The question is, “Why does the mind with its durable cognitive tools remain the only imaginable source of continuity across situations for most cognitive researchers – while we isolate the culturally and socially constituted activities and settings of everyday life and their economic and political structures and cyclical routines from the study of thinking, and so ignore them?” It is not this form of the question, however, that has exercised the minds of cognitivists. Rather, (negative) reactions to the study of cognition-in-context follow from strong beliefs and longstanding practices that create a taken-for-granted divide between cognitive processes and the settings and activities of which they are a part. I believe that the particulars of this position must be confronted. Cognitivists might well rejoin, “why take up the study of everyday thought in context?” For the very term “everyday,” when applied to thought, has been imbued with pejorative connotations. Its analytic meaning typically has been derived by comparison to the ostensibly superior canons of scientific thought. Moreover, the study of activity in situ has been damned as a rejection of theory and a move towards descriptive particularism. Even granting intrinsic value to the study of “what people really do,” it has been made to appear that doing so requires a lamentable sacrifice of methodological rigor – assumed to be impossible to achieve outside the experimental context – in order to gain relevance to the concerns of everyday cognition.