Re: [xmca] Antirecapitulationism and the Logical Impossiblity of Social Progress

It's the same in English Leif, or more exactly, the Latin roots of the
English word. Originally, in medieval English, "conscious" meant being "in
the know", ie., being part of a group with access to an esoteric knowledge.

 From the Oxford English Dictionary Online:

f. L. consci-us knowing something with others, knowing in oneself, privy
to, conscious + -OUS. L. consci-us f. con- together + sci- knowing, as in
scire to know: cf. nescius unknowing, præscius foreknowing. There is no
such word in F., which uses conscient in some of the senses (as did also
Bacon); but It. has conscio privy, accessary, guilty, from 16th c.

1. Knowing, or sharing the knowledge of anything, together with another;
privy to anything with another. Obs. [With quot. 1651, cf. L. alicui
alicujus rei conscius.]

Andy

At 07:43 AM 7/04/2008 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi
>
>Just a small note
>
>in my language the word consciousness is
>
>medvetande
>
>med+vetande
>with+knowing
>i.e. knowing with - another person
>
>Leif
>Sweden
>7 apr 2008 kl. 00.33 skrev David Kellogg:
>
>>No problem, Martin!
>>
>> In Halliday's 1992 essay "How do you mean?" (Collected Works,
>>Vol. 1, p. 354) he says:
>>
>> "We have often pointed out that it takes two to mean; but we
>>still tend to refer to consciousness as if it was an individual
>>phenomenon, with the social as an add-on feature. I would prefer
>>the Vygotskyan perspective, whereby consciousness is itself a
>>social mode of being."
>>
>> I asked Halliday about this when I met him in Tokyo, and he said
>>that he doesn't refer to Vygotsky much because he finds that when
>>people do they do not mean what Vygotsky meant, but that he DOES
>>mean what Vygotsky meant.
>>
>> The first page of the grammar is Halliday and Matthiessen,
>>Introduction to Functional Grammar, third edition, p. 3, where he
>>says the grammar purports to answer the question "Why does the text
>>mean what it does (to me, or to anyone else)?" To me and to
>>Widdowson, this suggests that a grammar, which necessarily
>>decontextualizes language, can explain how texts mean.
>>
>> Widdowson criticizes this view at BOOK LENGTH in his 2004 work
>>"Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis",
>>which is essentially a reworking of his Ph.D. thesis. See
>>especially 16-35, Chapter Two.
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>>
>>---------------------------------
>>You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of
>>Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.
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>
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  Andy Blunden : http://home.mira.net/~andy/ tel (H) +61 3 9380 9435,
mobile 0409 358 651

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Received on Mon Apr 7 06:59 PDT 2008