p.222 knowledge is inextricably tied up with action. Movement is not incidental
to learning, but part of the perceptual package that is the basis of categorization and recategorization...
In our dynamic systems view, knowledge does not just have its origins in the specifics of the here and now. It is always of
a piece with both the present and past because knowledge is a trajectory of activity that depends on both
the past and the current.
p.244 Our view of knowledge as dynamic activity... an intelligent dynamic system is one that is
always on the move and that lives on the edge of multiple attractors.
p.323-324 We deal with our perceptions and actions in terms of fluid, dynamic, contextual categories, patterns
of organization, which form the very grist for our engagement of meaning... meaning in the most abstract sense cannot
be separated from action. Meaning has its origins in actions and is made manifest - created - in real time
and through activity.
One of the important sources of embodied meaning is our generalized experience of physical
containment. As Johnson writes:
Our encounter with containment and boundedness is one of the most pervasive features of our bodily
experience. We are intimately aware of our bodies as three-dimensional containers into which we put certain things
(food, water, air) and out of which other things emerge (food and water wastes, air, blood, etc). From the beginning, we experience
constant physical containment in our surroundings (those things that envelop us). We move in and out of rooms, clothes,
vehicles, and numerous kinds of bounded spaces. We manipulate objects, placing them in containers (cups, boxes, cans,
bags, etc.). In each of these cases there are repeatable spatial and temporal organizations. In other words, there
are typical schemata for physical containment. ([Mark] Johnson, [The Body in the Mind] 1987, p.21)
Johnson goes on to show how these schemata pervade our thinking and language, how in the abstract
metaphorical sense, we understand the world through the physical relations of containment.
p.324 We must control forces to move our bodies through space. Indeed all our causal relations with
our environment require some sort of forceful interaction, as we act on objects or they act upon us. As Johnson says,
"Since our experience is held together by forceful interactions, our web of meanings is connected by the structure of such
activity" (p.42)
