[Xmca-l] Re: Saussure vs Peirce

[mike cole]

He’s being objective

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 11:32 AM Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co>
wrote:

> Hmm.  Haydi, would you like to be my publicist?  :)
>
> Seriously, you are very kind. You are *too* kind!
>
> Martin
>
> On Apr 18, 2019, at 1:12 AM, Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Martin,
>
> Many thanks for your scholarly co-operation and all clarifications! As in
> your invaluable books and numerous papers , this piece and previous pieces
> narrate for me the story of a scholar who so enthusiastically has traversed
> the path of scientific research , has tried to crystallize his findings on
> the Campus and in classes during thirty years , in seminars and gatherings
> (and if I am a bit qualified) has , despite his humble words , strong roots
> both in philosophy and psychology and maybe in other disciplines. Whoever
> reads the short piece below must understand the dimensions of competencies
> you work with and the fluent and smooth and shiny prose by which you
> crystallize your deep thoughts. Not only have I benefited from your
> writings but also have my son and daughter who teach classes who have
> hijacked the said book on their first visit and observation.
>
> Haydi
>
> On Wednesday, April 17, 2019, 7:07:08 PM GMT+4:30, Martin Packer <
> mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Haydi,
>
> Some years ago I worked my way as far as possible through Hegel’s
> Phenomenology of Mind, and I also read a number of commentaries on this
> book and on Hegel’s larger project. I learned that there are as many
> interpretations are there are commentators, and that I am no expert on
> Hegel!
>
> Nor on Marx, but I understand the suggestion that Marx turned Hegel on his
> head to be referring to the idea that the force or phenomenon that brings
> about historical change is not Geist but human practical activity. Any
> proposal that concepts unfold all by themselves raises in me the simplistic
> objection that concepts cannot exist without people. Of course, if humans
> become extinct the universe will continue to unfold, but presumably without
> the help of concepts. These are, at least, my ontological assumptions.
>
> So yes, I would view a focus on the dance of disembodied concepts as an
> alienated viewpoint. And I view the laws of nature and society as always
> human creations, and so always as fallible, as revisable, and as formulated
> in service of human goals and purposes at a particular moment. These laws
> are attempts to hold fast in the flux, uncertainly, and mortality of
> existence.
>
> And I agree that it is real people dealing with real circumstances who
> imagine, who create, and who have flights of fantasy. What I
> find objectionable in dualism is the reduction of mind to an individual,
> interior space of representations, ideas, and concepts. With such
> a conception, *only* fantasy is possible. I prefer to think and talk about
> “consciousness” instead of “mind,” where consciousness is (an aspect of)
> our life and activity in a world that sustains us but always goes beyond
> our efforts to understand it. Our thinking, and our formulation of the
> problems that we think about, involve, yes, “distinction but not disunity”
> in our relation to the world.
>
> Martin
>
> On Apr 15, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Martin,
>
> We are all happy you are back safe and healthy.
>
> The trio , the book , the separate draft , the once message to Huw are all
> excellent. You understand where to agree where to disagree.
>
> You say you oppose Positivists because they say they accept things they
> can touch as tangibles. Right.
>
> You say you don’t give so much value to Kant because despite the fact that
> he assumes a world outside the Mind , he terminates as an agnostic. Right.
>
> Andy’s stance is obvious. Hegel is no idealist and he’s not alone in this.
> You are one.
>
> And my problem is how to compromise Hegel with this your brilliant saying:
>
> THE ALTERNATIVE , IN BRIEF , IS THAT HUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD ARISES
> IN AND FROM OUR PRACTICAL  ACTIVITY OF LIVING IN THAT WORLD.
>
> All through Hegel’s work the primacy of the IDEA blinks at you. In one
> place he stresses that his only concern is with concepts. His world is not
> YOUR world as stated so succinctly arising in and from … He of course deals
> with this world but in alienation. If he were not for the IDEA , he would
> not have thought of the public and civil rights and social institutions as
> having been constituted by their relation to an abstract iconic deemed as
> superior and all competent as the Monarch , the embodiment and realization
> of the Institution of the Monarchy as something instilled in mentalities.
>
> What I then take in your phraseology is that you tend to deny the
> objectivity and necessity of the rules of Nature and Society which always
> show themselves within the sphere of your activity in objective material
> circumstances you apparently know yourself committed to in Brilliant
> expression (Dialectics in Nature reflecting in Logic as well). When we
> replace interests with Needs we actually part ways with the workings of
> this world and seek shelter in the subjective world of interests and
> interested humans not the actual ones. Circumstances do not always dance to
> the rhythms of our likings. In many times we get entangled in impositions.
> How can we escape dislikings? Again by the very changing thoughts of the
> very changing world dressed in rules , categories , concepts , theories
> according to the tenets of theorization and scientific research , say ,
> paradigms you say.
>
> Subjectivity is not realized Utilitarian way.
>
> By the way , know-how is fused , jointed , concomitant to the Practical
> Activity , long way to be called science.
>
> From the time our ancestors said farewell to the visual field and the
> concrete situation , flights of thinking started in unbounded wonderlands.
> This we also have with ontogenesis. Part of this flight turn back and come
> to fruition just if they follow and conform to the very said rules of
> afore-mentioned discussion. By this again one sees an inclination towards
> unbounded agency. Some flights are mere phantoms. Some are sweet dreamings
> necessary to a life compensation. Some are strong enough to turn into
> life-world transformations. Different points of views are visions and if
> they are not Cartesian as you stress , they ultimately submit themselves to
> the rules of the Ontology of This World. But in the beginning of your
> discussion a while ago you stressed you don’t talk of visions but of a
> world in which real men and real objects and real processes reign. How this
> could be regarding your Brilliant expression? All sciences in a final count
> are abstractions from objective reality manipulated and acted upon by human
> agents. This means distinction does not mean disunity. We should not forget
> the contiguousness of the objective world with all concomitant to it as
> forms of its unique existence. Science now exhibits the 6.5 billion times
> the Sun-size Black Hole with so huge a Mass. Have we been swallowed by the
> clear Pic?
>
> All of us claim that we oppose Cartesianism. [I ALSO remain fervently
> opposed to ontological dualism (the belief that two kinds of entity exist:
> mental entities and material entities IN ISOLATION FROM EACH OTHER BUT JUST
> ONE SECONDARILY RELATED TO THE OTHER MEANING ONCE THERE WAS THE WORLD
> WITHOUT MEN AND THEIR THOUGHTS)]. This is Monism not Dualism. Dualism , nay
> , Pluralism occurs when we say “I think it’s clear that EVERY scientific
> PARADIGM (What’s a Paradigm?) HAS ITS *OWN** ontology.” I would say :
> DERIVED EXISTENCE-implicit ontology- once inquiringly interrogated-meaning
> without men it’s gone! Derived existences or ontologies are but EPISTEMS!* governed
> by the Mind.*
>
> Haydi
>
>
> On Sunday, April 14, 2019, 9:42:45 PM GMT+4:30, Martin Packer <
> mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Haydi,
>
> First, let me apologize for the length of the book. I used to think that
> writers are paid by the word. Sadly that’s rarely true, but old habits die
> hard.
>
> If you have read on, you will have discovered that central to the book is
> an argument that Kant was responsible for a mistaken view of knowledge, one
> that continues to dominate today: the view that all that humans can know is
> our representations of the world, and never the world itself, “in itself.”
>  These representations may be cognitive or they may be linguistic but, in
> the Kantian view, the world as we experience it is in some sense
> ‘constituted’ (or ‘constructed’) by these representations. The world has
> the appearance of objectivity, but is in fact subjective. Nonetheless, Kant
> argued, we need to assume that a world exists outside our representations,
> although we can never know it.
>
> I am no philosopher, but I try to argue for an alternative to Kant’s view.
> Or rather, I review a series of counter arguments made by various
> philosophers and social scientists (and the first was Hegel, as Andy
> noted). The alternative, in brief, is that human knowledge of the world
> arises in and from our practical activity of living in that world. There is
> nothing that in principle we cannot know, though since our knowledge arises
> from practical know-how it will always reflect human interests. But that’s
> not a problem: humans don’t seek, not do we obtain, disinterested
> knowledge; we seek knowledge that will help us solve practical problems.
>
> There is always, don’t you think, an aspect of imagination in our actions
> in, and knowledge of, the world? When we engage with any concrete entity we
> are of necessity imagining how it will behave in the future, or simply what
> it will look like from a different point of view.
>
> My views of the ontology of science have shifted a bit over the years. I
> remain fervently opposed to ontological dualism (the belief that two kinds
> of entity exist: mental entities and material entities). But I’m no longer
> a monist. I think it’s clear that every scientific paradigm has its own
> ontology. I think Latour is convincing when he argues that every
> institution has its own ontology.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 18, 2019, at 11:30 AM, Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Martin,
>
> This sounds very well. And I have to say I've been reading your thick
> (400+) book and that I should continue to read it to the end but *one
> thing* : as we've also had it before when you first talked about "What is
> science?" , sent the separate draft (Now read and pinned to the book to
> make it just thicker) , yes , one thing : "To define a word solely as a
> sign for a concept seem to me to abstract it from its conversational,
> that's to say , **real world, context. A word *can* be a sign for a
> concept, but in practice it will also be a reference to a **real or
> imagined?? **concrete entity."
>
> 1. Concrete entity in a REAL world. So far I've spotted and marked just
> two cases in your book where "real" means "material" as we intend to mean
> "corporeal". Last time I understood you excepted the Natural World while
> you tried to give independence to the Qual Science or Research as having
> the REAL ENTITIES AND BODIES etc. By "implicit ontology" you meant , I
> think , derived existence. What is your take on the interactions between
> the independent  existences (yet cognizable in themselves#Kant) and derived
> existences (tied to the existence of a Mind). Taking a science as an
> instance , how you define its ontology and epistemology?
>
> 2. Also here I would like to inquire about the existence of a "concrete
> entity" in an imagined world if I'm not mistaken.
>
> And I seek permission to draw Andy's attention to the fact that concepts
> find their ways to words not words in a reverse direction to concepts. Any
> concept could be or is a word but not that ANY word could necessarily be a
> concept.
>
> Haydi
>
> On Monday, March 18, 2019, 6:02:14 PM GMT+3:30, Martin Packer <
> mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>
>
> Yes, it is indeed a trivial example. And yes, I agree that one needs all
> the utterances in a conversation to understand it. And equally, one needs
> all the conversation to understand a single utterance. More importantly, so
> do the speakers. But certainly an utterance can be comprised of a single
> word (Well; Rubbish; Eureka; or anything else), or even silence. And this
> implies that one needs all the conversation to understand a single word. To
> define a word solely as a sign for a concept seem to me to abstract it from
> its conversational, that's to say real world, context. A word *can* be a
> sign for a concept, but in practice it will also be a reference to a real
> or imagined concrete entity. To the extent that a science is a mediator, a
> tool, and not an abstract system it seems to me important to keep focus on
> how words are used in ongoing processes of conceptualization.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 17, 2019, at 7:27 PM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>
> Martin, I get the point, but any complex process is made up of units, many
> of them.  That's the point of using analysis by units. The excerpt you give
> is a trivial one. In general you need * all* the numerous utterances in a
> conversation to understand an extended interaction. It is like Engestrom
> who thinks when two activities interact, we have to have a new "fourth
> generation" unit, i.e., two activity systems interacting. But that is only
> because he took the activity system as a * system *not a * unit *in the
> first place.
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 18/03/2019 9:14 am, Martin Packer wrote:
>
> Seems to me, David, that the notion that the basic unit is the pair is
> precisely what helps us understand an exchange such as:
>
> A. How are you?
> B. Fine, thanks, and you?
> A. XXX
>
> One pair is constituted by “How are you” and “Fine, thanks,” while “and
> you?” is the first part of a projected second pair. This is why one might
> have the intuition that speaker B is doing more than one thing (though I’d
> suggest 2, not 3), and that something more is expected from speaker A.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 17, 2019, at 4:17 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well, Bakhtin is full of precisely the kind of sloppiness that Andy is
> deploring, Helena. So for example Bakhtin says that a whole novel can be
> considered as an utterance. You take down the book and open it. The
> novelist has something to say to you. He says it. And then you close the
> book and you put it back on the shelf.
>
> That's all very well, and it's very useful as a way of showing that
> literature is not some "state within a state": it is also made of language
> stuff, by people who have a historical existence and not just an afterlife.
> But it doesn't help Andy (or me, or my wife who studies these things full
> time) distinguish sub-units within the novel which will help us understand
> how novels are structured, how this structure has changed with their
> function, and how the very functions have changed as literature has
> evolved. And these WERE the problems which Bakhtin set himself (e.g. in
> "Novel and Epic" and elsewhere).
>
> We see the same problem from the other end (micro-rather than macroscopic)
> with the minimal pair (originally, in the work of Sacks, "adjacency pair").
> It's all very well and it's very useful as a way of understanding how
> conversations get structured as they go along, how people know when its
> their turn to talk and how they know when the rules have been broken. But
> it doesn't help us to understand, for example, why we all feel that when
> you say "How are you?" and somebody says "Fine, thanks, and you?" there
> seem to be three utterances in the second pair part, and the exchange as a
> whole doesn't seem finished, even though if we are using turns as the
> element (pair part) of the minimal pair, it really should be.
>
> Craig Brandist remarks that Bakhtin uses the term "dialogue" in so many
> different ways that he has rendered it meaningless. I think the same thing
> is true of the way he uses "utterance".
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article;
>
>  David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE: VYGOTSKY’S
> ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’, THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT AND ‘INGROWING’ IN THE
> WEEKEND STORIES OF KOREAN CHILDREN, British Journal of Educational
> Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
> <https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>
>
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 1:47 AM Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I find it useful to think of an utterance as bounded on two ends: on one,
> by the utterance to which it responds, on the other, by the utterance that
> responds to it. Thus you can discern utterances within utterances.
> Minimally, a two -part exchange, as Martin says; maximally, a whole stream
> of briefer utterances bounded by their prompt and response.
>
> Helena Worthen
> helenaworthen@gmail.com
>
>
>
> On Mar 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>
> According to conversation analysts, the minimal unit in conversation is
> the adjacency pair: a two-part exchange in which the second utterance is
> functionally dependent on the first.  Question-answer; greeting-greeting;
> request-reply, and so on. An utterance, then, is both a turn and a move
> within a conversation.  An utterance is *not* “complete in itself” - it is
> a component in a larger organization: at least a pair, and usually a much
> longer sequence.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 16, 2019, at 3:11 AM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>
> I would  have appreciated a definition of some kind of what the writer
> actually means by "utterance." In absence of that "the word, as a
> compressed version of the utterance" is nonsense, or at least a step
> backwards because it obliterates a concept. Otherwise, I wouldn't mind
> saying that the two are together the micro- and macro-units of dialogue (or
> something having that meaning). The same as Leontyev has two units of
> activity: action and activity, and Marx has two units of political economy:
> commodity and capital. To theorise a complex process you always need two
> units.
>
> The rest of what you have cited reminds me of what Constantin
> Stanislavskii said about the units of an actor's performance:
>
> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/stanislavskii.pdf
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 16/03/2019 5:42 pm, Arturo Escandon wrote:
>
> Thanks for that conceptual jewel, mate.
>
> Let me bring here Akhutina to further show their complementariness:
>
> The minimal holistic unit of conversation is the utterance. An utterance,
> unlike a sentence, is complete in itself. The utterance always carries
> within it the marks and features of who is speaking to whom, for what
> reason and in what situation; it is polyphonic. An utterance develops from
> a motivation, “a volitional objective” and progresses through inner speech
> to external speech. The prime mover of the semantic progression (from the
> inner word that is comprehensible to me alone to the external speech that
> he, the listener, will understand) is the comparison of my subjective,
> evanescent sense, which I attribute to the given word, and its objective
> (constant for both me and my listener) meaning.Thus, the major building
> material for speech production is the living two-voice word. But polyphony
> is a feature of the utterance as expressed in the word; the word carrying
> personal sense is an abbreviation of the utterance. Thus, the utterance and
> the word, as a compressed version of the utterance, are the units of speech
> acts, communication, and consciousness.
>
> Best
>
> Arturo
>
>
> --
> Sent from Gmail Mobile
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley
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