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Re: [xmca] "Inner Form" of Word, Symmetry, Ivanov Bateson?
Steve:
I agree that a lot of meaning has to be made here (that is, distinguishing, or at least relating, the ideal, the meaningful and the psychological). But the way we make it depends on what we are doing with it.
I guess unlike the more philosophically inclined members of xmca, I usually have a fairly concrete task in mind. My definitions tend to the functional, and you will probably find them subjectivist; your definitions tend to the structural, and I will find them objectivist.
It seems to me that for my purposes (doing coarse forms of discourse analysis, writing unprintable articles on child development, and dabbling dilletantishly in painting) the "ideal" is really just the once-and-future real; it is the potentially real, and it has no material existence apart from its one-and-future realization in the real.
Because it is tied to the real in this way, it can always be seen as a form of meaning. That is, the ideal can always point backwards or forwards to the real, the way that cherry blossoms point back to winter and forward to summer and dragonflies point backwards to summer and forward to winter.
But, as my analogy with blossoms and insects and seasons suggests, there are other forms of meaning that don't involve the ideal. I think it is just as possible to mean material objects (e.g. through pointing and naming) as it is to mean ideals (e.g. through signifying). So I think that the ideal is a subset of meaning; everything that is ideal is meaningful, but not everything that is meaningful is ideal.
Meaning, however, is in its turn a subset of something rather larger, that I would like to call "information". (Halliday uses this same distinction, except that what I call "information", he calls "meaning", and what he calls "meaning", I call information!)
Information also includes things like the speed and position of subatomic particles, and we can speak of entropy of information without having to invoke human consciousness. It seems to me that psychology includes both higher and lower mental processes, and that one of the important distinctions between them is that the latter (e.g. literal perceptions, the involuntary jump you give when you hear a loud bang, etc.) involve information but not meaning.
Meaning is a particular kind of information that has been transformed by human consciousness, just as civilization is that part of the environment that has been transformed by human consciousness, and culture is that part of society is that has been transforemd by consciousness.
(Notice I do not insist that human consciousness be atomized and individual; in fact, like you, I am always inclined to see it in molecular, supra-individual forms, and I am perfectly willing to talk about intentionality and therefore meaning on the level of the family, the community, the class, and even the "nation", although I must admit that I find the latter a little eighteenth century and quaint, and when people talk about the love of a country, I invariably think back twenty two years, to June days in China in 1989.)
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Mon, 6/6/11, Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com> wrote:
From: Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] "Inner Form" of Word, Symmetry, Ivanov Bateson?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, June 6, 2011, 5:48 AM
Apologies for sticking my nose into a discussion just before I leave on a trip and leave my computer behind for a couple weeks, but some statements in your recent message, David, seem to point toward the heart of the matter, so I thought I'd speak up.
I think Martin is on the right track when he differentiates the ideal and the psychological. Much work still needs to be done on this, in my view. It is by no means a resolved question.
When you say "I think that for real people, it is only through interpersonal meaning-making that social relations become real" I find myself thinking that the opposite relation needs to be emphasized - that it is only through social relations that interpersonal meaning-making becomes possible and real.
When you say " 'mean' really means intentionality" I find myself thinking that this statement reduces meaning to only acts of individual consciousness and will, whereas meaning is created by human activity in all its forms.
- Steve
On Jun 5, 2011, at 8:27 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
> ANL equates "meaning" with some ideal representational form. Psychology, on the other hand, is this set of "social relations" apparently unmediated by meaning. (Ha! I'd like to see how THAT works!)
>
> ANL: "In other words, meanings represent an ideal form of the existence of the objective world..."
>
> So! My name represents an ideal form of me, not my tangible, material self. Words like "this"and "that" and "the apple" and so on do not represent literary fictions and not actual objects. Obviously, the development of word meaning, from real to ideal and back again, is not possible.
>
> ANL: "...its properties, connections, and relationships, disclosed by cooperative social practice, transformed and hidden in the material of language."
>
> What "social practice" discloses, language covers up again. Sorry, the MATERIAL of language covers it up again. In other words, pronunciation and bad handwriting are the means by which we are held in thrall, the method by which the properties, (non-relational) connections and (non-connective) relationships (sic) are transformed and hidden.
>
> "For this reason meanings in themselves, that is, in abstraction from their functioning in individual consciousness, are not so “psychological” as the socially recognized reality that lies behind them."
>
> What the devil is a meaning in abstraction from its functioning in an individual consciousness? Is it like a dictionary that no individual consciousness ever cracks open and actually reads?
>
> I think what ANL is trying to say is that meaning is not psychological because it's this ideal representation standing in front of real stuff, while "social relations" (apparently unmediated by meaning) is the real McCoy. That strikes me as utterly false. ANL has somehow transformed "meaning" from a demiurge to a demon.
>
> I think that for real people, it is only through interpersonal meaning-making that social relations become real. After all, "mean" really suggests intentionality--it says I want something to stand for (not in front of) something else. I have no idea why that makes it somehow less psychological; it seems to me it makes it rather more so.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
> --- On Sun, 6/5/11, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
>
>
> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] "Inner Form" of Word, Symmetry, Ivanov Bateson?
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Sunday, June 5, 2011, 7:45 PM
>
>
> But why should we equate the ideal with the psychological, David? I read ANL as saying the practices make word meaning just as practices make use value. Both are ideal but neither is psychological. That's precisely the trap that it's easy to fall into, to think that anything ideal is in the individual mind. Word meaning obscures the practices that produced it in the same way the the value of the commodity obscures the labor that produced it. Bourgeois economists and linguists are cut from the same cloth.
>
> Isn't that a more likely reading?
>
> Martin
>
> On Jun 5, 2011, at 8:38 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
>
>> Yes, I really HATE that quote. Let me count the ways.
>>
>> 1) I really LIKE the word "demiurge" as a description for the role of language, not just with respect to meaning but also with respect to mind. A demiurge isn't really a deity, you know. It's a kind of CRAFTSMAN, a DESIGNER, an ARCHITECT which in the final analysis (but only in the final analysis) is consubstantial with the thing that it makes.
>>
>> 2) Then ANL sets up a layer of social "operations" (or maybe actions) which stands BEHIND meaning. So meaning isn't a social operation at all, huh? Why not? Well, it appears that one is REAL, that is to say, sociological, and the other is IDEAL, that is to say, psychological. Oh, no! Here we go again....
>>
>> 3) ANL then says that the MAIN problem is something called the contradiction between the sociological and the logical. Why do I feel that the two things are completely consubstantial? Why do I feel that this is really a profoundly TRIVIAL problem, compared to (for example) the contradiction between the sociologically ideological and the interpersonally emotional?
>>
>> I think you once pointed out to me that Vygotsky's theory of consciousness is semiotic (that is, NON-representational) except for its final layer of thinking, where we do appear to need some kind of representation of the self, some from of the "will" or the "consciousness" or the "volition", some species of demiurge, some kind of "role model".
>>
>> Children don't have to believe that roles are real in order to use them. Vygotsky describes thinking as a cloud and inner speech as a downpour, but I don't leave the house with an umbrella lest I be overtaken by a sudden fit of inner speech on my way to class. I don't see why I can't think of demiurge, or for that matter "language", or even "mind", in exactly the same way.
>>
>> By defining language as that thing that stands in front of objective social relations, obscuring and mystifying them, ANL is starting off with a very clear distinction between the objective, constative and the subjective, evaluative functions of speech. Sometimes things are so very clear and so very transparent that you could swear they are actually non-existent.
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education
>>
>> --- On Sun, 6/5/11, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] "Inner Form" of Word, Symmetry, Ivanov Bateson?
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Sunday, June 5, 2011, 2:58 PM
>>
>>
>> I just stumbled across this, in chapter 4 of Leontiev's Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Available on Andy's site, at <http://marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1978/index.htm>
>>
>> "Thus meanings interpret the world in the consciousness of man. Although language appears to be the carrier of meaning, yet language is not its demiurge. Behind linguistic meanings hide socially developed methods of action (operations) in the process of which people change and perceive objective reality. In other words, meanings represent an ideal form of the existence of the objective world, its properties, connections, and relationships, disclosed by cooperative social practice, transformed and hidden in the material of language. For this reason meanings in themselves, that is, in abstraction from their functioning in individual consciousness, are not so “psychological” as the socially recognized reality that lies behind them.
>>
>> "Meanings constitute the subject matter for study in linguistics, semiotics, and logic. Also, as one of the 'formers' of individual consciousness, meanings necessarily enter into the circle of problems of psychology. The main difficulty of the psychological problem of meaning is that in meaning arise all of those contradictions that confront the broader problem of the relationship of the logical and the psychological in thought, in logic, and in the psychology of comprehension."
>>
>> Seems to me that Leontiev too considered meaning to be first something public and social, even material (in their ideality, of course) and only later psychological.
>>
>> Martin
>>
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