Here's a final example of Harris's apparent inability to see and carry through on key distinctions. He writes:
"Integrational linguistics is the study of language as it features in the various modes of human interaction; in other words, as the faculty that makes available for us the characteristically human forms of communication." Pared down, this says, among other things, that "language" is a "faculty". But presumably Harris would at times think of a faculty as an "ability", which is distinguishable from the activity at which one has the ability. I'd prefer him to maintain the distinction between, say, the ability to swim and the act of swimming. And many scholars would reasonably insist on keeping clear the distinction between the ability to speak English, and "the English language" itself. But here Harris says that language IS the faculty: "Language is the faculty that underlies both speech and writing. It may be considered one part or facet of a more comprehensive faculty: that of sign-making." Although Harris does not define 'sign' we infer he feels that every object or action devised to "communicate" is a "sign". He then says, "Language is often described as 'the use of words' or the capacity for 'the use of words'. But that phrase hardly advances mattersb&" Alas, Harris, despite his celebration of himself as an innovative, break-through thinker, does not strike me as advancing matters much. (Indeed, his condemnation of dictionaries, with no suggestion of what might replace them, sounds retroactive to me.) A good deal of Harris's troubles seem to follow his not realizing when his readers must be unsure of what Harris has in mind when Harris uses key terms. (For example, Harris wrote a 4,100-word piece, Integrationism: a very brief introduction ( http://www.royharrisonline.com/integrational_linguistics/integrationism_intro duction.html) In that piece Harris uses the following terms (and many more): 'sign', 'linguistics', 'meaning', 'faculty', 'words', 'communication', 'understand', 'context', 'same'. With none of them does he try to describe the notion he has in mind. William wrote: For years I've been touting the concepts of Roy Harris, the highly noted Oxford linguist whose iconoclastic or somewhat deconstructive "Integrationist Linguistics" is a broad attack on the very notion that words (or chiseled marks) can convey a intended meaning from one person to another like a postman delivering a letter from a sender to a receiver. The cause-effect process does not work with language. The best that can be done is to create a context within which the word is translated into some more or less commonly understood meaning by at least two people for a while. The word is not a stable sign for Harris. The context (which could be anything chosen at all) comes first and then the sign is created too. Obviously the neurons are always 'firing off" or the brain would be dead or incapacitated. That means that thoughts are always present as 'language' chatter in the brain, maybe not always consciously. Another person's communicative expression can turn our attention to our contextualizing our chatter in a more or less specific way, like a flash of light can cause us to turn our head toward it. This contextualizing of inner thought chatter enables us to organize thoughts to create an as-if fictional interpretation of another person's communicative expression. "Mirror neurons" (see Ramachandran) enable us to project our consciousness in a way that imitates what is outside of ourselves. Empathy. Empathy is probably necessary to any communication. Is there an immaterial, purely spiritual reality, in the mind and thus in the world? I hope so but I can't find it. Yet because I act on the make-believe of a spiritual reality it might as well be identical to the physical computer I am now using. If all consciousness is permeated with make-believe, as i suspect it is (we create contextualized narratives for ourselves moment to moment) then there may be no difference at all between the material and the so-called spiritual. One is also the other. Dualism may turn out to be a false distinction of what is indivisible. wc
