From: Arlo J. Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Sat Nov 26 2005 - 17:48:59 GMT
[Case]
Since semoitics seemed to me to be about language so I was wondering if nouns
and verbs ever came up, as they seem to be a rudimentary way that languages
carve up reality. Nouns being static things and verbs being dynamic action.
[Arlo]
Don't confuse "semiotics" for "written and/or spoken language". Semiotics is
broadly concerned with three types of signs; iconic, indexical and symbolic.
Nouns and verbs constitute symbols. As I said in one post recently, this is the
triadic arm of semiosis that constitutes what most consider to be a uniquely
human abillity (although the debate is far from settled or clear).
Both "nouns and verbs", as "signs" attempting to capture some part of
"experience" (or "reality" if you will) are "static". At least according to my
read of the MOQ. That is, once experience is pushed into some form of
conceptual container it is no longer "Dynamic", but a "static" representation
(a "latch") of that experience.
Simply, the very act of semiosis transforms the Dynamic into the static. And,
according to Pirsig (and most semioticians), this tranformation is not "pure",
but structurated by the very semiotic system into which the experience is
transformed.
That is, the "collective consciousness" determines the possible (and probable)
way the transformation will occur. Eskimos "see" types of snow as wholly
different. We don't. The collective consciousness we appropriate in 21st
century American culture does not make the same distinctions salient, and so we
"don't see it".
Thus, the static latch that is "language", and the continuing historical
dialogue that is the "collective consciousness" not only ALLOW for evolution to
occur, but sturcture the evolutionary trajectory. We did not have the number
"zero" in the mathematics that emerged out of European intellect. Not because
Europeans were "dumb", but because it was not a necessary, or salient,
charachteristic of their collective consciousness. The Arabian mathematicians,
however, did have "zero". Intellect emerges out of specific social-cultural
fields, and is shaped by what is available, and salient, within that culture.
To get back to you statement that DQ needs to be defined, I'm think I'm in the
camp that says the only way to approach such a definition is through analogy.
You can't come straight at it (as Pirsig says in ZMM). So, in this sense I
think that ZMM/Lila do provide a "definition" for DQ, but only through analogy.
One interesting book I'd recommend is "The Creativity Question" by Carl Hausman.
Among other things, it references the work on "metaphor" as uniquely capable of
"saying what cannot be said" (my words, not Hausman's).
Arlo
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