From: Arlo J. Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 03 2004 - 22:45:31 BST
Platt,
> >
> > Exactly!!! But this does not mean semiotic structures are not useful.
>
> Ah, good old pragmatism.
>
Not completely, it's more akin to critical and socio-cultural theories, but in
this regard there is similarity. I'd say that semiosis is the glue that holds
static quality together at the social and intellectual levels. Without
semiosis, the social and intellectual levels would completely disappear. Do you
agree with this?
> > Language allows us to communicate, to share attention, to plan, to
> > remember, to organize experience, etc. Without semiosis we would be stuck
> > with "nothing" but a ongoing stream of "primary experience". We would have
> > no way to remember, categorize or represent this experience in any form.
>
> And no way to survive.
>
No way to survive as social and/or intellectual beings. But I'd suppose we'd
survive as biological beings, something like the other primates.
> > We just need to remember that our "representation" of reality is 100%
> > structured by values and saliences of whatever semiotic system we are build
> > these representation "through".
>
> Why remember? For all "practical" purposes, our representations are
> reality. Anyway, according to your theory, all we can remember are
> representations.
The "key" is that although "for all practiccal purposes our representations are
"our" reality, they are not "objective" reality. When you operate
(hypothetically) solely with other individuals in a shared semiotic, perhaps
this remembrance is redundant. But we don't operate this way. Pirsig
demonstrated this with the "green flash" story. Until his value system was
oriented, by a social semiotic system, to value this experience, he did not
"see" it. What "you" see, Platt, and what "I" see, is completely determined by
our social semiotic systems.
My point was that the categories "individual" and "collective" are being
advanced here in a way incongruent with semiotics. You can reject my propsal,
that intelligence emerges through socio-cultural semiosis, and by appropriating
a semiotic system, biological individuals learn a shared way to represent
reality in a cultural useful way (intelligence), but I stand by assertation
that seeing intellectual Quality as individual Quality is misleading and wrong.
I also disagree with the assumption that's been advanced in the dialogue; that
one must support either the "individual" or the "collective", and have a
philosophy that values one above the other. To propose so may serve political
interests, but not much else.
Arlo
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