Two Meta-Remarks and a question to the SemEco discussion

From: Alfred Lang (alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch)
Date: Tue Nov 12 2002 - 08:10:36 PST


Dear XMCA members,

I just want to tell you how grateful I am receiving so many and so
interesting responses and questions to my SemEco presentations and
elucidations. I want to spend as much time as I can to the growing
text of my SemEco compendium. Yet there is an excellent symbiosis and
mutual instigation between the book and XMCA discussion which I
really appreciate. So I hope to steadily present further material in
suitable portions. My excuses to all who find some of my posts too
long and too many.

The second point pertains to my remark on the probable role of the
figure-ground principle on the basic procedure of Western philosophy
and science. Nobody has taken that. Have I not been clear enough? Or
do you not think it is a worthwhile subject? I could understand if
you feel it's a very hot potato. If it has its role in all of
science, then the science cannot claim to operate independently of
human perceivers and thinkers. No matter whether some human conceived
apparatus is mediating from the object to the perceiver. Which, is
indeed, what a couple of scientists suspected and had troubles
integrating into their understanding of their science. One famous
example is Wolfgang Pauli and the role of the experimenter have and
following extra-scientific options in designing this or that
experiment for clearing a certain theoretical question. I don't want
to delay further going on in presenting chapters of SemEco, but this
is really an important point.

As to Jay's highly interesting exposition of functional
semiotic/semantic views on the problem of appraisal etc. I shall
respond soon. There is an ambivalence for me, however, which I would
like to clear if possible in advance.

Do I understand your exposee rightly, Jay, that what you denote as
semiotic pertains to the relation of some complex and dynamic object
range and its inquiry by the researcher and theoretician? For
instance the basic evaluative dimensions your mention: how do you see
that differentiation? Is it one of the field of inquiry; or is it one
attained mainly by the ways of distinctions our semantic order
suggests; or is it one of unavoidable cooperation, so to say,
inquiring and the inquired? Obviously, its not a categorical system
of distinctions but rather one of qualities that my coexist in any
concrete circumstances; so it may have the character of a typology
that allow to ascribe several if not all of the dimensions to any one
item, perhaps in a kind of characteristic profile?

Or am I completely wrong in that functional semantics is not a
discourse with references outside the discourse, i.e. of the nature
of a coordination of signifiers to something signified or a dyadic
semiotic meaning designative dimensions to something that is to be
described by them?

Alfred

-- 

Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland http://www.langpapers.net --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch



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