I've very much enjoyed evesdropping on the conversation so far. Now I'd
like to try to join in with a point or two on the materiality of speech.
I liked Mike Gerber's pragmatic question about the consequences of
identifying speech as "material" or not. It would be easy for materialists
and idealists to line up in fervert opposition for no reason other than
ideological prejudice. His question seems likely to reduce this
possibility.
It seems to me that speech is EITHER material or immaterial, depending on
how you want to look at it. As Judy Diamonstone pointed out, it is clearly
material since it involves movement of air or other molecules. On the
other hand, it is clearly immaterial if one considers it as a pattern. (A
pattern or relationship is not a material thing as one can quickly discover
by trying to grab "next to.") Speech is also BOTH material and immaterial.
It always has a pattern and it is always transmitted by a material medium.
Both facets are always available.
I believe the answer to Mike's question about the consequences of viewing
speech as material or not is the usual pragmatic one that it depends on
what you are trying to do. If you are trying to develop a speaker to
transmit intelligible speech through water, for example,then the material
aspects of the medium might be centrally important. If you are trying to
anticipate a person's future speech, or other actions, then its patterned
aspects would be critical. Taking speech one way can help advance one set
of purposes, while being useless for the other.
A related issue concerns the nature of an "artifact." I take this to be
anything constructed by artifice, i.e. anything whose production is
regulated by a goal or end. This harks back to Olli's emphasis on speech
being produced in relation to an "ideal." He made this point to emphasize
the immateriality of speech, so he apparently conceives of an ideal (or
end) as a pattern. It also relates in Paul Prior's point that describing
things in functional terms, (i.e., in relation to ends), differs from
conventional objective or thing-description.
So, is speech an "artifact"? It seems we usually take it as one, i.e. we
interpret speech in terms of the ends regulating its production (as Olli
suggests). Even when interpreted in terms of ambiguous, conflicting, or
changing ends, it is taken as an artifact. However, it COULD also be taken
as a mechanical production, as current programs which generate speech by
modeling the mouth and esophagus do.
The main point is simply that essentialism isn't essential. We don't have
to decide what speech essentially is. We don't have to permanently settle
for one option to the exclusion of the other. I don't really know how
comfortable Vygotsky would have been with this pragmatic conclusion, but my
sense is that it would not have caused great distress, his psychology being
a functional one.
I can't resist, in ending, quoting Boyd Bode's lovely way of making the
point that functional descriptions differ from thing descriptions.
"To take for granted that the human individual has a mind somewhere about
his person is much like assuming that a frog carries under it skin a
miscellaneous assortment of jumps. In the case of the frog it is evident
enough that the jumps are nothing more than certain activities engaged in
at various times, and that the proper way to get information about jumping
is not to inspect the frog in order to locate the jumps, but to study the
conditions (including the structure of the frog) under which jumping takes
place....consciousness, like jumping, is not a having but a doing, not a
static possession, but a form of behavior." (Fundamentals of Education,
1921, p. 203).
Eric Bredo
Eric Bredo
Department of Educational Studies
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
804-924-0886