The last century marked a Cartesian effort to dissociate mind from body, reason from emotion, language from the lived and embodied realities in which it is used. While early psychologists ousted the study of mental phenomena from their science, focusing solely on observable behaviour, the violent compuatationalist backlash which they provoked threw away the baby with the bathwater, alongside everyone happening to be in the apartment at the time. Only recently have people started to pay attention to both the mental and the physical constraints which shape our thinking. The newfound realisation that higher cognition and our sensorimotor systems form an interconnected and dynamic whole places theorising at a much firmer footing, and promises a more unified, coherent, and comprehensive linguistics and cognitive science.
