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.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
I've been hawking Hypertext Webster for just about as long as I've been on the net. I've followed this resource through a couple of host moves, and taken every opportunity to talk up this wonderful, wonderful place to check your words. But part of what I've always loved about this site is the juxtaposition of the faintly archaic 1913 Webster listings with the clearly modern, and possibly less authoritative WordNet.
So I'm writing this morning, trying to get a little more content in the ling_wars category, because, well, dammit I've been talking about it enough, and it really is a rich and wonderful fun book. I like to link heavily in these blog posts, and I do actually perform the occasional fact check (that's what started the fireworks on cogling, a simple attempt at a simple fact check.) I've looked up my Einstein quote, and am now trying to get a quick read on Skinner. Normally it'd be off to wikipedia, but just last night I learned about google operators, specifically the define operator, so I asked google to define Skinnerian for me. The only two links that came up were both cogsci.princeton.edu; figured that couldn't be all bad. So I clicked through and found myself at a WordNet-only listing. Where the Hypertext Webster is joined to a WordNet 1.7 listing, this was a WordNet 2. Exciting. So I clicked through the WordNet Home link, and found myself at the tastefully styled WordNet home page.
WordNet was developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University under the direction of Professor George A. Miller (Principal Investigator).
George Miller? George A. Miller? The T.O.T.E. guy? Click. Oh My Gawd. Not only a picture, but the full text of "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information". I've been wanting to get my hands on a copy of this since 1985. Not that I've been motivated enough to track down the original journal and order it at the local university, but it's been one of those prizes that I knew synchronicity would some day bring to me. Today's the day.
This paper, if you didn't know, is the heart and soul of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming concept of conscious and unconscious. It's a very simple, operational definition. What you're thinking of is conscious. What you aren't isn't. It's tied to this paper, seminal in the truest sense of the term. Guess what Beau's reading today.
Coming soon: Mother Jones on the Bandler Murder Trial.
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Harris' book is dense, in the good way, in the sense that there is hardly a paragraph that doesn't call for pondering; it's what Pirsig would call a slow reader. The Linguistics Wars would fare well on a cross-country cycle trip.
Here's a melange of ideas I pegged yesterday morning, paraphrased from pages 12-14:
Geologists study rocks, linguists study words.
The Stoics get credit for the initial taxonomy of phonetics, morphology and syntax.
The business of science is to find uniformities -- Russel
The brain is a pattern sensing device
Wow. Talk about a lot of argument packed in a little space. Let's take the first one, the one about rocks and words. When I talk about a rock I not only have concrete (pardon the pun) sensory evidence of, and experience with, the thing I'm talking about, I can *share* that experience by bringing it in range of the sensory apparata of the person I want to share with. I'm not limited to talking about the rock, I can show it, take turns performing various non-destructive tests, etc. And I can do it all in total silence, word free. Is there any such thing that can be done with a word? Hardly, unless the physical aspect of ink on paper or sound waves in the air is what words are. We can indeed count and even measure these physical aspects of words; but, but, but...
This entire notion of word rests on another notion, a notion going back to the ancient Greeks, of "spirit" or "soul", which in turn is a universal concept springing from the universal difficulty of describing then insensible (not to be confused with the non-sensical.) Sound is a word's body, meaning it's soul. The entire discussion of words, and therefore language, which is taken to be comprised of the use of words, is based on this idea...an idea that has lost some currency with regards to humans, at least in the "scientific" arena, but which still controls the debates and discourse about words. With regards to humans we've had those who were concerned only with the soul, priests and ministers and the like. We've had the Behaviorists and the Radical Behaviorists, concerned only with the observable and measurable. And we have the psychologists, too many of whom don't have the intellectual capacity to recognize their pursuit is little more than an update of the Dark Age conception of soul (what, for instance, is the meaning of the Greek root 'psyche') while trying to claim the charismatic cloak of science. Into the mix, then, conceptually speaking, we toss words, their bodies, their souls. No such problem with rocks, and on this rests much of the cause for the seeming superiority of the hard sciences.
This idea of body and soul of word is so old, so deeply set in the sub-conscious of all modern discourse on the subject, that even if it's completely wrong it's too late to get away from it. At least if you're going to call what you do "Linguistics."
Harris gives the ancient Greeks, particularly the Stoics, credit for dividing language into phonology, morphology and syntax. Which means again that no matter how valid, or not valid, such concepts may be, we are stuck with them. But considering the wide-spread over-application of Aristotle's law of the excluded middle, I am instantly suspicious. Phonology, morphology and syntax are about the body of words, and indeed this is a fertile field of study for would-be linguists who prefer the imprimatur the 20th Century's infatuation with science. So, these terms, and all the discourse over long centuries treating these terms, are still bound to the basic view that words have a body and they have a divine, immortal soul, meaning, and any heretical thoughts of throwing out this body/soul, this sound/meaning bifurcation will want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But haven't morphology, phonology, syntax made wondeful advances? Aren't they real sciences, safe from conceptual reconfigurations? Aren't there solid answers to "What have they done for me lately"?
I can ask; that's all I'm good for at this point, trying to ask questions that will be valuable and seem to have gone un-asked. This is a learning process for me. Harris' book surveys the field of linguistics more or less as it stands. I suspect before long I'll be introduced to folks carrying similar ideas.
On Russell and uniformity, I'm reminded of the Einstein quote, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Pure tautology, of course, but an interesting rebuttal to Russell. Whence comes this idea that all can be expressed as one? Well, of course, there is an easy answer. "Is." This simple word, Korzybski's bane, suffices to take care of all unified field theory. "Is." "The universe is." "Eternity is." "Existence is." There you are; easy as pi. The problem is Russell wants to at one time encompass every distinction and difference and also show there are none. Only slightly self-opposing.
As for the brain being a pattern sensing device, again we are positing that there is something called pattern, it exists in the world, and our brains (presumbably after receiving similarly postulated "data" from the senses) detects these patterns. I refer the reader to Watzlawick's (sorry, no links I'm willing to pimp for) wonderful discussion of Randomness in, "How Real is Real," and Bateson's meta-logue on muddles in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (Bateson link courtesy of Harris' incomparable Incommensurability links.)
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