OK, Cheerskep, so let's try to state the issue: You hear someone say something or you read what they say. You decide that there are so many different ways to interpret the statement that you can't know what the speaker/writer has in mind to communicate. Thus the communication is fuzzy and no specific meaning can be defined. This always puts you in the position of being the decider and it always put the speaker/writer in the position of supplicant. Harris would agree to some extent, I believe, that the communication as intended does not occur until both speaker/writer and hearer/reader agree about the intended meaning, insofar as they can, albeit always imperfectly. This is way conversation usually involves a back and forth exchange, narrowing the shared meaning to a mutually agreeable form. This form is what Harris regards a context. It's the context that determines how words are representatives of constructed meaning. The context takes precedence over any presumption that a word is a stable signifier.
A point is that you have a responsibility to try to interpret the speaker/writer's context and to add to it or help shape it. If you just want to play a shell game with uncovering a meaning with this or that word or say that words have no meaning because they suggest too many interpretations to be sensible then you are, in my view, abdicating your responsibility to participate in the contextualization and thus the likelihood of a shared meaning. When you say that words have no intrinsic meaning, I agree with you, as does Harris and most other well-educated people but that does not mean that words serve no function at all in shaping a shared construct of meaning, of course. If you read this and respond with your usual barrage of complaints that my words are too fuzzy for you, too ambiguous, and cajole me to keep offering the magic password that will suit you then I say you are being disingenuous, not being serious about the communicative act. On the other hand, you can, with relative ease, and with towering intellect, discern the broad context of what I've tried to say here...if you want to. If you read a Harris book, say, Signs, Language and Communication (1996) all the way through or Collingwood's An Essay on Philosophical Method all the way through I suspect that you would be a little more hesitant to dismiss them as, as...use any of your favorite fuzzy-category adjectives. I've read those books all the way through and found them very difficult -- slow going -- but that's because I'm only an ordinary smart guy, or once was, and therefore willing to wrestle with language contexts not fully familiar to me. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, May 21, 2012 3:22:37 PM Subject: Re: On Roy Harris 2 0f 2 Here's a further attempt to articulate where (in my view) Roy Harris went wrong. Here is the link to Harris's own summary statement of his position: http://www.royharrisonline.com/integrational_linguistics/integrationism_intro duction.html That summary has many interesting remarks, some of which I'd certainly call "insights". But, strangely in a thesis about "integration", his view is fundamentally non-coherent. I think Harris fails in this way because he does not describe his notion behind such key terms as 'sign', 'meaning', 'communication', and even 'contextualization". If he had forced himself to do that - for example, to ask himself what he basically has in mind when he speaks of "human communication" I believe he would have written something much more useful and defensible. Here are two extended quotes from Harris: "2a. Language is the faculty that underlies both speech and writing. It may be considered one part or facet of a more comprehensive faculty: that of sign-making (for which there is no general term in common use). If we adopt the term sign, however, it must be clearly understood that for the integrationist a sign is not a form which carries its own meaning permanently around with it. A sign acquires a meaning only when occurring in a specific context." "4a. Language, then, is the human capacity for communication by integrating signs into series of activities, some of which involve speech or writing or both.. 4b. That is why integrationism pays far more attention to contextualization than any other approach to language. There is no linguistic topic on which more naive and simplistic ideas abound than about context. There are no context-free signs, whether verbal or non-verbal. Contextualization is a complex activity, still too often neglected and poorly theorized. It is not just a function of the immediate situation, but of the entire communicational experience of the participants. The act of contextualization is the act by which the sign is identified as a sign. No contextualization, no sign. This is a basic assumption of integrational linguistics. 4c. Contexts are not given: they are constructed by the participants in particular communication situations. How exactly this is done how the distinctions are drawn between what is relevant and what is not no one has yet explained. Integrational research aims to explore this problem. 4d. The complexity of contextualization is one of the reasons why misunderstandings are common in human communication. Individuals contextualize differently from one another, depending on the personal experience they bring to bear on dealing with a given situation. Not even in the case of identical twins do two individuals share the same history of communicational experience." Harris does not appear to keep clear the distinction between what he'd call a "sign" (a spoken or written "word", a gesture, even a factor in environment smoke in the hall, rain, a growl from a lion) and the content of the mind receiving these signs. Harris is right to feel all of these signs can combine to occasion the next notions that arise in a person's mind. But Harris doesn't see the implication of his own excellent observation: "Contextualization. . . is not just a function of the immediate situation, but of the entire communicational experience of the participants." When he says, " A sign acquires a meaning only when occurring in a specific context," I claim he is thinking of "the meaning" as the notion that arises in the receiver's mind. The receiver, takes in these new "signs" and processes them, which involves connecting them with his memories. Everything you might say to someone "apple", "fire", "foopgoom", "appelsin" -- depends on the receiver's memory for the image, feeling, idea that then arises in the receiver's mind. It is this processing that Harris thinks of as "conceptualization" I understand why Harris says "the sign acquires the meaning", but what Harris actually is thinking is that the mind of the receiver acquires something, a rising notion. It's understandable but misleading to say the sign has acquired anything at all. The sign is absolutely unchanged. Harris is thinking straight when he says "a sign is not a form which carries its own meaning permanently around with it". But he's gone wrong when he suggests the sign itself EVER "has a meaning". That error, among others, has repercussions throughout what I've read by him. In my next posting, which will take an unusual form for this forum, I'll try to elaborate on this.
