I've finally got clear for a while of too many responsibilities, and had
the leisure and pleasure of reading Peter's paper (which I'd look at less
thoroughly when it appeared in MCA) and the discussion so far.
I accumulated rather a lot of notes as I read the paper, so I'll parcel
them out seriatim, probably in 3 parts.
I thought that Elisa's point was well taken that Lakoff is making a
specific case about semantics rather than trying to characterize discourse
in general. Language is very category-driven in its way of making meaning,
but it starts from categorial units (nouns for categories of things, verbs
for categories of processes or relations, etc.) and then uses higher levels
of organization (clauses, long sentences, longer texts) to weave more
particularity, specificity, and situation connectedness back in; apart from
writing it also parasitizes the context of speaking as another resource for
the net meaning to be made with the words-in-context. By the time we get to
something as elaborate as scientific or any other specialist system of
conventions for interpreting a text in relation to, say, laboratory
procedures or collections of data, we are a long long way from semantic
primitives and even from categorization.
I don't entirely buy Lakoff's specific model. His core claim is that
semantic primitives arise from how our bodies orient in perceptual and
motor terms in the physical world (front and back, forward and back, etc.),
and he moves on from there to take work like Rosch's on perception and
categorization as a next step toward relating the semantic primitives of
language to speakers who have bodies. Of course it matters to what kinds of
meanings language has evolved to let us make that we walk around facing
forwards, fall down, climb up, and see objects through abstractive visual
and cortical processes that make categories in certain ways. And some of
these principles no doubt are embodied in the semantics of various
languages in different ways and with different degrees of salience. (There
is an old linguistics agenda at work here to show that the semantic
primitives are species specific and universal across all languages, which I
don't buy into.) But if there is anything we use language to do, it is to
engage socially with other humans, and to try to do so initially with
nonhumans as well, and a good case can be made developmentally that
interpersonal uses of language are the semantic template for how we make
meanings about things, once we separate them from people. I believe there
is a profound sense in which language is first about people-to-people
meanings, and only secondarily and derivatively about people-to-thing and
lastly thing-to-thing relations. We are not Newtonian bodies in an
inanimate universe; we are very much 'Freudian' bodies in a living and
social community. Lakoff's logic can be very productive, but not if it is
limited by a blindness to sociality, or a belief that language is closer to
physics than it is to biology.
I would, however, agree with Lakoff that: (1) our knowledge is knowledge
about our interaction with the world, and our inferences about the world
therefore critically depend on our knowledge of ourselves and how we
interact with the world; (2) categorial-linguistic reasoning about
abstractions is somehow a direct extension of generalization of such
reasoning about concrete matters (but most basically about human
interpersonal interactions).
(1) presents the famous "factorization" problem: since experience "of" the
world is in fact interaction _with_ the world, the system about which we
have immediate knowledge (and in my slightly heretical view, the system in
which that knowledge is constructed, and 'resides' dynamically) is the
joint me-and-world system, or at the social level of knowledge the
us-and-world system (my _ecosocial system_), then on what basis can we say
we have knowledge of "the world" that is free of either my perspective or
our perspective, as members of a culture, or as humans?
I'll come back to this issue later, but for now, just imagine that the
prototypical case is not me-and-a-rock but me-and-you. If we switch the
frame from Newtonian to Freudian (I'm not a Freudian, his view is just
conveniently emblematic for my point), then every therapist knows that what
you see and hear is him-for-me, and what you enact is me-for-him, and the
only way you can "factor" your own needs and neuroses out of your
perception of him (which is really your perception of the me-him
relationship) is to know a hell of a lot about yourself, about the
counter-transference process (how you relate to him as member of a
category), and about how the therapeutic relationship (read obervation,
measurement, interaction) works in detail.
But the objectivist program has not been about detailed inquiry into how
different people and cultures make sense of the world-for-us differently;
it has not been about identifying what specific aspects of our knowledge of
the world-for-us come from the 'us' side, and how. Without that,
factorization is a bluff. The objectivist program it seems to me is mainly
a strong rhetoric. It depends for consensus on homogeneity of perspectives.
People who are as alike as possible in their training, practices, culture,
values, etc. are made a precondition for objective agreement. My objection
is not to any effort to callibrate knowledge inter-subjectively, but to the
deeper assumption that truth is One, that what we are aiming to achieve is
a universal consensus in which we all agree on one single picture of the
world-for-all-of-us, rather than what seems to me both the politically and
intellectually preferable assumption that _no one_ picture of the world can
give humanity an optimal strategy for engaging in the world, that truth is
Many, and that what we should be aiming for is as many distinct and
incommensurable views of the world-for-each-of-us as we can manage.
Intellectually, this is similar to Bohr’s arguments about complementarity
derived from quantum theory: things look different in different experiments
or to different observers; these differences cannot be eliminated by
reducing one view to the other; the alternative is to combine them and say
that the truth is what is seen from all possible non-equivalent, not
mutually reducible viewpoints. This is my experience of reality: that I
know better when I know something from more than one quite different
viewpoint or perspective. This is what phenomenology says to semiotics:
experienced reality exceeds any one possible description of it. It is what
physics says to linguistics (using mathematics as their translator):
reality cannot be fully described by discrete categories and category
relations, it also has a quasi-continuous co-variation --- there is
meaningful difference of degree that is not captured by meaningful
differences in kind.
Politically, a monistic objectivism (truth is One) extends its consensus
only at the price of homogenization; to get others to see the same world we
see, we must make them be as much like us as we can. We believe that all we
are doing is educating them to be able to see the same truth we see. The
monist missionary spirit brings the revealed truth to those beknighted by
darkness and ignorance … it does not come to listen, to find new
perspectives to add to its own, to share, if asked, its own perspectives
with others, and leave them to further develop their own views into the
future, partly taking from ours and partly going their own way. It does not
enrich the repertory of humanity with more humanly viable worlds-for-us. It
puts all our species eggs in one basket, that someday surely will drop. And
it leads us to discard or burn the others' baskets. All intellectual and
political imperialisms begin from the assumption that truth is One. They
all aim to make humanity One, as well. Is that two errors, or one?
“the object is comprehended from the standpoint of mankind’s practice in
its entire volume throughout the history of world development” Ilyenkov in
Jones.
Which is as close as we have yet come to all possible viewpoints.
Comprehension grows to the extent that we create new viewpoints, new
practices, and do not forget or discard what the older practices taught us.
Unfortunately this _cumulative_ view of the human historical path towards
understanding is quite at odds with the modern _progressivist_ view, which
DOES disparage and discard older views as superseded. They are not
logically superseded except when they are also still commensurable with
what takes their place historically.
So Peter's view of Materialism seems either too optimistic or too narrow
for me. I do not see that history teaches us that we can and have solved
the ‘factorization’ problem i.e. separating out what part of it-for-us (or
you-for-me) comes from our side. It seems to me rather more the lesson of
history that we believe we succeed in gaining objective knowledge mainly to
the extent that we reduce the diversity of allowed viewpoints and
practices, so that objectivity seems to arise spuriously from too many
humans all looking at the world in too much the same way.
There have been incommensurable views of the world historically, and there
are still cross-culturally incommensurable views. There is not one single
history of humanity, nor one history of world development, nor one single
history of human practices for engaging with and making sense of the
world-for-us. There is not one Humanity, yet.
“the process of cognition is just the reflection in knowledge of what is
above all a practical process in which the social body of humanity must
learn to use the forces of nature in accordance with the objective
properties of the latter” -- Ilyenkov in Jones.
I can’t agree more with the emphasis on practice and on the social body of
the community. But is there also here an implicit assumption that there is
just one ‘social body of humanity’ ? that humanity is to be conceived of as
one community with one system of practices or one set of goals? … is this a
view of ‘objective’ which assumes that the truth must be One? To live by
that belief is ultimately to act so as to homogenize the social world, to
achieve a world that is not just classless, and free of conflicts of
belief, but a dead end for humanity.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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