Re: thought experiment

Bruce Robinson (bruce.rob who-is-at btinternet.com)
Mon, 20 Sep 1999 13:42:47 +0100

Gary Shank's thought experiment cropped up as I was sorting through back
mail from xmca.

> Here are my questions -- to what degree should I, writing in 1999, be held
> accountable for my lack of use of we and wir? Does the fact that we and
> wir are not a part of my writing mean that i would reject them if they
> existed, or rather only that they do not exist yet? Or is my ignorance
> really a form of false consciousness, that i need to be held accountable
> for? That is, should i have been trying to express the ideas of we and wir
> somehow using the writing conventions that i did have? Or is it a sign of
> false consciousess in my culture that affects everything i say or do, no
> matter how peripheral it might appear to be? Should we therefore go back
> and edit in we and wir? Or would that be our own form of false
> consciousness?

Attempts to reform language only seem to be successful when they are
embedded in a wider and powerful social movement - which is only to be
expected given that changes in language are not a matter of individual
consciousness but of social interaction and embeddedness in everyday
practice. Thus it is difficult to imagine that 'chairperson' would have been
generally accepted - as it has at least in the circles in which I move in
the UK - without the existence of a strong feminist movement, which often
took the form of someone leaping up at the back of a meeting to protest when
someone used the gendered form. A counter-example might be Esperanto, which
has been a social movement, but one with insufficient strength to make
people take up the language.

Conversely attempts to change language which emerge from some rational
analysis of how to make language better / fairer / more logical are doomed
to failure (e.g. GB Shaw's attempts to reform English spelling) unless they
enrol the state / education system on their side. I'd be interested to know
from any German xmca'ers the progress of the 'Rechtschreibreform' where the
German state has been attempting to remove illogical / old-fashioned
spellings but met up with traditionalist resistance.

> I'm not trying to start a fight. I'm working with some very old texts
that
> are saying some very valuable things in non-20th century ways. How do i
> need to handle those texts, so that my readers can see the meat and not
the
> vast difference in styles and cultures?

Here's a favourite Vygotsky quote of mine from 'Crisis of Psychology',
where he attacks the idea that knowledge can only come from direct, sensory
experience:

"...it is a gross mistake to suppose that science can only study what is
given in immediate experience. How does the psychologist study the
unconscious; the historian and geologist, the past; the physicist-optician
invisible beams and the philologist - ancient languages? The study of
traces, influences, the method of interpretation and reconstruction, the
method of critique and the finding of meaning have been no less fruitful
than the method of direct 'empirical' observation... Scientific knowledge
and immediate perception do not coincide at all... It is just a matter of
how to interpret these traces, by what method... It is therefore a question
of finding the right interpretation and not refraining from any
interpretation"

It's not clear to me why you think that seeing the vast differences in
cultures and the meat of Duns Scotus are mutually exclusive?

Bruce Robinson

My thought experiment is designed
> to put myself into the shoes, of, say, Duns Scotus and see how it would
> feel to have my words understood in a contemporary polticial way. Not
that
> I expect anyone to be reading any of my words 700 years from now, or 7
> years from now, for that matter :-)
>
> your thoughts?
>
> gary shank
> shank who-is-at duq.edu
>
>
>