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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
I queried on cogling about this notion of negation, giving a paragraph from the "blue monkeys" post, with truly heartening results.
For me, the main difficulty with the statement comes down to the implicit, *polar* opposition between "only existing in language" as opposed to "existing in direct or primary sensation"....Can we really assume that both language and drawing are both "fed" directly by "direct or primary sensation", with no intervening layers of cognitive or conceptual organization?
Normally this is the kind of position I would have argued, but the page that started it all had got my dander up and I missed this obvious and important point. The model to which I was referring is Grinder and Bandler's popularization of Chomsky's deep-structure/surface-structure model as found in "The Structure of Magic" (Structure). It is important to remember that this was not a work of linguistics, but, rather, a use of linguistics to inform the creation of a model of therapy. Structure goes on to postulate a relationship between sensory experience and deep structure similar to that allegedly obtaining between deep structure and surface structure. The DS/SS model is not in vogue as it once was in some circles, but as offered in Structure really isn't such a terrible thing, being at least as useful and plausible as Berne's tri-partite ego, and much more useful and plausible than Freud's tri-partite model. I think it fair to point out that my blue monkeys post did indeed offer a more rich model than the simple language/sensation bifurcation questioned in the quote above. In the end any description of these processes will be useful only to the extent that it successfully limits to a wieldly number the operands and relationships modeled.
Another respondent played the existential card, citing a Sartre example of planning to meet a friend and the let down of being stood up. I am on much firmer ground existentially, experientially than I am linguistically. When we arrive at the coffee shop we experience what we experience, and it differs from the projected expected fantasy experience we anticipated. Now the experience and the fantasy I would class as being of a kind, whereas the anticipation and the disappointment (a word that suddenly seems quite literal in this context) are of another kind. One might call the two classes "experience" and "evaluation" except this still seems to imply the evaluations are something other than positive (rather than pleasant) experiences. Anticipation may be a code for, in reference to, the fantasy, but anticipation also is a somatic event in response to the fantasy...itself a somatic event in response to...
(Later I need to come back to the idea of negation as complement of addition, both are change, the underlying concept, and both are changes in existence; this is different from exists and doesn't exist. And the positive/negative|pleasure/pain|reward/punishment cube always bears repeating.)
Finally, there was a response that included:
Consider two-year-olds during the year when they say "No!" almost constantly. Notice what they do.
and
"Don't turn here" means "keep driving straight ahead."
These examples seem, to me, to *support* the notion that the negation is in the language representation rather than the sensations (if we were to cling to such bifurcation), else a list of " 'Don't N' means 'Do M' " would be a list of redundancies. "Don't turn here," could as well mean "stop here" or "put it in reverse"; trivial but not mean-spirited examples of what else "Don't turn here" could (do?) mean. Negation seems often to allow the question, "If not, then what?"; negation seems to act as a kind of place holder. It is quite beyond me to explain how or why that should be. The example, " 'Don't turn here' means 'Keep driving straight ahead' " is clearly the most likely social usage, but what is there in the out of context, words qua words, "Don't turn here" to preclude the other possible interpretations? It is the context of social convention in your example that permits the seeming certainty of the one meaning the other. (On the other hand, how can there be anything like language without the context of social convention?)
In the examples with the children, such as, "Notice what they do while they say 'No.' ", my experience and undestanding are that this is pretty much an idiomatic use of "No" modeled on similar parental use of the word, not as negation, but as a verbalization designed to accomplish behavior shaping via voice tone and facial expression, via the simple provision of approval and disapproval, which seem like a thing and its negated polar opposite in the langauge I have used (X and negated X) but which are in fact the difference between a purr and a growl, a smile and a snarl, possibly polar opposites but very much not a case of one simply being the absence or negation of the other.
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