Keywords In and Out of Context

One of the great pleasures of writing a book is having the opportunity to become more familiar with the work of those perhaps not directly in one’s own discipline (whatever that may be) but a knowledge of whose work may immeasurably enrich one’s own. Even though I had come across The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, a 1983 edited volume by Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield during my doctoral studies at Syracuse, its size (750 + pages) was so formidable that I read only a few of what I at the time considered the more pertinent of the essays it contained. (The book was also the topic of an interesting panel discussion at the 2012 ASIST conference, though, as I recall, that too touched on only a very few of the many contributions within.) However, I later managed to acquire the book at a reasonable price (thank you, BetterWorldBooks, for my ex-lib copy!) and was able to read it at leisure and to see what I missed.

This was the fourth volume of Machlup’s projected multi-volume update of his 1962 magnum opus, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Although it was not intended to be the final volume, Machlup’s death from a heart attack in Princeton earlier that year resulted in the decision to conclude the publication series. A stellar list of contributors to the volume included Margaret Boden, Kenneth Boulding, C. West Churchman, Douglas Hofstadter, Manfred Kochen, Donald Mackay, George Miller, Allen Newell, W. Boyd Rayward, Jesse Shera, Myron Tribus, and Patrick Wilson.

I must admit that I didn’t particularly attend to the essay by Michael Arbib, now emeritus professor at the University of Southern California, whose current Google Scholar citation count is a staggering 50,000+. His contribution “Cognitive Science: The View from Brain Theory” argued that Norbert Wiener’s early work on cybernetics (especially his 1948 book Cybernetics or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine) should be considered in conjunction with the history of cognitive science, which is not a particularly controversial conclusion today, though perhaps it was back in the early eighties. Since Wiener was Arbib’s doctoral advisor at MIT, Arbib’s own work might be traced through this intellectual ancestry, most notably the focus on animal (including human) communication systems, which is why I cite him at length on my own Chapter 2.

Arbib is a neuroscientist whose interest in cognitive schemas led him over the years not only to fruitful collaborations with cognitive scientist James Bonaiuto, philosopher of science Mary Hesse, architect Juhani Pallasmaa, and cognitive psychologist Simon Garrod, but also to substantive solo contributions in neurolinguistics, especially the study of the emergence of human language, as exemplified in his 2012 book, How the Brain Got Language, as well as a plethora of his other papers.

Most recently, he has authored a chapter (“The aboutness of language and the evolution of the construction of the construction-ready brain”) in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution in which he observes that “Most human utterances are about something … The nature of this aboutness can be immensely varied, but from an evolutionary perspective I will assume that the original use was that one person intended to convey to another some aspect of the current situation or an immediate course of action…. In animal communication systems, the aboutness is surprisingly limited. Even though many animals have an extensive behavioral and perceptual repertoire (their Umwelt in the sense given by von Uexküll (1957), communication is usually limited to a few calls, or to “songs” whose syllabic structure is unrelated to expressing new facets of the animal’s world.”

Arbib’s argument is that it was “aboutness” that first stretched the boundaries of human language (which he believes started with gestural and pantomime “proto-signs” to convey key items of information (hazards, food sources, etc.) relevant to group survival, which only gradually developed into early forms of proto-speech to convey more complicated messages (how to create and use tools, construct shelters, etc.), and only much, much later developed into a proto-language that could convey more abstract ideas “about” which it was important for the group to know. Arbib believes that the human brain was language-ready long before spoken speech emerged.

While “aboutness” is a perennial topic in LIS (generally confined to discussions of documents, as shown by this recent review in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly), its prehistory is not, though I think that many LIS scholars would find the very practical focus of aboutness in the evolution of language itself as described by Arbib of some interest, given that this would obviously have taken place long before our current fixation on documents… and long before documents themselves, however we may construe them.