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Re: [xmca] Word Meaning and Concept



And rightly so tempered!

Fichte was a funny guy. His works has been massively undervalued in the English speaking world mainly because until very recently there was only one work of his available in English, and this was a near unreadable rant on the Ego. Taken together with the fact that this guy re-wrote his system almost annually and ended his days as a kind of guru advising people on life-style, and that is after being banished from Jena for atheism (while people like Goethe were managing to popularise Spinoza) and openly supporting the Jacobins at a time when Robespierre was executing people in batches of 50.

Nonetheless, not only do we owe the idea of Activity as a fundamental category of philosophy (rather than mind/matter or subject/object dichotomies) to Fichte, we also owe the idea of Recognition to Fichte, not the Young Hegel who appropriated it from Fichte. Recognition is the key concept in a lot of critical theory nowadays, creating conditions, IMHO, ripe for a CHAT/CT reconciliation. Althusser's idea of interpellation was also anticipated by Fichte, and would be worth an examination in the context of a dramatic reading of Vygotsky, too.

Andy

Tony Whitson wrote:
On Wed, 15 Jun 2011, Andy Blunden wrote:

For this insight we must thank Johann Gottfried Fichte. I am delighted to hear that Good old Charles Sanders Peirce thought the same with his sign-activity.

This is definitely the meaning of CSP's concept of sign-activity (although he still used the word "meaning" more conventionally).

And Peirce was familiar with the German idealists, although his appreciation of their contributions was tempered by seeing their idealism drawing them into some unfortunate tendencies.

Andy

Tony Whitson wrote:
Messages in this thread that have appeared subsequently to the one from Andy that I'm responding to here have used "meaning" as a noun (it seems to me), thereby referring to meaning as something that is appropriately signified by a noun.

Andy's post suggests using "meaning" as a verb (gerund or participle), which I think is much better. The meaning of a word is something the word does (actually or potentially), not something it contains, conveys, etc. A person's meaning (like a word's meaning) is also something that the person does -- just as their dancing is something that they do.

I am meaning this in the Peircean sense of meaning as sign-activity, or semiosis. Andy is suggesting a consistency with LSV.

But is not the "this" that I mean, when I say "I am meaning this," something that can be signified by the pronoun "this" (or the nominal phrase, "my meaning")? I would answer again that what I mean is like what I dance. We can treat my "dance" as a noun that names a thing, but it really is a nominalized term for the dancing -- for something that is not some "thing," but (rather) some doing -- for what is fundamentally an action or activity. (And dancing/dance seems to align well with acting (action)/activity.)

We can still differentiate among valid, less valid, or completely deranged ways a word can _mean_, as it's interpreted in the ongoing semiosic generation of interpretants (Peirce), and such differentiations can be along the lines of hermeneutical, anthropological, or more juridical or "official" (as in David's Kangxi example) in/validity; but the array of actual or potential meaning(s) that a word can do are all within the potentiality of the word's meaning.

I read David's post as not inconsistent with what I'm reading from Andy, except that instead of "meaning making," I would suggest "meaning doing," or the doing, not the making, of my meaning, or the meaning of a word.

What is your thinking?



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Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
 are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                  -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)



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