On 7/26/23, Ada Wan <[email protected]> wrote: > Re "being 'relational' has a measurably tractable meaning brought about by > the dot product in a vector space ;-)": this depends. I meant and should have stated: "in Mathematics" (again Mathematics and science is my background)
> Re "characters, words, phrases, sentences, ... all the way to whole books are > always intra- and intertextually relational" --- I agree, except for the > inclusion of "words" and "sentences" as these are, at least, obsolete, > unreliable, and non-universal. We can do better in this regard. Anything we > examine can be relational, assuming we have established or understood the > connection. But note that the connection may be in us, instead. Hmm! What do you mean exactly when you say that: "'words' and 'sentences' as these are, at least, obsolete, unreliable, and non-universal". Do you mean "as I understand them in the kind of research I do" or in general? If it is the second case I think Gogol would disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_How_Ivan_Ivanovich_Quarreled_with_Ivan_Nikiforovich https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/531 ~ Aristotle as well. Eco pointed out that the only true to matters statements trying to discern the essence of poetry were written by Aristotle. Ancient Greek people were obsessed with like ratios. Aristotle explained Poetry though some sort of parallel comparison of like ratios such as: "as sight is to the body, so mind is to the soul", out of which you would algebraically phrase: "the eyes of your soul", meaning "your mind". Now, if "words don't matter", how could we understand poetry? figurative meaning? ~ > ... But all in > all, we just communicate in whichever way we end up doing so. Yes, yes, yes! I totally agree, but we do still use language, especially words as some sort of brokering device "to communicate" (which comes from Latin communicare, literally meaning "to make common", "to share" in an intersubjective way, not as some "post-modern" folks would imply today "transmit 'information'" (whatever they mean)). In a sense you have ~retaken~ a theme that tormented Greek sages in a documented way going back to the 6th century Athens. The relationship between techne and arete to which Plato dedicated 5 of his dialogues. After three millennia we haven't still been able to shed some light, let alone figured out such issues, which I think matters, because we have come to believe that being smart means having the fastest computer, ... morally, however, we have apparently totally lost our senses. I think in order to understand language (in general semiotics) we need to make sense of the inner and outer intersubjective dialectic we employ when we "communicate" and (as I see things) there are various conceptual constellations essentially interlocked when it comes to making sense of such matters: a) techne (functions) b) the concept of the general (das Hegelsche Allgemeine) c) figuring out how intersubjectivity works (AFAIK, IMHO; Karl Marx's theory of valuation is the best in town even though it generated an industry of criticism mostly with positivistic leanings) d) the mind-body link (which I think taking into consideration all other aspects above could be proved to simply be of a semiological nature (no pineal gland, no microtubules, no ...)) lbrtchx _______________________________________________ Corpora mailing list -- [email protected] https://list.elra.info/mailman3/postorius/lists/corpora.list.elra.info/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
