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
There are abstractions of such vintage coin and ubiquitous use that they become foundational to a culture. Veneration of "science" would be an example of an abstraction going in this direction, even when comically misapplied, as in Christian Science or Religious Science (fairness disclosure: I was raised in a spin-off of the Church of Religious Science, and when I need the social comforts of a church here is where I go, although these days I lean more towards taoism's briliant, but lonely, "if you can talk about it you're not really talking about It.") Back to abstractions. Abstractions such as point-line-space, thought-idea-meaning, word-sentence-language have long since seeped into the bedrock below the concrete slab of the building that is Western culture; there is no building without these abstractions, and it's mighty hard to get at and analyze them wihout ripping down the building, smashing the concrete slab, mining the bedrock and carting it off to the lab. If only study of language were so straighforward, rather than being the infinitely more subtle, slippery complex task it really is.
A friend writes:
(Point, line, space) form a sort of shorthand that makes the universe thinkable, that allows us to make generalizations. They are creations of nature. They constitute a sort of "folk science," a pre-science without which our modern sciences would not be possible.
"Makes the universe thinkable" is a really nice, sweeping turn of phrase. But thought, meaning, universe are all foundational abstractions, in the woof and warp of the language and culture. If there is any one risk in linguistics it's this one: that the tool we use for our field of study is itself the field of study. It's awfully hard to use a tool and at the same time free oneself of all the assumptions built into the very shape of the tool. Sure, one *can* dip water with a knife, but it's not the best tool for the job. Likewise, it is possilbe, concievably, to use language to investigate language, but it's not even on a par with the knife/water example, it's more like when an infant reaches for its right hand with its right hand, like the knife dipping not for water but for the knife.
Probably the most concrete example I have of this kind of Whorfian influence of language on world view comes from programming languages. At the simplest, it is possible to write an infinite loop (and cause a machine to crash) simply by moving from one language to another and forgetting how they each handle equality (that's personal experience, btw, from my first week on the job as a web programmer.) Call that first order world-view-shaping, as in knowing the difference between "the same word" in two different languages (i.e., two noise systems that sufficiently map the same things the same way such that a simple change of noise will work, as in English "day" and German "tag.") More delicately (and I might call call this second order world-view-shaping) there is at least one programming language, perl, that declines to differentiate whether a variable is a string of letters or a number or even another variable. The perl compiler looks at the operator and uses the contents of the variables to suit; so, for example, if you see $x == $y, perl treats the contents of the variables as numbers; if you see $x eq $y perl treats the contents of the variables as letters. Many other languages insist not only that a varialbe be assigned a type, they also then diffentiate between different kinds of strings and numbers (strings usually are a matter of largest allowed size; numbers tend to diffentiate size and method of calculation: integer, non-integer...) So when programming in perl one is spared making many distinctions that other languages insist on. Yet many of the languages that insist on detailed variable declaration don't insist on case-sensitivity and shun the use of characters outside the alphabet (whereas perl is rife with *@#%& and insists" this" is not the same as "THIS" or "This" or even "tHis", a pair of two edged issues that fans hail and critics hate.) These differences approach the kind of stuff that orginally captured Whorf's imagination (if I've read my history right) that the Hopi language simply had no direct analogs for anything resembling the Western, linear conceptualization of time, much as many programming languages have no equivalent of a simple perl scalar. It is easy to get a little nervous when talking about Whorf, but I think the baby has been tossed out with the wash water. Only a fool would say, "Perception governs reality;" sadly, many have, and used their misunderstanding of Whorf to support their claim. But, similarly, only a fool would deny that one's perceptions greatly influence our interactions with reality. And language is certainly interdependent with, influencing and influenced by our perceptions.
To tie back in, the programming language one uses will strongly affect the way one goes about solving problems or acheiving results (perhaps two ways to say the same thing but reflecting affectively disparate world views, in turn resulting in effectively different worlds) becuase the language of choice simply works differently, is better at doing different things, built to different criteria.
Natural language is first and foremost, it seems to me, accreted from primate noise and gesture systems in conjunction with changes in brain structure to solve the problems and acheive the results common to primates (which, at the risk of letting my [Freudian] slip show are eating, mating, and spacing {with spacing not only an abstraction of access to food and mates but something more integral to the organism.})
Time is movement, and the smallest quantum of time contains movement, as anyone who owns a camera knows.
I maintain time isn't even movement, but rather an inferred entity. I likewise hold space to be an inferred entitiy. In general the argument goes: Zero is an abstraction for the absence of countables, it is qualitatively a different animal from the natural numbers. Likewise space-in-which-objects-reside; there is no sensory evidence of this space stuff, it has no empircal existence. So too for time. But it is almost imposible to talk about anything without recourse to these concepts, and the tool of discourse fails even to permit a means of using these concepts cynically, reservedly, advisedly; to speak at all, at least in English, is to assume at a very deep and slippery level that Time, Space and other such non-emprical entities exist. To say time is movement is to conflate what we observe with what we infer about the observation; empircally we can say P moved from M to N. Empirically we can say that we observed O move from Q to R. Empirically we can describe the one in relation to the other. So far there is no need for time. But I don't know how to talk about the relationship of these two points and their respective travels without using words like "as, while, during, when" all of which presuppose time. The best I can do is plot both line segments and say "where x=3 P=(x3,y1) on line segment MN and O=(x3,y2) on line segment QR," but although I have avoided using constructions that presuppose time I've also terribly distorted my world view and lost the ability to deal with things that do not lie in the cartesian plane...unless I abstract from that plane a space, and from that space a fouth axis and so on. It is mighty hard to carry on socially meaningful conversations while maintaining this four-axis nomenclature, and when we get too far from formulations that help the average primate acheive the holy trinity of beer, broads and boob-tube we risk having frittered our time unwisely.
Chomsky's is a one stage model:
GRAMMAR -------------------->SENTENCE
whereas I would claim that the minimum is a two stage model:
GRAMMAR ------>SPEAKER------>SENTENCE
I think I understand possible motivation on Chmosky's part; elegance in modeling comes to mind. But sometimes the search for elegance leads to eliminating distinctions without which the problem set is unassailable.
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