Holy crap, I think you guys have rediscovered New Criticism. <ducking/
> :D Speaking quite seriously now, I think that we really are at a
time when literary theory should become a core part of the hard
sciences curriculum. Now that would be an interesting turn around...
BTW, Glen, I don't know how I missed it before but I'm just taking a
look at your page and recent work. Right on! I think you have
identified the core issue as lying in the explicit -- and more
damagingly, the methodological implicit -- bias toward the continuum
and it sounds like you're poking the established view at exactly the
weak point.
On Sep 15, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
Glen wrote:
If you only extend your model to what is written and its
(subjectively defined) _relevant_ context, you are basically
decapitating the context and considering only the body.
[..]
And there are
other uses where, not only should you make the mind of the writer
part
of the model, but you should also include the social extent of the
writer.
What is the goal of a writer? It could be to communicate, but it
could also be to entertain or to manipulate. If a reader thinks
they are modeling a writer's *mind* (holy crap, the arrogance..),
it's likely they are just going down the road the writer so
competently put out for them.
In e-mail, compared to face-to-face communication, there are fewer
signals as to an individual's behaviors and constraints. With these
limited signals, it is more difficult for a reader to model the
writer's mind and the writer's social extent. To say that the
reader has a responsibility to form a model of the writer from an
impoverished set of signals (and others which may be in large part
synthesis and manipulation) means to invest in a bad model rather
than getting better information about the writer out-of-band. The
writer that tries to encourage such modeling from their writing
alone is probably up to no good. The models would be mostly
cultural norms and the reader's projections and, of course, the
imaginary person the writer is trying to put forth.
Marcus
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============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
