From: Case (Case@iSpots.com)
Date: Mon Nov 28 2005 - 15:08:07 GMT
[Case]
This whole business of contextualization sounds like an overly complicated
version of simple behaviorism. Basically behaviorists explain behavior as:
Behavior = Biology + reinforcement history + current stimulation
But I suspect I continue to miss the point.
[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).
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