Re: "meaning" Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Saussure Again

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Great discussion.
Re citation and xmca.
I would like to hear from others, but seems to me that quoting the date of
post to xmca would be nice.... at least acknowledgement of some kind for the
source of the ideas. I have seen a lot of uses of xmca posts without
attribution to anyone at all even though the odds of the person in question
getting the info in question from elsewhere are about equal to my ability to
spell acknowledgment. (see above) :-)

With some help from a friend, Bruce is in the middle of rationalizing the
archived messages so that previously encountered problems of using it as a
data base have disappeared. Good news there on the horizon.

I think that this is what j'ai vouloir dire, kho nose?
mike

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:41 AM, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:

> Thanks, Michael,
>
> Your point about vouloir dire in relation to meaning is nicely stated. I
> will want to quote you on that when I propose a different way of
> conceptualizing meaning.
>
> Which brings me to some list-practice issues. Sometimes when I see
> something on other lists that I would like to quote, I write to the author
> asking for permission to quote -- where the list is more private than xmca.
>
> I feel more free to quote from xmca because all posts here are indexed by
> google, and will come up frrom the xmca archives in a google search. I just
> thought it was worth mentioning this on-list as a reminder, in case it
> matters to anyone who hasn't thought about it. Posting to xmca is
> publication.
>
> Which brings me to a more technical question (i.e., one for Bruce): To
> quote Michael's post, I will need to note where it is now; but then after it
> moves from the Current month in the archives to the page for November 2009,
> I will need to find the new url for it from there -- which should be easy,
> but is not always (sometimes the contents page has not mapped properly to
> the archived posts).
>
> Would there be any way that the url for a given post in the archives could
> be the same when it first goes up as it will be forever after?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
>
>  Hi Tony,
>> from time to time, Derrida writes 'vouloire-dire'. In French, vouloir dire
>> is the equivalent of 'wanting to say' or 'what do you mean', but this
>> question is simply asking for another way of saying something. But this
>> cannot be 'meaning', as scholars tend to write about 'the meaning' of a
>> word. Because there are potentially infinite number of ways of expressing
>> what one wants to say, there would be an infinite number of meanings, which
>> is contrary to the use of the word 'meaning'.
>>
>> Derrida is an interesting case, because he writes in French but for
>> Anglo-Saxons. He writes French in view of a translation, and sometimes he
>> writes --  in the text or the footnote --- 'I wonder how the translator will
>> deal with this untranslatable expression'.
>>
>> In a book I have just open as I am working, Derrida does the reverse. He
>> writes something about 'sens' and, because it pertains to Austin, he puts in
>> parenthesis the word Austin uses, i.e., 'meaning'.
>>
>> Perhaps we ought to place in parentheses the original words whenever we
>> refer to a scholar who has written in a different language, so that we know
>> what someone refers to. In this way, most CHAT research would have to write
>> activity (aktivnost', Aktivität) rather than activity (deyatel'nost',
>> Tätigkeit), according to the Leont'ev / Holzkamp use of the word/s.
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>> On 2009-11-23, at 7:35 AM, Tony Whitson wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
>>
>>  Hi David, Saussure never has written about 'meaning', and the problem
>>> with many translations into English is precisely the shift that occurs when
>>> Saussurean (Derrida, any one else writing not in English) is translated into
>>> the word 'meaning', when in fact there is no such word in other languages,
>>> and when the semantic relations that subtend the words such as Bedeutung or
>>> Sinn, or sens and signification are rendered as 'meaning'.
>>>
>>> Bakhtin read Saussure, but not in English.
>>>
>>> Moreover, what people do not seem to understand about the Saussurean
>>> approach to the sign is that it is a relation, between a signifié and
>>> signifiant. The signifiant is not 'meaning', because sens and signification
>>> are also translated as meaning.
>>>
>>> I don't know about Russian, and whether it cuts up the world in ways that
>>> there is a useful equivalent.
>>>
>>> Michael
>>>
>>
>> Strangely, what I think is the most used as an authoritative translation
>> of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, with facing pages in German
>> and English--in a book where such matters should be handled
>> meticulously--"meaning" is used indifferently for Sinn, Bedeutung, and even
>> Meinung.
>>
>> As for Derrida, one of his locutions that gets translated as "meaning" is
>> "vouloir-dire." "Meaning" might work for "vouloir-dire" in some contexts (in
>> a novel, maybe); but they are not equivalents when the "meaning" of
>> "meaning" is at issue.
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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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