Re: [xmca] Re: Word Meaning and Action: What' Plausible branch?

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

I don't think I'm contradicting myself, Andy. We'e trying to figure out the statements LSV made about language; about speech and its relationships to thought. Speaking and thinking are both activities (I'm not sure if you're using the term in some special sense), but they are clearly not identical activities. Words are artifacts, obviously, and they are constituted in activity, obviously. The point is to figure out the character of the particular kind of artifact that is the word. If you want to adopt an ontology in which activity is fundamental, I won't try to dissuade you! I just don't see any evidence that this was LSV's ontology. And I don't think it is sufficient to stop there.

Let's consider some of your examples:

> A person who utters a word in their sleep, or reads out the text of
>   a document in a foreign language, for example, is not meaning
>   anything by what they utter. There is a word, but no meaning. A
>   meaningful word is always essentially an active constituent of a
>   social relation (including to a social relation to oneself). When I
>   say "stop please!" to [sic] you, then as an English-speaker you know
>   that I mean I want and command you to stop.

I think you are confusing meaning with intention. If the sleeper speaks in my language their words can have meaning for me. If others listen to me reading a text in a foreign language my words can have meaning for them. But more importantly the task is to explain *how* it is that a word can be taken as meaningful, and on some occasions but not on others. What is it about the word, as a kind of artifact, that enables it to "carry my meaning," as you put it? Can a spade carry meaning? Can a 1000 peso bill carry meaning? It can carry value. Is the meaning that a word carries truly "my" meaning, or "yours"?  

On Jun 17, 2011, at 9:06 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:

> Martin, you are arguing against yourself. The idea of talking speech as as artifact-mediated activity is *not* that this is a special property of the spoken word or speech, and nor is it so that we can make analogies with other domains of activity. It is a fundamental view of the world. Not matter and mind. Not the four elements. Not subject and object. Not God. *Activity*. Activity always uses artefacts, but the nature of the artefact is constituted in activity. Activity is social.
> 
> By defining "subjective/objective" solely in terms of indivual consciousness you are using an ontology of mind and matter to prove that an ontology of activity is wrong. Of course, that makes sense. If your world is made up of individuals with their individual consciousness sending messages to each other, then Acitivity Theory is a big mistake. But the claim is that activity is THE fundamental category, from which concepts like mind, matter, space, time, meaning, value, etc., etc., are derived.
> 
> Andy
> 
> 

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