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Re: [xmca] fetishism | word meaning

Dear All:
I do not intend to offend, however faced with the choice in front of me of withdrawing from this forum or of sharing my perspective on spoken language, I choose the later. If one is passionately pursuing understanding, one, above all else, looks for the causes of whatever one is seeking to understand. I am not interested in participating in pointless chit-chat as a social activity/exercise. And I am not much interested in what others who came before have said about my subject of interest, if their pronouncements do not facilitate my own understanding. I have found the information I wish to share only by focusing on the fundamental causative forces that produced spoken language. If those I would like to share my findings with would be more concerned with delving into the matter before us, and be willing to sincerely look for answers, than they are to maintain and defend their assumed position, I believe a genuine dialog could take place. Rarifying the discussion by unnecessarily complicating the search for clarity creates a false aura of expertise around those who are initiated into the lingo, and seems to enable them to establish and protect their status as gate-keepers for the ivory-towered dispensers of "truth". I was looking for the basic functioning of spoken language. I wanted to know what happens when humans use inherently meaningful sounds to refer to things. I realized that, in the absence of any "objective" sense of the ultimate meaning of anything, we derive a sense of the meaning of our world from the subliminal effects on us of our spoken words. When we say the word for something, we are simultaneously thinking of the thing to which we are referring and feeling the effects of the sounds of the words for that thing. Because both the feeling and the thought occur at the same time, we subconsciously assume that the feeling is about the thing. The feeling is really about the word, - the sounds of the word. The effects of the sounds of our words serve to inform us of the meanings of the things that constitute our world. This sense which we derive from our language is not ultimate, but merely our culture. Nevertheless, unless we understand this process, we may be guided by that linguistically- dependant world-view rather than by any reasoned assessment of "the truth" concerning the nature of reality. That we are affected by our vocal sounds stands to reason, but to be fully appreciated, that effect should be experienced. Try non-verbal vocalizing to help you feel how we are affected by our voice. Non- verbal animals communicate vocally. In the final analysis, all we really have to go on in sensing the meaning of anything are our unreasoned feelings about things. Once we ask the question, "What does this or that 'mean'", we are forever searching for the ultimate answer. Only that which we do not question, that which we accept as given, forms the basis for our sense of what is. That primal foundational sense is provided by the subliminal effects of our spoken words. "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was God." Do you see what I mean? 

		J.Gilbert
	
On Jun 7, 2011, at 5:38 PM, Tony Whitson wrote:
David's right, but I think he's explained the least difficult of difficulties in the position that "words are vocal sounds" (which I tried 
                                     ~
to treat charitably with the "ainda nao" comment, conceding that vocal sounds "participate" in the meaning that words do).
What David described is just the difficulty of reducing the "acoustic image" (Sausurre) facet of words to "vocal sounds." Sausurre's students even recorded for us the sketches of sound- waves that Saussure used in his explanations of how phonemes are not just vocal sounds.
Way more difficult is reducing words to something less that signs -- signs in the full sense of Peirce's sign relations, not just Sausurre's structures. 

On Tue, 7 Jun 2011, David Kellogg wrote:


Joseph:
Nobody is being difficult. The theory you are putting forward here is called "direct speech perception". The idea is that phonemes are themselves present in the sound waves, and do not have to be reconstructed by the receiving brain. It's a very radical, empiricist theory that has long been associated with behaviorism (Watson, for example, was a strong proponent of direct perception).
Imagine that you want to convey the letter "A" to me in South Korea. You could rig up a digital camera and send me an image. I would not need to "know" anything about language to get your message; what I see is what I get. That's direct perception.
But that isn't the way we did it. Instead, my computer has a software system that "knows" what an "A" is, and on a given signal will produce it for me. I in turn reconstruct what you mean from the "A" produced by my computer. That is mediated perception.
Vygotskyans,including myself, have always been suspicious of direct perception, and for good reason. As Vygotsky says, it doesn't appear to tell us what is specifically human about human speech (animals, for example, can convey emotion through vocal sounds, but they do not have human speech). This doesn't bother behaviorists; on the contrary, it's one of the strengths of the theory as far as they are concerned. I find it very...well, difficult. But I would say that the difficulty is not in me. 

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Tue, 6/7/11, Joseph Gilbert <joeg4us@roadrunner.com> wrote:


From: Joseph Gilbert <joeg4us@roadrunner.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] fetishism | word meaning
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, June 7, 2011, 5:01 PM


Do you really need clarification or are you merely being difficult?

        J.G.

On Jun 7, 2011, at 2:11 PM, Huw Lloyd wrote:


On 7 June 2011 21:31, Joseph Gilbert <joeg4us@roadrunner.com> wrote:


Do you hold that vocal sounds affect us emotionally/feeling-wise?



Hi Jospeh,  I'm assuming this question is directed at me?
They are capable of emotional influence. Though this a function of the person, rather than the sound. For example, deaf people aren't influenced 
that much.
It's not clear to me how this relates to your usage of "are" in "words are 
vocal sounds".

Will let you mull it over.

Huw




        Joseph Gilbert


On Jun 7, 2011, at 10:25 AM, Huw Lloyd wrote:
On 7 June 2011 16:27, Joseph Gilbert <joeg4us@roadrunner.com> wrote: 

  Words are vocal sounds. Vocal sounds are meaningful.




I think you have an elision here, Joseph.
If you take "are" as the plural of "is", you're effectively saying: 

"A word is a sound, sound is meaningful."

Hence you appear to be conflating the relation of equivalence with
aggregation:

(Spoken) Words are (composed of) vocal sounds.
Just as you might say "Pyramids are (composed of) stone" rather than 
"Pyramids are buildings".

Huw






               Joseph Gilbert


On Jun 6, 2011, at 9:15 PM, Tony Whitson wrote:
Peirce explicitly contended that the meaning of any sign (including 
words,
thoughts, arguments, feelings, or whatever), _qua_ signs, lies in the virtuality of potential future interpretations (just by virtue of the fundamental nature of what it is to be a sign, i.e., in the activity of 
sign-relations).
Also, notice that I'm using "meaning" as something that we -- and our words, thoughts, etc. -- DO, not something they contain, convey, etc. I recently noticed similar usage in the title of Jay's MCA review of 
Sfard's
book, which speaks of "Meaning Mathematically," not "mathematical 
meaning."
The latter locution could mean the same as Jay's, but it also would 
allow
the more familiar reading of "meaning" as a noun. If we need to begin meaning differently than how we might be heard to mean in positivist discourse, I think we need to begin choosing speaking that resists 
assimilation to that discourse.

On Mon, 6 Jun 2011, mike cole wrote:
The poem is neat and your explication brings to mind a recurrent 
thought
when I encounter the core idea of "the thought is completed in the 
word."
I
(think I) know what LSV and Mandelshtam are saying, but I always have 
this
thought that the thought is not yet completed, not in so far as it is 
taken
up, perhaps transformed, and comes back again at a later time, in some 
new,
albeit related, form, to begin that side of the cycle over again. 
mike
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> 
wrote:
I clipped the wrong line from Martin's post in that last message. I 


meant
the Dickinson verse in reponse to the line that now appears below from 
Martin.
In Dickinson's verse, what's not timeless is not merely the meaning 
that
a
word does as a lexical unit in a language (i.e., in the philological 
sense),
but even in a specific utterance the word spoken continues meaning, as 
it
continues living, non-timelessly.


On Sun, 1 May 2011, Tony Whitson wrote:

  On Tue, 26 Apr 2011, Martin Packer wrote:
For LSV word-meaning is not timeless. It changes over time; he 
didn't



  study philology for nothing!




  A word is dead

    When it is said

  Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
  That day.

    --Emily Dickinson
I find it helpful to think of meaning as something that words do -- 
not
something they contain, convey, etc.


  Tony Whitson


UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
  are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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  Tony Whitson

UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
  are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                 -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
 are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
-- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970) __________________________________________ 
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