Re: [xmca] searle on writing

Well, I wouldn't mind at all. Regarding Searle, I think he should be more
careful when talking about "primitive" and "civilized" societies, there
might be involuntary value judgments lurking here. And of course not all
writing is the same: there are different writing systems; for instance, it
can be argued that alphabetic writing has a combinatorial power similar to
language (and, for that matter, mathematics).

As regards memory and preservation, there is also the issue, raised by Jack
Goody, of writing "decontextualizing" utterances from concrete interactional
settings and "recontextualizing" them in the frame of the writtent text.

Goody has much more to say about it, as well as Lévi-Strauss in "The Savage
Mind" and many more authors such as McLuhan, Havelock, Ong, Olson, etc. (and
of course you and Sylvia Scribner).

There is a Portuguese neuroscientist, José Castro Caldas, whose team has
been working on the processing of written language in the brain. I will try
to find some of his papers and then, if you guys agree, I can send them to
the list.

Best,
Luiz

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:42:30 -0700, Mike Cole wrote
> The topic of language, thought, writing, and development is
> certainly worth discussion. A lot of it. Are you volunteering to
> organize such a discussion, Luiz Carlos? mike
>
> On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 10:34 AM, Luiz Carlos Baptista <
> lucabaptista@fcsh.unl.pt> wrote:
>
> > Hi. I found an interview with John Searle about language and writing, it
> > might be interesting for discussion. It is here:
> >
> > http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/searle.htm
> >
> > **********
> > "The brain is a wonderful thing. Everybody should have one."
> >
> > Luiz Carlos Baptista
> >
> > Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem
> > Universidade Nova de Lisboa
> > Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
> > Avenida de Berna, 26-C
> > 1069-061 Lisboa
> > Portugal
> >
> > lucabaptista@fcsh.unl.pt
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
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Received on Tue Jul 15 11:42 PDT 2008