Phil sounds a theme that I have derived from my experience as well, and
argued quite a bit to sympathetic linguists who look at discourse and text
and work their way DOWN from large-scale to small-scale as well as Up the
other way. Compositional semantics has always struck me as implausible if
not downright hilarious, but there are serious people who have spent their
lives on it, and it is take seriously by many who are basically inclined to
a reductionist view.
It is, I think, basic to the nature of meaning itself, to semiosis, that it
involves multiple scales, or what is usually called "context", in time,
space, or the extensionality of "meaning" as a PROCESS. You can be
Leibnizian and say that words are monads, with an internalist 'awareness'
of other words, or you can be second-order cybernetic and say that there is
a sort of downward causation from the whole to its parts, or you can be
radical about temporality itself and say that it flows at different rates
at different scales in parallel (according to the pacing of the activity
that defines time or duree experientially and operationally on each scale)
.... but you always get back to the same conclusion, Phil's.
But Phil had more to say, about segmentation and 'paralinguistic'
information. Speech is NOT composed of word units. That is as demonstrable
as anything in physics, at least if by speech we mean a material acoustic
phenomenon. It is our INTERPRETATION of speech that segments it (or can
learn to segment it, especially post-literacy training), in a semiotic
process which again depends on wholes at various scales. The "units" of
words are not THERE to be added up compositionally, though semiotically we
can learn to "hear" them analytically. What comes down does not necessarily
also go up. (If you watch speech in a medium where you have not learned to
"hear" or "see" the words, such as on an oscilloscope, your also discover
that a lot of the consonants and some of the vowels you "hear" ain't there
physically, much less the word boundaries.) But there is a LOT else that IS
there .... all those buzzes and hisses and tone shifts, all that
vocalization which exceeds verbalization (as it must, a separate argument
but reliable). And all that super-verbal vocalization carries information,
and meaning, or at least the super-species of meaning we call feeling.
Unconsciously indexical and often consciously as well. All ruled right out
of linguistics by academic fiat, but not out of communication theory. Which
is why I am a "functionalist." Linguistics is to human spoken and written
communication much as classical physics is to the study of complex
phenomena like turbulence or living cells -- it tells you only about the
part that fits the ideological predispositions of modernism ...
Of which I have recently been reading a new version, that of Isabelle
Stengers (famous as collaborator with Ilya Prigogine, the European 'father'
of complexity theory), who has some interesting things to say about the
principle of sufficient reason and how it led physics down the garden path
(nah, the concrete path) first in ways that didn't matter, and then in ways
that did. I have not got to the part of her book _Power and Invention_ that
discusses what the consequences have been for other disciplines that
followed natural science's lead. Her approach is not a dry philosophy, but
has some very wet things to say about risk, passion, and humanity as
touchstones of valid knowledge. The savoury thing about it is that she
makes her arguments in very rationalist modernist terms, using new science
to upend philosophies beholden to old science. It is regrettable that in
many respects philosophy and the social sciences, at least in the
English-speaking world, remain WAY behind the leading edge of intellectual
developments in the natural sciences. The old science became a bad guy
under modernism, but various post-modern sciences have been offering
alternative for quite some time now, and Stengers is trying to sort out the
possibilities on offer.
All of which does have a lot to suggest about memory, by way of the more
basic issues of time and process-oriented views of the real. Stengers likes
Whitehead as well as Latour and Serres. More as we play in this 'long
conversation' .... JAY.
At 11:58 AM 8/8/2001 +1000, you wrote:
>At 06:23 PM 7/08/2001 -0600, Phikl W wrote:
>> odd, isn't it, that there's nothing about comprehension for words or
>>sentences - oh, well. perhaps diane can explain this.
>
>Phil's sparked a ramble:
>
>I've been reading, when I can, a book called "Spaces between words: The
>origins of silent reading" Paul Saenger, 1997. It's a nicely detailed
>history of how we have come to believe the conceit that single words, and
>smaller such units, having inherent meanings.
>
>Before I done book lernin', I used to spend (at various times and among
>various other activities) many hours in front of a computer screen
>digitally editing voice overs for documentaries, adverts, etc in recording
>studios. There are usually no breaks between words, even when your ear
>"tells you" there is. If you spend long enough with a particular piece of
>dialogue, listening to it (and "looking" at it), over and over and over,
>you will fisrtly notice that there are all these other sounds: clicks,
>gurgles, snorts, hisses, rumbles, breathing sounds, etc, etc. If you listen
>long enough, you might suddenly have the strange experience of the sounds
>emptying themselves entirely of semantic content. At that point all you can
>hear is the clicks and buzzes and rumbles and melodies; the harmonics and
>atmospherics; the heavings and huffings and squirmings of the human body in
>the act of making meanings with the voice.
>
>The smashing of human languaging practices into discrete particles,
>efficient as it is for *individualised* written communication and recording
>purposes, lends a great force to the belief that making meaning is a
>building up of phonemes, words, etc, when in fact something entirely
>different appears to be the case. As inefficient as the early mediaevalists
>were at writing stuff down on books (made of as many as 100 animal hides),
>they were not (at one time) overcome by the illusion that meaning is made
>up of little bits that get built up into bigger bits that all of a sudden
>make "sense".
>
>I think that maybe Malinowski's "long conversation" is far more instructive
>a metaphor for understanding meaning-making systems as organic environments
>that we mold, walk through, "drink" from, and splash about, more often than
>not unconsciously, in making our way through being human.
>
>It's truly a marvel that we have ever understood anything at all, although
>*it would seem* the reductionist project, "hyper"-ised as it is in
>combination with a global, electronic, mass-mediated, binary-digitised,
>mythologised, homogenised simulation of human "meanings", has the
>progressive effect of obliterating, bit by bit, comprehension, sociality,
>and memory.
>
>If you think I'm being hyperbolic, ask people if they remember what they
>were doing the same time a week ago, or a month ago. Ask them, for example,
>(if they saw it) what the lead story was on national news was last night; a
>week ago; a month ago -- and so on. Ask a group of people "how many of you
>know your next-door neighbour?" The results of this kind of casual research
>is remarkable, at least in my experience.
>
>But then, what is it important that we remember? Who is important to know?
>
>Regards,
>Phikl G.
>
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
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