[Xmca-l] Re: Saussure vs Peirce

[Greg Thompson]

Yes, that clarifies a good bit.
(and I think helps me to understand some points of disagreement - and I
feel like maybe I keep re-discovering these... and let me apologize in
advance for the next time I ask for clarification after forgetting these
differences all over once more).
-greg

On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 11:41 PM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> 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> 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> 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>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, Martin Packer <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> 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://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>
>

-- 
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://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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