[Xmca-l] Re: Saussure vs Peirce

[James Ma]

Yes, and also using consciousness to figure out consciousness!

James


mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> 于 2019年4月18日周四 19:41写道：

> 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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