According to Harris and his integrationist linguistics, we don't communicate through pre-existing signs but instead we create the signs through communication. I did refer to Harris' book and indicated my following his linguistic theory. So, anyone here should have recognized that my comments were simply a paraphrase of Harris' theory which is fully elucidated in his book, Signs, Language, and Communication. Furthermore, Cheerskep surely realizes that communication is a participatory event in time and thus requires active creative work by all involved. Cheerskep seems to take the position of the fully passive recipient in a linguistic exchange, a position that requires the other participants to do all the creative work re signs and somehow pass that on to him. No, Cheerskep needs to participate in constructing the context in which the signs are created. Then turning to Harris, we can see that he establishes levels of context from the fully subjective to the partially objective. For example he identifies three kinds of context, the biomechanical, the macrosocial, and the circumstantial. Michael's argument is one that Harris would say relies on macrosocial conventions. These are codes, general signs and thus meanings we more or less inherit through our culture. They are like shadows against which we still create the specific sign/meaning in defining a context for communication.
I can't summarize Harris here and I don't really understand his theory that well but he is no pipsqueak. With dozens of books and papers and huge international influence, Harris is professor emeritus at Oxford University. His central idea is fully consistent with Cheerskep's to the extent that meaning does not exist independently. But for Harris all participants in a communication event must engage meaning creatively. If one is passive, then that one is not communicating. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, October 18, 2010 5:59:45 PM Subject: Re: rules William writes, "Please lose the all caps triumphalism." William is right. It was a bad idea on my part. In truth, I had a wrong-headed aim of conveying it was meta-message -- in other words, it was not part of the thread but a comment on the thread. William also writes: > We can still > communicate with signs we create; in this case "rules". > Believe this: I have no clear idea what "he is saying" here. The line appears to assert that "rules" are "signs". I can't follow that at all (in part because I'm not sure how much William's notion of "signs" coincides with Frances's recent description of her notion of "signs"). But also because at least some signs don't begin to feel like "rules" to me. If I see a billboard sign that says, 'Clausthaler is the world's best non-alcoholic beer,' that doesn't feel like a rule to me. Again I think I should stress this: I am not playing games here, I'm not pretending. I honestly don't know what the heck William has in mind.
