Andy:
If we reject the claim that nature is dialectical (in a non-trivial sense, in the same sense that human semiosis is dialogical), I have trouble making sense of Volosinov's description of how signs come into being. It seems to me that signs come into being precisely by human selection and voluntary reproduction of something pre-existing in nature.
Volosinov describes two people in a room. Outside the it begins to snow. One of them says, "Well!"
When we apply Peirce's (profoundly dialectical) notion of signs to the colloquy, we get:
Sign: Snow
Object: Lateness of spring
Interpretant: Disappointment
The first two things are clearly natural: snow means that spring will probably be late whether anyone notices it or not (any grizzly bear will tell you that). So I still think that human dialectics is a deliberate, volitional, selective reflection of a "natural dialectic" in the thinking, speaking, human subject.
It seems to me that if we reject this continuity of natural semiosis into human semiosis, we end up rejecting either materialism (as Hegel did) or monism. No?
David Kellogg
Seoul Ntional University of Education
---------------------------------
Need a vacation? Get great deals to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Sun Sep 9 17:25 PDT 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Oct 08 2007 - 06:02:26 PDT