Keywords In and Out of Context

Wilson and Golonka (2013) wrote a highly-cited theoretical article in Frontiers of Psychology using the title above, with an unusually wide coverage of “cognition” in animals, people, and robots, so it’s worth a look (though I believe that the “we” in the subtitle refers only to people!)

The main topic of my own Chapter 1 is embodied cognition as the largely ignored foundation of all library and information science theories: our senses, which include sight and touch (representation), hearing (relevance), sound (reference), and memory (retention), provide the experiential “grounds” for all our “concepts.” The embodiment aspect of all this has only recently entered the LIS literature, mostly through phenomenology (there was an interesting panel discussion back in 2016 at COLIS9 on the history and potential future directions of phenomenological research in LIS, which I am sorry to say that I did not attend) but the sensory elements only occasionally come into play, for example through Tim Gorichanaz’s work on ultrarunning.

And, as Dove (2023) in his “Rethinking the Role of Language in Embodied Cognition” provides a new argument that language may in fact influence embodied cognition, the connection to LIS research may even become stronger than we think it is.