Re: [xmca] "Inner Form" of Word, Symmetry, Ivanov Bateson?

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

I dunno, David.

Certainly, LSV considered the changes in word meaning to be a big deal:

Chapter 7: "the main result is not this thesis in itself but another, which constitutes the capital achievement of our research: the discovery that the meanings of words develop. The discovery of the changing meaning of words and their development is the new and essential contribution of our study to the theory of thinking and of speech; it is our principal discovery, which permits for the first time to definitively triumph over the postulate that was at the base of old theories on thinking and language, the postulate of the consistency and immutability of word meaning."

And there are places to be sure where LSV seems to make word meaning as fluid as you suggest:

Chapter 7 again: "The discovery of the inconstancy, volatility and variability of the word meanings and their development represents by itself a principal and basic discovery, which alone can deliver the entire study of thinking and speech from a blind alley. Word meaning is inconstant. It changes in the course of the development of child. It changes with different modes of functioning in thought."

And of course his account of adult child communication is that one word has a different meaning to each of them:

We have in Chapter 5 "the practical coincidences of word meaning	used by children and adults which make verbal communication and mutual understanding between children and adults possible."

But all that seems too subjective and unstable a basis for mutual understanding and communication. You're reading a lot of Bakhtin into your Vygotsky here! The stable core of language seems to have completely dissolved. Perhaps this is how sophisticated adults use language - poets all. But as LSV pointed out, young children are realists about language: they consider word meaning to be so fixed that they cannot detach the name from one object and apply it to another. So what you've proposed here doesn't seem to be the whole story ontogenetically. 

Certainly, if word meaning is this fluid, it is essential to build reason on something else. Certainly LSV would needed to distinguish concept from word meaning.

Martin


On May 30, 2011, at 6:20 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

> Let's take Andy's definition of inner form: it's the meaning of Tatiana's "action" (in which Andy includes Tatiana's word) for Tatiana herself. But in order for that inner form to be understood by someone else, say, Krista, it must become an outer form. And the nature of understanding that outer form? It seems to me that the way it happens is that it becomes inner form for Krista; that is what understanding really is. 
>  
> That gets us out of the idea of an immutable inner form in a hurry!

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