the sum of 5 and 7). A new noun then undergoes what she called alienation: it comes to be used in impersonal statements, as if its referent existed independently of the discourse.

Routines occupy a central place in the theory. Sfard analyzed a routine as a pair consisting of a task (the performer's vision of what must be repeated from precedent situations, where a precedent is a past event deemed similar to the present one) and a procedure (the prescription for action, deduced from what was done in the precedent events). The same procedure can ground different kinds of routines depending on how the performer sees the task: in explorations, the goal is producing an endorsed narrative; in rituals, the performer recapitulates others' actions for the sake of social approval rather than for any product. Most routines, Sfard held, fall between the two poles, and learning often takes the form of deritualization, in which the performer's attention gradually shifts from the performance itself to its outcome and the routine becomes more flexible and better connected to other routines.

The theory distinguishes two kinds of discursive change. Object-level learning extends the stock of endorsed narratives about existing objects. Meta-level learning changes the meta-rules of the discourse itself, as happens when the integers are extended to rational numbers, and some old truths, such as "multiplication makes bigger", cease to hold. The new discourse may be incommensurable with its predecessor, and encounters between incommensurable discourses produce what Sfard termed commognitive conflict. Such a conflict becomes an opportunity for learning, she proposed, only under a "learning-teaching agreement" in which participants concur on which discourse leads, who teaches and who learns, and what the process should look like. Because newcomers cannot yet judge the outcomes of the new discourse, meta-level learning is, on this account, bound to begin with rituals.

Commognitive research takes discourse, rather than the individual mind, as its unit of analysis. Its data are recordings and verbatim transcripts of interaction, and the analyst is required to alternate between an insider's and an outsider's perspective on the discourse under study. The theory also extends to identity: alongside mathematizing (talking about mathematical objects) participants engage in subjectifying (talk about one another), and Sfard argued that identity-constituting narratives such as labelling a student "weak" tend to act as self-fulfilling prophecies that shape subsequent learning.

Critical reception, applications and adoption

Reviewing the book in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Gerry Stahl wrote that Sfard had provided "one of the most impressive unified, homogenous theories of learning" and credited her with bringing the linguistic turn of twentieth-century philosophy into learning science, but he objected to the book's thin treatment of neighboring theories and noted that its empirical base consisted of brief dyadic and adult–child excerpts, mostly translated from Hebrew. Mathew Felton and Mitchell Nathan welcomed the prospect of treating central and peripheral questions of mathematics education within one framework, but they warned that taking thinking to be communication by definition risks a self-fulfilling prophecy, since evidence such as kinesthetic and visual imagery, eye movements and reaction times may then be discounted. Tony Wing, writing as a practicing mathematics teacher, considered the book essential reading for its pragmatic originality, singled out its rehabilitation of imitation, and asked whether all perceptual functioning really includes discursive responses and whether the theory left enough room for affect.

Paul Cobb, in an essay review, wrote that the numerous constructs Sfard proposed did achieve the operational rigor she sought, and that although her approach sat squarely within the sociocultural tradition, it stood apart from related work on discourse in the precision with which it analyzed particular discourses and the process of becoming their participant. He counted the theory's attention to three levels of analysis — historically established mathematical discourse, the local discourse of the classroom, and individual students' developing discourses — as an important contribution, given that sociocultural theory had until then been of limited use in designing instruction, and he considered the line of work "one of the most important current developments in research on thinking and learning". His main reservation concerned equity: the circularities Sfard saw as inherent in meta-level learning implied, on his reading, unavoidable inequities in students' motivation to learn mathematics in school, a conclusion disquieting enough that he hoped aspects of her analysis might require modification.

Jay Lemke read the book as a set of detailed arguments for a communicational paradigm in the study of learning and development, drawing as much on Wittgenstein as on Vygotsky, and judged the result "very carefully reasoned": a well-specified example of a practice theory that replaces the mentalist notions of Cartesian dualism with a single account of how mathematical sense is made. He raised two subjects for further discussion. Thinking, he argued, is not just about logic: affect might be, as Sfard had argued for cognition, an internalized form of originally interpersonal processes, and so deserved a place in the account. He also asked whether the theory's emphasis on the rule-regulated side of discourse needed a complement in its contingent and creative side, suggesting that Sfard attended more to the communication of ready-made mathematics than to mathematical creation, and that the possibility of learners inventing new or alternative mathematics, as Ramanujan had done, seemed remote from her argument.

Empirical applications by other researchers followed. Zayyadi et al. analyzed the word use, visual mediators, narratives and routines of Indonesian middle-school students solving word problems. Lu and colleagues coded what they called commognitive responsibility in computer-supported one-to-one tutoring in China and found that it shifted gradually from teacher to student over successive sessions.

Karavi, Mali and Avraamidou argued that commognition supplies the analytic language needed to study proof teaching in university lectures at the micro-level, and Karavi and Mali later distilled twenty-three meta-rules from one real-analysis lecturer's discourse, concluding that lectures convey the norms of mathematical discourse largely implicitly.

Viirman and Nardi followed biology students through mathematical modelling tasks, took the framework outside mathematics-degree settings, and concluded that cross-disciplinary contexts were well suited to commognitive research. Barnett, Can and Clark used the 1875 correspondence between Gaston Darboux and Jules Hoüel to study how an analysis student figures out the metadiscursive rules of mathematical rigor, proposing adoption, acceptance and awareness as three degrees of taking up such rules.

In Brazil, Moustapha-Corrêa et al. designed history-based teacher education tasks meant to provoke commognitive conflicts, and described their study as revealing a little-explored capacity of the framework to steer the design and evaluation of pedagogical interventions.

Other scholars extended the theory's vocabulary. Kontorovich, for instance, accounted for students' apparently self-contradictory answers to square-root tasks by introducing intra-commognitive conflicts (conflicts between incommensurable strands within a single learner's discourse) together with the notion of precedent pockets.

Nachlieli and Tabach carried the notion of deritualization from individual learners to whole classes, proposing a classroom-level precedent-search-space and reporting that prospective teachers' collective performance became more explorative over successive lessons.

Ben-Dor and Heyd-Metzuyanim described a coalescence between visual and deductive geometric discourses in peer interaction, presenting their case as the first commognitive mapping of a successful meta-level transition achieved between peers.

Biza introduced the discursive footprint, the trace that curricular encounters with a topic across mathematical domains leave in students' later discourse, and used it to analyze 182 undergraduates' work on tangent lines.

Cooper and Lavie networked commognition with Vygotskian accounts of the zone of proximal development and proposed interdiscursivity (task elements that carry meaning simultaneously in a learner's familiar discourse and in the target discourse), arguing, against the received commognitive position, that first steps into an incommensurable discourse need not be ritualized.

Nachlieli and Elbaum-Cohen identified teaching practices aimed at meta-level learning in a lesson introducing complex numbers, observing that commognitive theory itself is not prescriptive for teaching. Much of this work appeared in a special issue of The Journal of Mathematical Behavior titled "Advances in Commognitive Research", edited by Jason Cooper and Igor' Kontorovich.

In a commentary on that special issue, Nathalie Sinclair described commognition as "a cumulative, coherent and convincing theory that is also seductive, singular and selective". She counted the close connection between theory and method among the framework's particular strengths and read the proliferation of its vocabulary, which had grown past thirty terms, as a sign of the generativity of its premises, while warning that the resulting complexity could hamper its accessibility to newcomers. She also found in commognitive research "a certain totalising or territorialising tendency" to describe every phenomenon in exclusively commognitive terms; questioned its commitment to a single mathematical discourse against more pluralist views of mathematics; observed that the communication analyzed in the special issue consisted almost entirely of spoken and written words, with no physical or digital tools in sight; and noted that most of the issue's authors belonged to the Haifa Discourse Group, several of them former doctoral students of Sfard. Fourteen years after the book's publication, she thought, "commognition is far from being widely accepted, or for that matter, understood".

Adoption

A meta-synthesis of thirty-two Scopus-indexed commognitive studies reported that adoption began rising in 2020, that close to two-thirds of the studies were conducted at the higher-education level, that all of them used qualitative methods, and that the largest shares came from Indonesia, New Zealand, Sweden and South Africa. Dzulfikar et al. attributed the growth to the framework's capacity to address cognitive, interactional and affective questions through a single kind of discourse analysis, and identified error analysis and commognitive conflict as subjects that remained little studied.

External links

• Commognition - Discourses on Learning in Education