As Goethe said in relation to Bildung, "we Germans use the same word to indicate both the process and the product," and Activity Theory prefers to see things as actions or processes, rather than reifying our actions as verbs. There is always a choice, linguistically, well in fact it's damn hard to say anything without using nouns, but you see what I mean?
When Moses Hess argued for Doing as against Having, Marx supported him (See 1844 Manuscripts). It is actually a bourgesois class point of view to take the world as Being and the person as Having, while socialists take the world and the person in terms of Doing. ... but of course we don't talk about class nowadays do we. :) We are also born realists, aren't we? The world confronts as an accumulation of things. But we can also be critical of our tendency to reify our activity.
Andy Tony Whitson wrote:
The OED reflects the existing usage of words.Semiotics explores and attempts to account for the nature of signs and sign activity, including the nature of the meaning that signs do, and how signs do their meaning.Semiotics is not about deference to common usage, any more than is CHAT. On Wed, 15 Jun 2011, Huw Lloyd wrote:On 15 June 2011 01:40, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:Messages in this thread that have appeared subsequently to the one fromAndy that I'm responding to here have used "meaning" as a noun (it seems tome), 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 persondoes -- just as their dancing is something that they do.This appears to be more a question of labeling phenomena than disagreeing about the phenomena per se. Though that's hard to tell without agreeing onthe labels.The 'doing' that you refer to is achieved by the person. The word, sentenceor other phenomena doesn't do anything in this respect.Meaning in the oxford dictionary is a noun, and its appearance in our emails here is as a noun. We can use "meaning" as a gerund, such as in "meaning is something that all people do" (which is rather infrequent usage). Though wedo not use it as a gerund in "the meaning I interpreted" (which isfrequently used) or "He meant this meaning not that meaning" as in "He wrotethis sentence not that sentence".I'm not interested in turning over common usage of terms, this is what wehave technical terms for. I can only suggest that you try a substitutiontest, that clearly and unambiguously demarcates the term as a verb, to checkthat you're using the term consistently. HuwI 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 nominalphrase, "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 reallyis a nominalized term for the dancing -- for something that is not some"thing," but (rather) some doing -- for what is fundamentally an action oractivity. (And dancing/dance seems to align well with acting (action)/activity.)We can still differentiate among valid, less valid, or completely derangedways a word can _mean_, as it's interpreted in the ongoing semiosicgeneration 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 orpotential meaning(s) that a word can do are all within the potentiality ofthe 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," orthe doing, not the making, of my meaning, or the meaning of a word. What is your thinking? On Mon, 13 Jun 2011, Andy Blunden wrote: Mike, Vygotsky says in several places that the word is the sign for orcarrier of the concept. As I said earlier, in my reading word meaning is an artefact mediated action, the word being the artefact and the meaning being the action (both subjective and objective), invested with potential for meaning-with by activity-with. A concept is in my humble opinion a cultural unit or form of activity. So word meaning, once developed to the point ofconcepts, is related to concept as an action is to an activity. Andy mike cole wrote:That is to compacted and complicated for me to be able to gloss to myself, David.I am struggling with the polysemy of both "meaning" and "concept" in this discussion to make sense of their relationship very well. Ditto sign andsymbol, although Huw'snote about signs and shadows nudged me along. I noted that Anton referredina recent note to "tool and sign/symbol" and wondered what he meant, butwas too preoccupied to ruminate.Here is a thought I had while ruminating. Might it be appropriate to saythat meaning is a tool of human processes of concept formation ? mikePS- There was a fascinating segment on the American Evening TV Program,60minutes, this evening.. A controversy about "The N word" , the banning of Huck Finn, and the success of a book which substitutes the word "slave"for the word "nigger." One proponent of the argument for using slave was teacherwho is shown in class discussing "the n word", asking her class, "why dowe say the N word instead of 'n-i-g-g-e-r' spelling it out?" Now THERE is an example of the power of the book!! At least I am not alone in my confusions about such matters. :-))On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 8:17 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.comwrote:This is Evald Ilyenkov, "The Concept of the Ideal', in "The Ideal inHuman Activity", Pacifica, CA: MIA, p. 268:"The meaning of the term 'ideal' in Marx and Hegel is the same, but theconcepts, i.e. the ways of understanding the 'same' meaning are profoundly different. After all the word 'concept' in dialectically interpreted logicis a synonym for understanding the essence of the' matter, the essenceofphenomena which are only outlined by a given term; it is by no means a synonym for 'the meaning of the term' which may be formally interpretedas the sum total of 'attributes' of the phenomena to which the term is applied."Ilyenkov then goes on to discuss Marx's cuckoo-like propensity "not to change the historically formed 'meanings of terms'" but to propose very different understandings thereof, and thus to change the very concept.Three questions: a) In addition to the ONTOGENETIC argument against the equation of meaning and concept (viz. that if meaning were already equivalent to concept thenmeaning could not develop into a concept), can't we make a SOCIOGENETICone?Doesn’t this sociogenetic argument explain both the cultural adaptationofconcepts over time (e.g. “quantity” into “operator” in math, “grammar”into “discourse” in linguistics) and the cuckoo like exaptation of other people’sterms to express quite different concepts by Marx and by Vygotsky (e.g."egocentric", "pseudoconcept", etc.)?b) Viewed sociogenetically, isn't this distinction between conceptualessence and word meaning the same as the distinction between signification value and sense value? That is, from the point of view of Johnson'sdictionary (or the Kangxi dictionary, or the Port Royal grammar, or any other state codification of meaning) the state-ratified meaning of wordsis their essence and the other, vernacular uses are simply senses, folk values, the range of phenomena to which hoi polloi apply the words?b) Isn't the OPPOSITE true when we look at the matter microgenetically?That is, from the point of view of interpersonal meaning making, the essenceof the phenomenon to which I apply the term in the given instance is the self-legitimated, auto-ratified, individually-approved sense value andthesignification value is simply the range of conventional meanings, therangeof conventional phenomena to which the word is applied and misapplied byothers? David Kellogg Seoul National University of Education __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca--------------------------------------------------------------------------*Andy Blunden* Joint Editor MCA: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744 Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857 MIA: http://www.marxists.org __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmcaTony 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) __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca__________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmcaTony 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) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857 MIA: http://www.marxists.org __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca