Martin:
I will have to defer to you as I believe you to be the greater scholar as
well as better in translation ( as I alas know only english and pig
latin)> However, instinctively I believe concept to be the dialectic
that allows thinking and speech to merge and become what LSV refers to as
higher psychological processes.
eric
From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: 04/20/2011 11:30 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] activity (was concepts)
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
On Apr 20, 2011, at 3:47 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
Eric,
I don't know, I think LSV makes it pretty clear that word-meaning is not
the concept. He criticizes Ach, who:
"identifies concept and word meaning, and thus precludes any possibility
of change and development in concepts" (T&S chapter 6, para 16).
Martin
Eric,
I apologise for my curt message earlier today. As it happens I had been
sitting in a cafe for a couple of hours musing over this very issue, and
when I returned home to read your message I couldn't resist a quick
reply.
It seems to me that one way of thinking about what LSV does in T&S is
that he defines what word-meaning [Значение] is by explaining
successively what it is not. That does seem a bit dialectical, doesn't
it? And one of the things that word-meaing is not is concept (ch 7). It
is also not sound (preface and ch 1). Is it not objective reference (ch
2).
And I think this clarifies some of the issues in reading the book. For
example, when in chapter 5 LSV borrows Frege's & Husserl's distinction
between 'sense' and 'reference,' Sinn and Bedeutung should translate as
Смысле and Значение, but LSV has the *former* term as Значение. So
Frege's distinction becomes 'meaning' and 'objective referent.' Why?
Because LSV is using this distinction to make the point that the meaning
is not the object the word refers to, which is a commonsense view and
also that of several psychologists whose work he is critiquing.
In chapter 7, however, when LSV introduces Paulhan's distinction between
'sense' and 'signification' it is the *latter* term which he calls
Значение, while the former is Смысле. Why? Because although LSV gives
credit to Paulhan for introducing the distinction, he criticizes him for
not solving the problem of the relationship between the two terms. And
meaning, for LSV, is neither Paulhan's sense nor his signification.
Here is the paragraph in full:
Our research has been able to establish three fundamental characteristics
which are linked amongst themselves and which constitute the originality
of the semantic aspect of inner speech. The first fundamental
characteristic is the predominance of the sense [смысла] of a word over
its meaning [значением] in inner speech. Paulhan has rendered a great
service to psychological analysis by introducing the difference between
the sense of a word and its meaning. The sense of a word, as Paulhan has
demonstrated, represents the ensemble of all of the psychological facts
which appear in our consciousness thanks to a word. The sense of a word
is in this way a dynamic, fluid, complex semantic formation which has
several zones of different stability. The meaning is only one of the
areas of sense that the word acquires in a given context, but it is the
zone which is most stable, most unified, and most precise. As is well
known, a word easily changes its sense in different contexts. The
meaning, in contrast, is the immobile and immutable point which remains
stable in diverse contexts. This change in sense in the word is what we
have established as the fundamental fact in the semantic analysis of
speech. The real meaning of a word is not constant. In one operation, the
word has one meaning, and in another it takes on a different meaning.
This dynamicity of meaning brings us to the problem of Paulhan, that is
to say the relationship between meaning and sense. The word, taken by
itself in the dictionary, has only one meaning. But this meaning is
nothing other than the potential which is realized in living language;
this meaning is only the foundation stone of sense.
LSV's word meaning is not signification because it is not a fixed,
dictionary definition. But it is not Paulhan's sense either. Sense is an
important phenomenon, especially for understanding inner speech and its
relation to thought on the one hand and social speech on the other. But
it is not word-meaning. For one thing, LSV points out that Paulhan shows
that sense can actually be detached from the word.
So here too the emphasis is on what word-meaning is not. Not sense, not
sound, not referent, not concept.
Martin
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