Today is Earth Day, which I remember celebrating in my high school science class way back in 1970, though, as I recall, it mostly involved picking up trash around our school grounds (including cigarette butts from the “student smoking” area, which back then was an officially sanctioned part of school life.) In any event, I’m… Continue reading

are the four fundamentals on which LIS is built, as I argue in Chapter 1, and yet the very complex physical components that underlie all of these abilities (sight, voice, hearing, memory) come in for almost no discussion within the field, though they obviously affect whether and how we can make use of information resources.… Continue reading

The “language of thought hypothesis” (LoTH), famously associated with the late Jerry Fodor and not particularly popular in recent years, appears to be recovering some ground, according to Mandelbaum and colleagues, whose “Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought” I cited in Chapter 1. Mandelbaum develops this further with colleagues Quilty-Dunn and Porot… Continue reading

I mentioned Robert Worden’s “The Evolution of Language by Sexual Selection” in Chapter 1, as he offers an appealing hypothesis as to the role that language played in human evolution: that what may have begun as a very task-oriented method of communication for group activities only slightly advanced from that of other primates eventually became… Continue reading

is the subtitle of Brian O’Connor’s 1996 book Explorations in Indexing and Abstracting, which I wish I had read earlier in my doctoral studies, though it had a great impact on me when I did encounter it later (since much of my career had involved indexing and abstracting for various publishers). In any event, he… Continue reading

I didn’t include the human sense of smell in my list of key sensory capabilities in Chapter 1, because: 1. I was a victim of the common misconception, apparently first promulgated by French physician Pierre Paul Broca in the 19th century, that our olfactory bulbs are inferior to those of other mammals (see John McGann’s… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

“The Faculty of Language” by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch with its wonderful subtitle (“What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?”) has garnered so many citations since its 2002 publication in Science that it certainly doesn’t need one from me (though of course it got one) so here instead I would mention… Continue reading

I referred to Jerome Bruner’s “Routes to Reference” (1998) briefly in Chapter 1, but didn’t deal with it in the depth it deserves, with its drawing together of so many important threads, from infant pointing, to Peirce’s notion of “interpretant”, to “plot” as the connection between children’s narrative play and Aristotle’s concept of the “peripateia”… Continue reading

A surprisingly overlooked and undercited 2009 piece in American Art by University of Pennsylvania art historian Dr. Michael Leja is an early and eloquent investigation of the cultural role of the keyword in the online environment. He wrote, “We are entering a new phase in the commercialization and commodification of language, and as it increasingly… Continue reading