>Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 10:19:22 -0400
>To: <bison who-is-at mail.utexas.edu>
>From: Jay Lemke <jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu>
>Subject: RE: thoughts on artifacts and appropriations
>
>David,
>
>Thanks for your note. I guess we are all to some degree prisoners of the
pointless dichotomy of people from objects. Of course there is no reason
why some kinds of objects can't have emotions; reading the subtractive
hierarchy backwards, emotional attributions are one of the properties that
begin to appear around, say, animals or pets, and continue on up the
hierarchy (in fact they seem to peak just below the top in our culture,
since middle-aged, middle-class men are supposed to have less emotion than
women, working-class people, etc.).
>
>Of course my actual theory is that objects are a special class of people,
MINUS the properties like emotions, and as you point out, children have to
be TAUGHT NOT to atttribute emotions to some kinds of objects. Probably we
should have a special subclass in the hierarchy for toys; they are rather
like less-animate pets, I suppose. In fact a friend in London is doing a
semiotics of toys, and they are, not surprisingly quite like people,
animals, etc. in may ways in terms of what and how they mean for us.
>
>One might also wonder, in this model, what the difference is between
emotions in people vs. emotions in animals (at least as seen from the human
point of view). It may well be that emotions function more like signs for
people than they do for animals, though they also function as signs for
animals, I'm pretty sure. Perhaps in Peircean terms, for animals, emotions
are mainly indexical signs, the result of physiological "causes", or bases
for inference about others (pets certainly seem to interpret human
emotional expressions as signs of our likely behavior towards them), while
for people, emotional expressions are also significantly purely symbolic
signs as well (e.g. mediated by our cultural language categories for what
the set of possible emotions is supposed to be).
>
>So, in short, there are many kinds of objects-with-emotions, and people
are among these. Do remember, though, that I am trying to view people as
functioning in part in the same roles that objects function in, with
objects as "diminished" people-like entities, rather than saying that
either objects and people are contrasting, mutually exclusive categories,
or that people "are" objects. People are "meat", that is to say, we are
also material entities, but semiotically we are not the same kind of
material entities that we assign to the subtractive class we call
"objects". People and objects can fulfill many of the same roles in
activities, but people can also fill roles that objects cannot ... or so we
believe.
>
>best, JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------