Thinking Through Things in Texts
A Seventeenth-Century Example
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4389440 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Olivia Smith (0000-0002-1266-7377, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 112-125 |
| Publication date | 2014-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Paragraph (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0264-8334 • E-ISSN: 1750-0176 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/para.2014.0113 |
| OpenAlex | W2017445081 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 7 |
What is the cognitive role of things - sometimes but not always expressed as nouns - that appear in texts? What kind of literary affordances are the material furnishings that appear in a piece of literary writing? These questions are explored in this essay through the example of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), a long work of literary philosophy that plays with the evolving conventions of its genre. Fusing methodologies borrowed from anthropology and linguistics, this essay reveals the extent and type of work done by two of Locke's things, manna and porphyry. In doing so it tests a way of tracing the cognitive action of the Essay's contemporary readership without recourse to modern experimental methods
Affordance · Art · Cognition · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Noun · Sociology · Categorization, perception, and language · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |