Jay, I really like the paragraph cited below in your 11/02 post. I have a
question prompted by a passage in it:
"... the ontological price of making the social-semiotic a part of the
material is that the material can no longer be foundational for the social
..."
Materialist ontology argues that consciousness is a product of the material
world - that the material is foundational to consciousness. In my
interpretation of this view, materiality is the foundation of the
biological, and the biological - also material - is foundational for the
social. I would then suggest that the material world for humans is
composed of both concrete objects and processes (material things) and
abstract objects and thought processes (human consciousness). How does
this interpretation of materialism jive with your view?
- Steve Gabosch
Jays's full paragraph:
For many of us, this means that if we want to be genuinely post-Cartesian
and reject idealism and non-materialist views of cognition or social
dynamics (Hegel is hardly a spent force in historical explanation of
cultural change ...), then the ontological price of making the
social-semiotic a part of the material is that the material can no longer
be foundational for the social. The social and cultural are not built on
top of an autonomous biological-physical foundation; both are built
together, or not at all. And this mixing of the natural and the cultural,
at the level of the human individual, requires some changes in our
humanistic outlook. Some decentering.
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