Can words be things?
mando
On Aug 19, 2007, at 7:12 AM, Michael Brady wrote:
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]
