Now Cheerskep, you go too far acting as the List Contrarian. I did not say any experience can be 'communicated'. I merely said it could be verbalized in some way, however unsuccessfully. I do admit that by using the word 'unsuccessfully' I imply some intent for communication but I didn't explicitly limit the word to communicating between persons (the usual use of the term) since one can easily communicate with oneself unsuccessfully or successfully, as in mulling over thoughts without any intent to express them to others. I do agree that words cannot be relied on as context-free signs to convey meaning from one person to another. Remember, I'm the fellow who has praised Roy Harris (who you dismiss, inexplicably) and other word people, like Stanley Fish (his 'reader-response' theory). In different ways they claim that meaning is constructed outside the text or not by the text alone. Everything you say about language agrees with that idea, too. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, July 25, 2012 2:28:33 PM Subject: Re: is list dead? In a message dated 7/25/12 3:07:49 PM, [email protected] writes: > whatever we experience can be verbalized in some way even if > unsuccessfully. > Again, it depends on what you have in mind when you say "verbalized". Much experience can be "talked about", but it would seem much of it cannot be "conveyed". Our degree of success at conveying it would depend on our conjuring apt comparisons -- and then hoping the auditor had experienced the thing we were comparing it to. No verbal description of a color red we are seeing would be useful in conveying it to a person blind since birth. A mathematician, enthralled by the beauty of a certain formula, would be hard put to convey his experience to an innumerate person.
