[Xmca-l] Re: Saussure vs Peirce
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Sun Mar 17 22:38:58 PDT 2019
Greg, *a word is a sign for a concep**t.* I have said this
several times. I mean this as definitional, rather than
saying predicating it to what may or not be counted as a
word or a phrase or whatever. What is important for my work
is the *concept *which the word or phrase or gesture or
symbol or whatever signifies. It doesn't matter that unit is
a part of an aglutinative sentence/word, or a combination of
syllables or words. It is whatever is used in the given form
of communication which evokes a universal concept (as
opposed to /instances /of a concept or /activity /organised
around a concept).
Every science, insofar as it is a mature science, is founded
on a unit not an arbitrary collection of phenomena. Further,
it seems that every science has two units: one *micro *and
one *macro *(at least; a science may have multiple
subfields). It turns out the the unit is constitutive of the
field of phenomena, which is redefined by the formation of
the science.
What we see in Thinking and Speech is word meaning and concept.
What we see in Capital is commodity-exchange and capital.
What we see in biology is cell and organism.
In general, there is a macro unit which is typical of the
phenomena we want to understand, but in order to do this we
have to seek out the cell which can be understood
viscerally, and combinations and interactions of which give
us the macro unit. This macro unit justifies the name of
unit (rather than system) only because it is the unit of a
larger process; for example, a concept is a unit of a
culture; a capital (i.e., a capitalist firm) is a unit of a
capitalist economy; an organism is a unit of an ecosystem, .
Make sense?
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 18/03/2019 4:03 pm, Greg Thompson wrote:
> Andy,
>
> I'm not sure I understand your sense of "units"? Are the
> units (e.g., words) decomposable into units on their own?
> Or is their meaning also dependent upon the whole of which
> they are a part? (such that the meaning of words both make
> up the complex whole and are made up by teh complex
> whole). I tend to see language (along with, for that
> matter, Marx's commodity and capital) as the latter but I
> can't quite tell if you are with me or not.
>
> There are further troubles when it comes to looking cross
> linguistically at so-called words, e.g., with
> agglutinative languages where sentences are indeed words
> (or vice-versa). Not to mention the potential for
> smaller-than-word units to have meaning. This is a
> different problem from my question about units but it is a
> problem for taking words-as-units unless one isn't
> interested in those other languages.
>
> Enjoying the talk about talk,
> -greg
>
> On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 6:29 PM Andy Blunden
> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>
> Martin, I get the point, but any complex process is
> made up of units, many of them. That's the point of
> using analysis by units. The excerpt you give is a
> trivial one. In general you need /all/ the numerous
> utterances in a conversation to understand an extended
> interaction. It is like Engestrom who thinks when two
> activities interact, we have to have a new "fourth
> generation" unit, i.e., two activity systems
> interacting. But that is only because he took the
> activity system as a /system /not a /unit /in the
> first place.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 18/03/2019 9:14 am, Martin Packer wrote:
>> Seems to me, David, that the notion that the basic
>> unit is the pair is precisely what helps us
>> understand an exchange such as:
>>
>> A. How are you?
>> B. Fine, thanks, and you?
>> A. XXX
>>
>> One pair is constituted by “How are you” and “Fine,
>> thanks,” while “and you?” is the first part of a
>> projected second pair. This is why one might have the
>> intuition that speaker B is doing more than one thing
>> (though I’d suggest 2, not 3), and that something
>> more is expected from speaker A.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Mar 17, 2019, at 4:17 PM, David Kellogg
>>> <dkellogg60@gmail.com <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Well, Bakhtin is full of precisely the kind of
>>> sloppiness that Andy is deploring, Helena. So for
>>> example Bakhtin says that a whole novel can be
>>> considered as an utterance. You take down the book
>>> and open it. The novelist has something to say to
>>> you. He says it. And then you close the book and you
>>> put it back on the shelf.
>>>
>>> That's all very well, and it's very useful as a way
>>> of showing that literature is not some "state within
>>> a state": it is also made of language stuff, by
>>> people who have a historical existence and not just
>>> an afterlife. But it doesn't help Andy (or me, or my
>>> wife who studies these things full time) distinguish
>>> sub-units within the novel which will help us
>>> understand how novels are structured, how this
>>> structure has changed with their function, and how
>>> the very functions have changed as literature has
>>> evolved. And these WERE the problems which Bakhtin
>>> set himself (e.g. in "Novel and Epic" and elsewhere).
>>>
>>> We see the same problem from the other end
>>> (micro-rather than macroscopic) with the minimal
>>> pair (originally, in the work of Sacks, "adjacency
>>> pair"). It's all very well and it's very useful as a
>>> way of understanding how conversations get
>>> structured as they go along, how people know when
>>> its their turn to talk and how they know when the
>>> rules have been broken. But it doesn't help us to
>>> understand, for example, why we all feel that when
>>> you say "How are you?" and somebody says "Fine,
>>> thanks, and you?" there seem to be three utterances
>>> in the second pair part, and the exchange as a whole
>>> doesn't seem finished, even though if we are using
>>> turns as the element (pair part) of the minimal
>>> pair, it really should be.
>>>
>>> Craig Brandist remarks that Bakhtin uses the term
>>> "dialogue" in so many different ways that he has
>>> rendered it meaningless. I think the same thing is
>>> true of the way he uses "utterance".
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Sangmyung University
>>>
>>> New Article;
>>>
>>> David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE:
>>> VYGOTSKY’S ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’, THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL
>>> DEVELOPMENT AND ‘INGROWING’ IN THE WEEKEND STORIES
>>> OF KOREAN CHILDREN, British Journal of Educational
>>> Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
>>> <https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>
>>>
>>> Some e-prints available at:
>>>
>>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 1:47 AM Helena Worthen
>>> <helenaworthen@gmail.com
>>> <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I find it useful to think of an utterance as
>>> bounded on two ends: on one, by the utterance to
>>> which it responds, on the other, by the
>>> utterance that responds to it. Thus you can
>>> discern utterances within utterances. Minimally,
>>> a two -part exchange, as Martin says; maximally,
>>> a whole stream of briefer utterances bounded by
>>> their prompt and response.
>>>
>>> Helena Worthen
>>> helenaworthen@gmail.com
>>> <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Mar 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, Martin Packer
>>>> <mpacker@cantab.net
>>>> <mailto:mpacker@cantab.net>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> According to conversation analysts, the minimal
>>>> unit in conversation is the adjacency pair: a
>>>> two-part exchange in which the second utterance
>>>> is functionally dependent on the first.
>>>> Question-answer; greeting-greeting;
>>>> request-reply, and so on. An utterance, then,
>>>> is both a turn and a move within a
>>>> conversation. An utterance is *not* “complete
>>>> in itself” - it is a component in a larger
>>>> organization: at least a pair, and usually a
>>>> much longer sequence.
>>>>
>>>> Martin
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Mar 16, 2019, at 3:11 AM, Andy Blunden
>>>>> <andyb@marxists.org
>>>>> <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I would have appreciated a definition of some
>>>>> kind of what the writer actually means by
>>>>> "utterance." In absence of that "the word, as
>>>>> a compressed version of the utterance" is
>>>>> nonsense, or at least a step backwards because
>>>>> it obliterates a concept. Otherwise, I
>>>>> wouldn't mind saying that the two are together
>>>>> the micro- and macro-units of dialogue (or
>>>>> something having that meaning). The same as
>>>>> Leontyev has two units of activity: action and
>>>>> activity, and Marx has two units of political
>>>>> economy: commodity and capital. To theorise a
>>>>> complex process you always need two units.
>>>>>
>>>>> The rest of what you have cited reminds me of
>>>>> what Constantin Stanislavskii said about the
>>>>> units of an actor's performance:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/stanislavskii.pdf
>>>>>
>>>>> Andy
>>>>>
>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> Andy Blunden
>>>>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>>>> On 16/03/2019 5:42 pm, Arturo Escandon wrote:
>>>>>> Thanks for that conceptual jewel, mate.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Let me bring here Akhutina to further show
>>>>>> their complementariness:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The minimal holistic unit of conversation is
>>>>>> the utterance. An utterance, unlike a
>>>>>> sentence, is complete in itself. The
>>>>>> utterance always carries within it the marks
>>>>>> and features of who is speaking to whom, for
>>>>>> what reason and in what situation; it is
>>>>>> polyphonic. An utterance develops from a
>>>>>> motivation, “a volitional objective” and
>>>>>> progresses through inner speech to external
>>>>>> speech. The prime mover of the semantic
>>>>>> progression (from the inner word that is
>>>>>> comprehensible to me alone to the external
>>>>>> speech that he, the listener, will
>>>>>> understand) is the comparison of my
>>>>>> subjective, evanescent sense, which I
>>>>>> attribute to the given word, and its
>>>>>> objective (constant for both me and my
>>>>>> listener) meaning.Thus, the major building
>>>>>> material for speech production is the living
>>>>>> two-voice word. But polyphony is a feature of
>>>>>> the utterance as expressed in the word; the
>>>>>> word carrying personal sense is an
>>>>>> abbreviation of the utterance. Thus, the
>>>>>> utterance and the word, as a compressed
>>>>>> version of the utterance, are the units of
>>>>>> speech acts, communication, and consciousness.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Best
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Arturo
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> Sent from Gmail Mobile
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Martin
>>>>
>>>> /"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman
>>>> or Dr. Lowie or discuss matters with
>>>> Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become
>>>> at once aware that my partner does not
>>>> understand anything in the matter, and I end
>>>> usually with the feeling that this also applies
>>>> to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> <http://greg.a.thompson.byu.edu>
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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