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Re: [xmca] Word Meaning and Concept



On Thu, 16 Jun 2011, Andy Blunden wrote:

I agree, Tony. And OED isn't so bad anyway. "To mean" is defined (mean v. tr. II) "to signify, to convey or carry a meaning, significance, consequence, etc" and meaing is the gerund, the process of meaning.

As Goethe said in relation to Bildung, "we Germans use the same word to indicate both the process and the product," and Activity Theory prefers to see things as actions or processes, rather than reifying our actions as nouns.

The idea of Bildung is central to my work, and I make a point of using "formation" in the translation, for exactly this reason. Even to speak of process and product is to regard the activity as one of _production_ rather than as one of _formation_. I argue that formation, as such, is a kind of activity in which the state of the formation at any time within its forming is not something that can be seen to exist apart from (or as merely a product of) its forming. The formation at any point in time continues being in*formed by its semiosic formation over time.

There is always a choice, linguistically, well in fact it's damn hard to say anything without using nouns, but you see what I mean?

Yes, and there's nothing wrong with using nouns to designate activities,, once we've learned to think of those activities in their being _as_ activities, first of all.

When Moses Hess argued for Doing as against Having, Marx supported him (See 1844 Manuscripts). It is actually a bourgesois class point of view to take the world as Being and the person as Having, while socialists take the world and the person in terms of Doing. ... but of course we don't talk about class nowadays do we. :) We are also born realists, aren't we? The world confronts as an accumulation of things. But we can also be critical of our tendency to reify our activity.

Andy

Tony Whitson wrote:
The OED reflects the existing usage of words.

Semiotics explores and attempts to account for the nature of signs and sign activity, including the nature of the meaning that signs do, and how signs do their meaning.

Semiotics is not about deference to common usage, any more than is CHAT.

On Wed, 15 Jun 2011, Huw Lloyd wrote:

On 15 June 2011 01:40, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:

Messages in this thread that have appeared subsequently to the one from Andy that I'm responding to here have used "meaning" as a noun (it seems to
me), thereby referring to meaning as something that is appropriately
signified by a noun.

Andy's post suggests using "meaning" as a verb (gerund or participle),
which I think is much better. The meaning of a word is something the word does (actually or potentially), not something it contains, conveys, etc. A person's meaning (like a word's meaning) is also something that the person
does -- just as their dancing is something that they do.


This appears to be more a question of labeling phenomena than disagreeing about the phenomena per se. Though that's hard to tell without agreeing on
the labels.

The 'doing' that you refer to is achieved by the person. The word, sentence
or other phenomena doesn't do anything in this respect.

Meaning in the oxford dictionary is a noun, and its appearance in our emails here is as a noun. We can use "meaning" as a gerund, such as in "meaning is something that all people do" (which is rather infrequent usage). Though we
do not use it as a gerund in "the meaning I interpreted" (which is
frequently used) or "He meant this meaning not that meaning" as in "He wrote
this sentence not that sentence".

I'm not interested in turning over common usage of terms, this is what we
have technical terms for. I can only suggest that you try a substitution
test, that clearly and unambiguously demarcates the term as a verb, to check
that you're using the term consistently.

Huw











I am meaning this in the Peircean sense of meaning as sign-activity, or
semiosis. Andy is suggesting a consistency with LSV.

But is not the "this" that I mean, when I say "I am meaning this,"
something that can be signified by the pronoun "this" (or the nominal
phrase, "my meaning")? I would answer again that what I mean is like what I dance. We can treat my "dance" as a noun that names a thing, but it really is a nominalized term for the dancing -- for something that is not some "thing," but (rather) some doing -- for what is fundamentally an action or
activity. (And dancing/dance seems to align well with acting
(action)/activity.)

We can still differentiate among valid, less valid, or completely deranged
ways a word can _mean_, as it's interpreted in the ongoing semiosic
generation of interpretants (Peirce), and such differentiations can be along the lines of hermeneutical, anthropological, or more juridical or "official"
(as in David's Kangxi example) in/validity; but the array of actual or
potential meaning(s) that a word can do are all within the potentiality of
the word's meaning.

I read David's post as not inconsistent with what I'm reading from Andy, except that instead of "meaning making," I would suggest "meaning doing," or
the doing, not the making, of my meaning, or the meaning of a word.

What is your thinking?


On Mon, 13 Jun 2011, Andy Blunden wrote:

Mike, Vygotsky says in several places that the word is the sign for or
carrier of the concept. As I said earlier, in my reading word meaning is an artefact mediated action, the word being the artefact and the meaning being the action (both subjective and objective), invested with potential for meaning-with by activity-with. A concept is in my humble opinion a cultural unit or form of activity. So word meaning, once developed to the point of
concepts, is related to concept as an action is to an activity.

Andy

mike cole wrote:

That is to compacted and complicated for me to be able to gloss to
myself,
David.
I am struggling with the polysemy of both "meaning" and "concept" in this discussion to make sense of their relationship very well. Ditto sign and
symbol, although Huw's
note about signs and shadows nudged me along. I noted that Anton referred
in
a recent note to "tool and sign/symbol" and wondered what he meant, but
was
too preoccupied to ruminate.

Here is a thought I had while ruminating. Might it be appropriate to say
that meaning is a tool of human processes of concept formation ?

mike

PS- There was a fascinating segment on the American Evening TV Program,
60
minutes, this evening.. A controversy about "The N word" , the banning of Huck Finn, and the success of a book which substitutes the word "slave"
for
the word "nigger." One proponent of the argument for using slave was
teacher
who is shown in class discussing "the n word", asking her class, "why do
we
say the N word instead of 'n-i-g-g-e-r' spelling it out?"

Now THERE is an example of the power of the book!! At least I am not
alone
in my
confusions about such matters. :-))






On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 8:17 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
wrote:


This is Evald Ilyenkov, "The Concept of the Ideal', in "The Ideal in
Human
Activity", Pacifica, CA: MIA, p. 268:

"The meaning of the term 'ideal' in Marx and Hegel is the same, but the
concepts, i.e. the ways of understanding the 'same' meaning are
profoundly
different. After all the word 'concept' in dialectically interpreted
logic
is a synonym for understanding the essence of the' matter, the essence
of
phenomena which are only outlined by a given term; it is by no means a synonym for 'the meaning of the term' which may be formally interpreted
as
the sum total of 'attributes' of the phenomena to which the term is
applied."

Ilyenkov then goes on to discuss Marx's cuckoo-like propensity "not to change the historically formed 'meanings of terms'" but to propose very different understandings thereof, and thus to change the very concept.

Three questions:

a) In addition to the ONTOGENETIC argument against the equation of
meaning
and concept (viz. that if meaning were already equivalent to concept
then
meaning could not develop into a concept), can't we make a SOCIOGENETIC
one?
Doesn?t this sociogenetic argument explain both the cultural adaptation
of
concepts over time (e.g. ?quantity? into ?operator? in math, ?grammar?
into
?discourse? in linguistics) and the cuckoo like exaptation of other
people?s
terms to express quite different concepts by Marx and by Vygotsky (e.g.
"egocentric", "pseudoconcept", etc.)?

b) Viewed sociogenetically, isn't this distinction between conceptual
essence and word meaning the same as the distinction between
signification
value and sense value? That is, from the point of view of Johnson's dictionary (or the Kangxi dictionary, or the Port Royal grammar, or any other state codification of meaning) the state-ratified meaning of words
is
their essence and the other, vernacular uses are simply senses, folk
values,
the range of phenomena to which hoi polloi apply the words?

b) Isn't the OPPOSITE true when we look at the matter microgenetically? That is, from the point of view of interpersonal meaning making, the
essence
of the phenomenon to which I apply the term in the given instance is the self-legitimated, auto-ratified, individually-approved sense value and
the
signification value is simply the range of conventional meanings, the
range
of conventional phenomena to which the word is applied and misapplied by
others?

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education


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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
MIA: http://www.marxists.org

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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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-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
MIA: http://www.marxists.org

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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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