Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
| Months | ||
|---|---|---|
| Jan | Feb | Mar |
| Apr | May | Jun |
| Jul | Aug | Sep |
| Oct | Nov | Dec |
Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
Psychology or Anthropology? From page 12:
...in general, linguists regard their discipline now as a branch of psychology. For most of this century, though, linguists had quite different allegiances, seeing their discipline as a branch of cultural anthropology.
As a youth I had a hard time understanding that biology was not a subset of chemistry, itself a subset of physics. Sure, that would be a nice neat way to view the world, but the reality is there is no such linear inclusive relationship nor would all contenders feel such would be a worthy goal. Likewise I had a hard time at the beginning of '04, back in school for the first time in ages, and taking Sociology classes. To my eye it ought to be Ethology > Anthropology > Sociology & Psych. No such view obtains anywhere outside my muddled head, and anyway, where would such a system leave Political Science or Zoology?
And yet a discipline needs some kind of differentia, some organizing principle, not so much to distinguish itself from other disciplines as to structure it's pursuits. So, if the topic is linguistics perhaps existential questions are less relevant.
Except that linguistic considerations so strongly influence and even pre-figure so many other considerations, from our conceptual reliance on bifurcation (which I personally blame on Aristotle by way of Alexander) to the ubiquity of negation.
So, what is the proper domain of the subject that deals with the way we relate and responde to sensation clusters? What started this note was my reaction that anyone fool enough to think psychology isn't beholden to cultural anthropology deserves all the wrong answers they get. But what school of psychology would that be true of?
[/ling_wars]
static link
writebacks: 0 (writeback = trackback +/- comment)
HTML isn't a language because it lacks iteration, for one thing. And according to Harris another thing it would need is self-reference.
Fred and Barney must have had some way of talking about talking or, what they were using wouldn't have been language.
I've read in the occasional programming text the bit about HTML; it lacks iteration, it lacks iteration in particular and control structures in general. But a quick google did me no good in terms of learning the full list of what a language can't do without if it still wants to be a language.
Now, just winging it, I'd say the bit about self-reference is close, but reference in general, and more, the capacity for combining, willy-nilly, one-to-one references with one-to-many references and many-to-many references...within a single modality. Which is to say vision is a representational system but is not a language because it needs recourse to other sensory systems to establish...
Nope, not right. I'm thinking it's more to do with the interrelation of different reporting systems. And, maybe the first step is some kind of extra-somatic information storage (I like the idea that rythm might have been the trigger; drumming and coordinated movement before actual words.)
Well, I hope I get more about what it takes to be a language in the first place.
[/ling_wars]
static link
writebacks: 0 (writeback = trackback +/- comment)
Heard recently on cogling:
Lewis Carroll (the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) knew all of the languages mentioned in "The Hunting of the Snark"
- http://www.pacificnet.net/~johnr/books/snrkpre.html
- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CarSnar.html
If Carroll had written The Red Wheel-Barrow, I would think he was conscious of its Hebrew substrate ... but I doubt Wm. Carlos Williams knew much Hebrew, despite his later friendship with a younger Allen Ginsberg.
Carroll wrote "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and later included that poem in the Alice books. Why not "The Walrus and the Carp" or "The Mason and the Carpenter"? The scientific name for the walrus (whale horse) is Odobenus rosmarus. [Now you know why Dobbin is a horse's name.] That can be deconstructed into Ode = poem + Latin benus = bent, twisted + Aramaic RaZ = secret (as in sub rosa) + (the Virgin) Mary ... in other words, a twisted poem about the secret of Mary.
The Carpenter may represent the Son. The victims (Host) in that poem are the oyst-ers.
There's an interesting discussion along these lines in the opening scenes of the very funny, but very childish (and very offensive to some) film, "Dogma" wonderfully delivered by Matt Damon, playing an angel of vengence who very much knows better, delivered to a nun. I'm inclined, however, to credit Izzy's interpretation as more credible and consistent.
I've just bookmarked a Fauconnier article, after finding it via a peek at wikipedia's listing for cognitive linguistics. One of the attractions of cogling is the high level of academic validity and focus brought to the table the the bulk of the players (and that would *not* include this particular layman.) But one of the frustrations of lurking there for the past few years is the strong sense coglings are exactly the kind of folks with whom one would like to grab a brewskie and set to work unscrewing the inscrutable.
On "empirical:" Ran accross a delightful example of opposed meanings for one "word" (a notion that, for me, shows the begged question behind the word "word.") at my favorite online dictionary.
Well, I warned the fine gent who prompted the Kevin Smith plug that I was
Cost me two bucks to sign up for Smith's board, but I reckon it'll be worth it in time.
[]
static link
writebacks: 0 (writeback = trackback +/- comment)