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Situated cognition and the phenomenology of place: lifeworld, environmental embodiment, and immersion-in-world

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Abstract

This article makes use of a passage from novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body and to consider what the related phenomenological concepts of place, environmental embodiment, and immersion-in-world might offer research in situated cognition.

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Notes

  1. Simple experiential exercises for seeing firsthand the “lived nature” of body-subject include, for example, moving a household object that has a place to a new place; or setting oneself to get to a destination by a route other than usual. Though seemingly trivial, these exercises can reveal much about body-subject (Seamon 1979, pp. 201–210).

  2. Clearly, there are situations, mostly in learning new actions and routines, when cognition “directs” body-subject—for example, learning to type and directing which fingers to strike which keys. Once, however, body-subject has “absorbed” the keyboard as a kind of “habitual, routine field,” cognitive attention is no longer needed, and one can proceed efficiently as his or her mind may be on matters far removed from the typing task at hand. Ursula’s use of careful observation—in her case, out of necessity—illustrates another connection between cognition and bodily action: becoming self-consciously aware of and re-mastering lifeworld situations and needs corporeally.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture, Kansas State University, 211 Seaton Hall, Manhattan, KS, 66506-2901, USA

    David Seamon

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  1. David Seamon
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Correspondence to David Seamon.

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Seamon, D. Situated cognition and the phenomenology of place: lifeworld, environmental embodiment, and immersion-in-world. Cogn Process 16 (Suppl 1), 389–392 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0678-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0678-9

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