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
A friend on cogling turned me on to a paper by Dirk Geeraerts, Idealist and empiricist tendencies in cognitive semantics. The paper is a dialoge, more or less between a straw-man morph of Geeraerts (D), Geeraerts's best efforts at a fair portrayal of Ann Wierzbicka (A) as foil to the staw man, and History (H), the moderator, who draws whatever synthesis can be found between the positions of the other two. What follows is a sloppy, as-I-go list of responses.
Page 5; H: "...leave open the question of how long [a] position can be maintained after repeated [experimental] failures..."
The answer, of course, is that one can maintain such a position indefinitely. That's can. Should is another issue. And, typically, such positions are held as long as possible, or at least in direct proportion to invesetment levels in said position. This, I think, is the important part. Such investments can be mental, emotional, financial, etc, but they in no small part deterimine one's willingness to scrap an assumption v. blaming the equipment or methods. The coverse, of course, is equally controlled by such game-theoritcal pay-off calculations.
Page 5; A: "...the world as we know it is shaped by the concepts we impose on it."
No one who knows me will be surprised at the way this raises my hackles. Reality is not affected by our concepts, save to whatever extent they are part of the ever changing set of events and objects we call reality. Our extant concepts certainly do impose constraints on the concepts we are likely to devlop, but that doesn't change reality. Reality continues to be whatever it is while we keep making up new ways to describe it inaccurately.
Page 7; H: "If not only our thinking, but our thinking about thinking is influenced by pre-existing conceptualizations..."
And how not?
Page 8; A(quoting Wierzbicka): "Chasing the phantom of 'objectivity' through supposedly scientific methods one loses the only firm ground there is in semantics: the terra firma of one's own deep intuitions."
There's that nasty "I" word again, as if such intuitions, deep or shallow, North, South, West or East were aught but learnings for which we have dropped the "I learned this" tag.
Page 10; A: "Not an extension, if you like, but rather an intension."
These are offered as opposites, just like Korzbyski used them, but aren't we actually better off for having both? Like hearing and sight, the value of which comes not from their identical domains but from the interaction between that which overlaps and that which doesn't.
I feel, however, like these references to sensory mapping is rather outlawed in polite linguistic society. To me, however, there's no point ringing our hands about language if it can't be tied somehow to the sensory apparata.
Page 11; D(quoting Wierzbicka): "...[a definition] must be phrased in such a way that it covers the entire range of use of a given word, expression or construction."
This is simply impossible; new usage is always breeding
Language is a moving target. Any attempt to describe it in terms of inert entities is as doomed as the search for protoplasm. (Or has DNA and the genome project un-doom protoplasm?)
Page 11; D: "...what would be the semantics of a sentence like A raspberry is a fruit? If you paraphrase it as "a raspberry is one of those things we think about (among other things) as growing on trees", you do imply that raspberries are thought of as growing on trees."(emphasis added; rl)
A has argued for a definition, based on her preferred mode of investigation, introspection, of fruit as including the semantic feature, "grows on trees." A and D are arguing over the value of such introspective finds; A for introspection, D against. D is claiming that either the treelessness of raspberries disproves A's evaluation of introspection or raspberries must somehow include tree-borneness. But to D's "you do imply" I say no. The many-to-many-capable system of sensory associations that we call language does not default to reciprocity. It is sufficient to say, "The mention of fruit conjures the image of trees," and it is required to be a fruit to call it a raspberry. But there is no necessary connection between the two, and it is a misguided application of bifurcated logic to think otherwise.
Page 13; A: "Do you think that the semantic knowledge that we possess at one particular moment is always sufficient to categorize the entities, situiations, events, processes or whatever that we encounter in reality?"
Yes, but define "categories;" friend/foe, novel/known. Wait, no; ambiguity easily disputes this. Wait...yes, first category: "Can I easily assign this?"
Page 13; D: "...the peripheral, slifromy deviant cases..."
No luck on "slifromy"; typo?
Page 13; A: "...my definition of fruit describes the knowledge that we have of the concept "fruit" on the deep-seated level of stored meaning."
Doesn't this vary based on idiosyncratic life experience? And I'm suddenly distracted by notions of morphological v. [?] zoological taxonomy. If you come from a culture with lots of berries and no dropes you might not have this "grows on trees" thing in your semantic feature set. Seems to me, language and culture typically grow and change Lamark-wise, but the vocabulary of science, which adds to language still Lamark-wise, prefers to refer to things in slightly more Darwinian fashion. Which is to say, most folks are more comfortable with Ketchup as a vegetable than with either olives or tomatoes as fruits. What does this imply for A's reliance on introspection? I don't think anyone claimed it lacked limits.
Page 14; D: "So you have a semantic deep structure, and a semantic surface structure, and semantic transformations that change deep structure into surface structure?"
Doesn't it work the other way around? A T.O.T.E. with discrete steps at time zero will become a single chunk at time n. Apply this to the notion of a many-to-many-capable system of sensory associations...out comes language. L.A.D., etc., are no more than the combination of this propensity to chunk and the Lamarkian development of responses built up in a social network (family, kin-network, tribe, ,society, civilization, culture.)
Page 14: "...Standard tests for polysemy, like the zeugma test, or Quine's p and not p-test..."
What is polysemy that makes it different from ambiguity? And where can I find info on either of these tests? That "p and not-p" thing sure does smack of bifurcated logic...which is not going to be a tremendously useful tool in understanding language, the bulk of which has nothing to do with such bifurctions or the criteria of statement-hood.
Page 14: D: "It is not a priori given that the idea of a category that people may introspectively retrieve from memory is an adequate reflection on the extent of that person's actual knowledge of the category."
Differing semantic feature lists triggerd by same word secondary to idiosyncracies of life experience and learning process. D's statement certainly presupposes there is an ideal and correct set of properties for a category about which one knows or doesn't know, and one's ideas are right or wrong based on their conformance to this ideal.
Page 15; D: "...it is less "knowledge that (lexical item x may refer to entities with such and such characteristics)" but rather "knowledge how (lexical item x may be successfully used)"."
I can't help thinking kluges like this are a sure sign that the tools we're using are inadequate to the task.
Page 17; D: "...we had better be careful with thinking about stored knowledge as something encoded in symbolic fashion."
I'd take the next step: Reject symbolism and signage altogether, in favor of adopting a non-linear many-to-many system of sensory associations and responses to stimulii.
Page 19; D: "...ontological assumptions cannot be decided at random."
I've carped elsewhere about Alexander and Aristotle, but now think a moment about FDR and e=(mc)(mc). Who wields the axe strongly influences if not outright dictates one's assumptions. Look at Lysenkoism. And I feel linguistics is stuck largely in a swamp of ill-formed foundational concepts dating back to ancient Greece, most deadly of which is the scientific equivalent of mono-theism, this idea that there's going to be one right way of looking at things. It makes so much more sense to me to push along the empricist track and the idealist track and learn that much more about the world by where they overlap and where they don't. Look at chemistry and atomic-physics; from one point of view there should be an inclusion relationship. In reality they are as different a film-strips and IMAX. But the differences lie much more in the vagaries of our perceptual apparata than in reality.
Page 24; H: "...develop a general theory of interpretation, a universally applicable interperative methodology that specifies the criteria for correct interpretations."
Could this be studying the white space in design? What would it mean to study the criteria for correct representation? Aren't interpretation and representation polar complements? And isn't representation association?
Page 26; A: "...a vocabulary of universal concepts—a set of innate indefinables that is common to all languages of the world and that constitutes the core of their vocabulary."
Has anyone one a list of these universal concepts? Later in the page A offers SEE, HEAR, THIS, I, YOU, WHERE, GOOD, BAD, SAME, OTHER and THINK.
Page 27; D: "I want suggested interpretations to be empirically grounded in what we know of the cultural background, the actual behavior of the language users, the physiology of the human conceptual apparatus."
I could buy "perceptual apparatus." But I have trouble with "conceptual," at least in such close proximity to "physiology" and "apparatus."
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