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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
Between tweaking my two domains into some semblance of acceptable shape, validating code, and the like, I have yet to get any further in "The Linguistics Wars." Hopefully I'll spend some time with it this weekend. But the negation thread lives on at cogling, mostly because I can't seem to keep my fingers off of the keyboard, and someone's always willing to take another stab at helping me get my head around what seems to be the list-orthodox views as very clearly offered by George Lakoff early in the thread.
I'll get to excerpting and expanding on my most recent iteration in cogling, but first I need to take a second to capture a thought that's been floating, waiting to get attached to something. In Montague's "On Human Agression," there is reference to two entirely disparate interpretations of observations made by Colin Turnbull in "The Mountain People." It seems to me there has got to be a term for when this happens, when polarized camps sincerely see the same data set as supporting their side and disproving the other. I have no idea what that term might be.
But if I did have a word for it (and I may just coin one before the day is out) I sure would have plenty of chances to use it in describing the dialog about negation on cogling. One gent wrote:
Titan's "Venus of Urbino" (1538), the model for hundreds of later paintings depicting reclining female nudes, was certainly meant to be seen by Guidobaldo II (duke of Urbino) as "woman NOT wearing clothes". Even if viewed as "woman POSITIVELY naked" - the cognitive significance hardly changes.
Seems to me going positive-north is the same as going negative-south, and surely I can see someone going positive-north, which is really negative-south, except that what I see isn't any flavor of north or south but simply varying distance relative to me. And while the words, the noises, change, the visual experience is unaffected by those shifty noises. The cognitive significance (using the term in complete ignorance of any technical restrictions) hardly changes because positvely naked and not wearing cloths are verbal, linguistic variations for an underlying, static, extant (which is just a dodge to avoid saying "positive" again) image, not of the clothes that aren't depicted, but of the bodies that can be seen. Much of that cognitive significance, it seems to me, comes from an aculturated position in which clothed is default and unclothed (naked) defaults to a pejorative deviance. Isn't it this cultural dynamic that drives the cognitive significance?
One thing that really bothers me is how hard it is to avoid words that rely on negation as part of a dichotomized system. Consider, for example, approach/avoidance. That would be a culturally privileged re-cast, it seems to me, of "at time zero distance between self and subject was N units; at time t distance was M units." That is, as far as I can tell, much more akin to what the eyes see. To use a sophomironic (sic) reference, language lets us argue if the glass is half empty or half full. Sensation notes the whiskey goes up three fingers from the bottom.
I'm beginning to feel more than a little heretical; I don't know that my ravings on cogling even qualify as apostate, for I don't know that I ever would have qualified as having had the faith. And that's because I really don't grok in fullness the domain of cognitive linguistics, as differentiated from cognitive else or other linguistics. Which gets me back to the need, really, as due dilligence, to spend more time with Harris' book.
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