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
Page 40, Harris quoting Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures,"
- language
- a set (finite or infinite) of sentences
- grammar
- a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of [that language] and none of the ungrammatical ones
Harris goes on to contrast strings of words that are grammatical with strings of words that aren't. But doesn't this all put the cart before the horse, metaphysically and epistemologically speaking? We are presupposing the existence of these word thingies and sentence thingies without any direct evidence of their existence, based solely on the depth of penetration these ideas have acquired in our language and culture (so deep that it is hard to speak sensibly without recourse to these terms.) Still, like the flat earth (and how often do you think of your floor as "an arc of a circle with infinite radius?) the ubiquity of these terms does not justify blind acceptance of them, not if you want to use the word science.
If science is empircal, treating of empirically accessible and assessable entities (and even these, we know, are more a matter of psycho-physiology than of any hard-nosed reality) then how can we take the science of words and sentences seriously. No, I find I am inclined to throw in with the radical behaviorists; better to study the relationship between noise and response. That's a scientific pursuit. Or admit that language isn't scientific and accept the lunatic fringe, admit that unless the work is tied to a productive application anything goes.
Linguists, by and large, treat of words and sentences and assume their set of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions without disclosure. The assumption isn't intellectually dishonest. The failure to disclose is.
[/ling_wars]
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