On Oct 18, 2008, at 6:56 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Your mind does all the doing and pointing. You contemplate the
words, and the scurrying lump of links in your head retrieves lots
of associated memories from its soft hard-drive.
As I also wrote, communicating in language is a matter of encoding and
decoding, and there is something between you and me, namely, the words
(those coded things). What difference does your metaphor make
("scurrying") compared to mine ("pointing")? Why not use the analogy
of the shoe salesman ("Here's a nice pump image that might fit your
word. Try it on. No? Okay, try this sling-back image. Oh dear, it
chafes. Here's a loafer." Etc.), constantly seeing which bundle of
neural activity best conjoins with the incoming jangle of sensory
stimulation.
Then you say, "The utterance doesn't have meaning, it provokes the
meaning in the listener -- in this case, a good or reliable or
perfect translation." Of course, the word doesn't "provoke" any more
than it "points".
Then why bother with the utterance at all, with either what was spoken
or was written? It [whatever the "meaning" of "it" is] is all in my
mind, a notion. Why bother with that language stuff? Why should I not
just notion up what you would say--might say, could say--and save you
the trouble of typing the message and me the trouble of reading it?
Because you want to provide me with the tools that construct what you
hope will be a reasonably congruent notion in my head, and those tools
are words, and they chisel or nail or hew or point or provoke that
congruent notion. Not that they have any animate existence, but that
their nature enables such a response in me.
You've got your own Achilles and the tortoise problem here, but it's
not about catching the slow-poke. It's more like your getting yourself
from the dock to the boat. How do you get onto the boat, except by
moving through the air between the dock and skiff? At some point, in
some way, a notion similar to a notion that was in my head was caused
to arise in yours. How did that happen? The only way, short of
telepathy, is via speech or writing, and those words possess the
capacity to in-form.
My Dad once took me to a baseball game and said, "Listen to me. When I
speak, I put my ideas into the form of sounds, so that your ears will
be able to perceive them, and they will send signals to your brain,
and you will generate some idea of what I am thinking. Got it?" I
loved that! That was baseball! Or as they would put it in France,
"That was *le* baseball!"
But the phrase that really captures my attention is "the meaning in
the listener". Let's hope you don't mean "THE meaning". Let's hope
you mean "A meaning", by which let's hope you mean "a notion" -- the
which notion is a memory that's a result of the listener's exposure
to repeated juxtaposition of the word with the
notion in the past.
God! Pillow talk with you has got to be a chore! <g>
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
