Printable View
Hehehe. :D That still doesn't alter the fact that anyone who speaks english will understand the sentence.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Asia? I thought for sure you were in England. If you don't mind me asking, where in asia? If you do, just ingnore the question and I won't bring it back up.
I find him pretty amazing too. Sometimes I wonder if he's human. :lol: I'm impressed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas
What baggage is in "The sun rose today"? Given everything you say, is there a single person who speaks english who would not understand the sentence?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
oh dear Unnameable,
the exchange between pooh and piglet is one that I have in water color and it is a comfort and safe haven for me.
I admire your mind, honestly I don't feel I could be even in your shadow. I would have loved to be in one of your classes if for no other reason than to hear you speak......words. any words.
lol… Unnamable, you are brilliant. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Unnamable
I sure no one will mind if I forget about Lacan for a moment. ;)
I was thinking about locusts and their tragic position in all of this. They are usually referred to with the word ‘plague’ as their collective noun. Our negative view of locusts is made explicit in the very phrase we use to describe them - ‘a plague of locusts’. Some creatures are far more favourably treated by us – We have a ‘pride’ of lions and even a useless great lump of an animal like a hippopotamus gets nothing worse than a ‘herd’. Even the very lowliest are better served – we speak of a ‘culture’ of bacteria, which sounds rather refined and educated.
My concern is that there are children growing up in this world, being indoctrinated with linguistic structures that mean they will probably never give a locust a fair chance. I believe this is, in essence, nothing short of Locustist.
My God, Unnamable, you're right! There are children in the world who may grow up to dislike locusts! Contact all the English speaking teachers and parents across the globe and ensure that they forget about trying to teach mathematics, spelling, grammar and basic hygiene to children, and instead, teach them to like locusts.
Now I'm the one being facetious. :rolleyes:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was originally a statement of what people actually believed the sun did - rise at one side of a stationary Earth, pass across the sky and descend behind the hills on the other side; the flat Earth remaining stationary beneath it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Nowadays it is accepted that this is not what happens; that the Earth spins on it's axis, giving the impression that the sun is moving.
One example of 'the baggage' is that an english speaking person from pre-Galileo times would understand the phrase in a completely different way than a modern one.
Another example is that very young children take things much more literally than adults. A child that has never been told that the Earth spins around the sun and turns on it's axis would take exactly the same meaning from the phrase as our historic english speaker, as might a person with impaired mental faculties, a sufferer of Down's syndrome or autism, for example.
I can still remember when I discovered that the Earth moved around the sun and not vice-versa - I was probably about 3 - and how my perception of the world suddenly changed. I actually had nightmares, thinking I could feel the Earth moving beneath me at night.
In a completely different way, the phrase can be said to have baggage due to the mental associations conjured up upon hearing it. I know that I get a fleeting image of the sun appearing from behind a hill, sending fingers of light across fields and rooftops; a delightful pastoral scene, with a crowing cockerel and all. Whereas, had I been awake at sunrise, it may well have been overcast and raining, the only hint of sunrise being a slight lightening of the shades of grey behind the tower blocks and factories.
Our brain, upon hearing words, triggers memories and associations, throwing up anything that might be useful in understanding what it has heard. For example, "The sun rose today" may trigger the phrase, "The rising sun" and lead to thoughts of Japan, especially if that country had been on one's mind for some reason recently. One could also hear the homophone "son" and turn to thoughts of Christianity.
These associations are how we understand words and every word and phrase triggers them. Hence, "baggage".
A person who doesn't know what a locust is, will have no reaction, intellectually or emotinally, to the phrase "a plague of locust". But once he finds out what a locust is, the reality of it, that will shape his reaction. He doesn't need a word to know how bad locust are. And aren't you providing your own contradiction here? If in the phrase "a culture of bacteria," culture is a positive word, why, my friend, do we have such aversion to bacteria? We should be embracing them if language controls us.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
For brevity I didn'twant to use the whole quote, but used....Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
There are 250 million people in the United States. Given they all understand the english language I am willing to bet that 250 million people will understand what I meant. Frankly the examples you give are trivial. If you think that there is that much of a barrier between people's understanding of words, then how come we are having such a complex discussion? If a simple sentence, The sun rose today" is a barrier then how can any communication exist?
fayefaye,
for some reason your hilarious post reminds me of Basil Faulty when the American tourist comes and wants a waldorf salad. Basil's chef is gone and he took twenty pounds from the American and had to come thru. All his wife can find for the moment are apples. His response sounds exactly like yours.
It opens up a whole new vista of thought about your personality.
I like it.
Virgil,
Please let's stop arguing for argument's sake!
I will try and put my points more succinctly.
When we hear a word, any word, we immediately draw upon our previous experiences of that word to establish it's meaning. Our brains provide us with a series of images associated with the word. For every individual, the precise combination of images is subtly different but there is enough common ground for us to 'understand' roughly the same concept. This is how communication is possible.
Where two people's prior experiences of a concept are similar, the communication is much more accurate, leading to a feeling of 'rapport' with the other person. Where the two experiences are very different, misunderstandings and arguments ensue. I am merely playing devil's advocate here and trying to show how people can have a different reaction to the simplest of phrases.
The thoughts, ideas and emotions triggered by the phrase, "The sun rose today" are different for every person on the planet. I'm not saying that they don't understand the phrase, or that their understanding of it is not essentially similar, just that they do not understand the phrase in precisely the same way.
Stroke victims, and unfortunately, I know one personally at the moment, often forget words but are able to describe the concept behind the words perfectly. It is entirely plausible that such a person would understand nothing whatsoever from the word "sun" but would be able to describe the object and it's "rising" without hesitation. As an example, the person that I know gets extremely frustrated with not remembering the names of simple objects - shouting such phrases as, "I want a.... like a knife but with a round end - I need it to eat my ****ing soup!" In this person's case, the brain has been damaged and can no longer link the word with the object that it represents. The link needs to be re-established by re-learning the word (in precisely the same way that it was originally learnt as a child.) Trust me, it is one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed.
The concepts behind all words exist as much in our brains as they do in the real world. If you like, we hold a 'model' of them all inside our heads and this model has associations and links with other object models. In as much as we all have different brains, with different models and a different set of links between them, there is no objective meaning of any word.
Try this simple test. Ask as many people as you can find to write down the first thing that comes into their heads when you say "The sun rose today". Simple word-association. I would lay odds that no 2 people write down precisely the same thing. This doesn't mean that not everybody understands the phrase, just (as my point has been all along) that not everybody has the same set of connections (which I call baggage) associated with the phrase.
I hope that this makes my position clear.
Xamonas
I heard you. I understand. I've said it many times, I understand. . I am not arguing for argument's sake. I find the position bogus. It doesn't meet my experience. Frankly it trivializes the human brain. If something is not clear with one word, than communication requires more words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs. People communicate within and across cultures everyday and understand. The sun rose today. Do you understand?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
Kindly explain how my post "trivialises the human brain". I think that I described, as accurately as I could, in simple terms, the incredible richness and diversity of human brains. If my meaning wasn't clear, then perhaps your own personal "baggage" associated with the words I used has got in the way of understanding. If so, I apologise.
As well as communicating, people also misunderstand each other every day (wars have started over such). I think that you're responses to my posts are a case in point. I didn't set out to argue with you, merely to illustrate that even the simplest of phrases can have subtly different meanings to different people. If, for whatever reason, you find this impossible to accept, I find no further point in arguing with you. I fear that you find objectivity on a subject upon which you have already "made a stand" impossible. I find this sad. Personally, I am my own worst critic and my own doubting Thomas. As Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living for man."
That isn’t true, is it – assuming they know what ‘a plague of’ means. If they don’t know what that means either, then I would assume they don’t speak English and that what you are saying above would be true for any words.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
And how does one find out? Presumably, unless one lives where the locusts run free, it would mean relying solely on books, images, other people’s studies, etc. Even if you see them in the course of your everyday life, your feelings towards them will still include a large part of what those who have educated/socialised you feel towards them. The ‘meaning’ of locust is already ‘decided’. That doesn’t mean it can’t be altered but our assumptions and attitudes are very deeply ingrained (see later comments).Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
It depends what you mean by the ‘reality of it’. We do not apprehend it ‘objectively’ as if it were simply a physical organism. You know in which part of Asia I live. Well, on the way home after a night’s revelling, in a truly Shakespearean meaning of the word, I often pass many roadside food vendors selling an assortment of local fast food. This includes deep-fried cockroach, deep-fried maggots, deep-fried grasshoppers (they could be grasshoppers, crickets or locusts, I don’t examine too closely) and deep-fried little frogs that have been squashed flat. Why is it that I know that insect protein is nutritionally quite good for you but that I have an aversion to putting such things in my mouth? The thought of chewing a cockroach is not one that I entertain without feeling rather queasy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Logically, there is no reason why this should be so but my cultural attitudes are so powerful and internalised that I have no intention of taking a bite.
Are they objectively or intrinsically ‘bad’? Obviously our perception of them is affected by the damage they cause but ‘of themselves’ they can’t be ‘bad’, surely?Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
If you are serious here (I’m not sure how one embraces bacteria anyway), then all I can say is that you want the issue to be far more unambiguous and black and white than it ever is. ‘Culture’ doesn’t have just one, positive, unambiguous meaning. Nor did I mean ‘control us’ in the way you are using it here. I thought that had been made clear many times above.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
PS Fancy a bite?
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73...asshoppers.jpg
I hate to do this, but to give everyone who’s not up on the intricacies of this discussion I’ll have to resort to a philosophic overview. This will not be particularly pleasurable for me, because frankly philosophy bores me. But I think it will have to be done. Mind you, I was not a philosophy major nor am I an expert on the topic. But the debate between what seems everyone on that side and me on this side has been rehashing old ground. We’re repeating ourselves. This going back to the philosophic roots of what we believe may change some minds (although I doubt it), make some understand why they believe what they believe, or just fill the rest in in this convoluted discussion.
Western culture (I can only speak for western culture, but this may not be much different in other cultures) has historically looked at meaning, what philosophers call the logos, as residing in two places: form or mimesis. Form being the idea of a thing; mimesis being the reality of a thing.
Plato emphasized that form had preeminence over mimesis, which had huge implications. Let’s just summarize as saying that western culture up through the 12th century or so, built its method of thinking (at least according to philosophers; I’m skeptical that real people even bothered with any of this.) on metaphysics, that is we know things not because of their physical nature but because of they exist in the mind and in an ideal way, heaven. Plato believed that these forms exist in the mind before we are even aware of them. Meaning lies in the forms.
Aristotle, as a sort of proto-empiricist emphasized mimesis over form. He believed that we could not be aware of the forms/ideas until we had empirically sensed them or somehow experienced them. Things don’t exist in the mind a priori. Around the 12th century Aristotle was rediscovered, and ultimately overturned Platonic thought and probably led to the renaissance and then to the enlightenment, especially the philosophic notion of empiricism. Empiricism being that we need to derive ideas from observed experiments. You can see then how this blossomed into the scientific revolution and ultimately modern society. Meaning lies in mimeses.
These have been the two extremes of western thought since classical Greece. Empiricism has won the day, but pure empiricism does have a whole in its thinking (there are things which are a priori, we are not a complete blank state). Without getting into it, let me just say that the philosopher Kant was able to qualify pure empiricism, and found a sort of synthesis of form and mimeses, but still an emphasis on mimeses.
Now we come to the theorists, which are a break from traditional western thought, we’ve been arguing over: the structuralists, deconstructionists, new historians, whatever else is the latest fad. I know there are nuances between them but I think they all have the same philosophic underpinning. These theorists don’t believe that logos exist in either form or mimeses but in signifiers. Signifiers being words or how we communicate. These words are constructed before we know of the thing. We create the words before we experience a thing. I think in effect they are creating a new metaphysics not based on forms but on words. Meaning therefore lies in the words, which are unstable, changing, carry baggage, and could mean different things to different people.
I think that’s a lot for now. If anyone wants to correct me, please do I don’t present myself as an expert in philosophy. I don’t even really care about it, but it must be understood. I tried to simplify for the sake of the general forum. I tried to be fair in my presentation above, and in my next major post on this, I’ll summarize why I think the theorists are all wet.