Re: [xmca] activity (was concepts)

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Eric,

No need to defer - like Anna, I appreciate disagreement! I doubt I'm the better scholar; perhaps the more obsessive. And my ability to understand Russian is entirely mediated by Google Translate!

Martin

On Apr 21, 2011, at 9:17 AM, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org wrote:

> Martin:
> 
> I will have to defer to you as I believe you to be the greater scholar as 
> well as better in translation ( as I alas know only english and pig 
> latin)>  However, instinctively I believe concept to be the dialectic that 
> allows thinking and speech to merge and become what LSV refers to as 
> higher psychological processes.
> 
> eric
> 
> 
> 
> From:   Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
> To:     "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date:   04/20/2011 11:30 PM
> Subject:        Re: [xmca] activity (was concepts)
> Sent by:        xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
> 
> 
> 
> On Apr 20, 2011, at 3:47 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
> 
>> Eric,
>> 
>> I don't know, I think LSV makes it pretty clear that word-meaning is not 
> the concept. He criticizes Ach, who:
>> 
>> "identifies concept and word meaning, and thus precludes any possibility 
> of change and development in concepts" (T&S chapter 6, para 16).
>> 
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
> Eric,
> 
> I apologise for my curt message earlier today. As it happens I had been 
> sitting in a cafe for a couple of hours musing over this very issue, and 
> when I returned home to read your message I couldn't resist a quick reply.
> 
> It seems to me that one way of thinking about what LSV does in T&S is that 
> he defines what word-meaning [Значение] is by explaining successively what 
> it is not. That does seem a bit dialectical, doesn't it? And one of the 
> things that word-meaing is not is concept (ch 7). It is also not sound 
> (preface and ch 1). Is it not objective reference (ch 2). 
> 
> And I think this clarifies some of the issues in reading the book. For 
> example, when in chapter 5 LSV borrows Frege's & Husserl's distinction 
> between 'sense' and 'reference,' Sinn and Bedeutung should translate as 
> Смысле and Значение, but LSV has the *former* term as Значение. So Frege's 
> distinction becomes 'meaning' and 'objective referent.' Why? Because LSV 
> is using this distinction to make the point that the meaning is not the 
> object the word refers to, which is a commonsense view and also that of 
> several psychologists whose work he is critiquing.
> 
> In chapter 7, however, when LSV introduces Paulhan's distinction between 
> 'sense' and 'signification' it is the *latter* term which he calls 
> Значение, while the former is Смысле. Why? Because although LSV gives 
> credit to Paulhan for introducing the distinction, he criticizes him for 
> not solving the problem of the relationship between the two terms. And 
> meaning, for LSV, is neither Paulhan's sense nor his signification. 
> 
> Here is the paragraph in full:
> 
> Our research has been able to establish three fundamental characteristics 
> which are linked amongst themselves and which constitute the originality 
> of the semantic aspect of inner speech. The first fundamental 
> characteristic is the predominance of the sense [смысла] of a word over 
> its meaning [значением] in inner speech. Paulhan has rendered a great 
> service to psychological analysis by introducing the difference between 
> the sense of a word and its meaning. The sense of a word, as Paulhan has 
> demonstrated, represents the ensemble of all of the psychological facts 
> which appear in our consciousness thanks to a word. The sense of a word is 
> in this way a dynamic, fluid, complex semantic formation which has several 
> zones of different stability. The meaning is only one of the areas of 
> sense that the word acquires in a given context, but it is the zone which 
> is most stable, most unified, and most precise. As is well known, a word 
> easily changes its sense in different contexts. The meaning, in contrast, 
> is the immobile and immutable point which remains stable in diverse 
> contexts. This change in sense in the word is what we have established as 
> the fundamental fact in the semantic analysis of speech. The real meaning 
> of a word is not constant. In one operation, the word has one meaning, and 
> in another it takes on a different meaning. This dynamicity of meaning 
> brings us to the problem of Paulhan, that is to say the relationship 
> between meaning and sense. The word, taken by itself in the dictionary, 
> has only one meaning. But this meaning is nothing other than the potential 
> which is realized in living language; this meaning is only the foundation 
> stone of sense. 
> 
> LSV's word meaning is not signification because it is not a fixed, 
> dictionary definition. But it is not Paulhan's sense either. Sense is an 
> important phenomenon, especially for understanding inner speech and its 
> relation to thought on the one hand and social speech on the other. But it 
> is not word-meaning. For one thing, LSV points out that Paulhan shows that 
> sense can actually be detached from the word.
> 
> So here too the emphasis is on what word-meaning is not. Not sense, not 
> sound, not referent, not concept. 
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> 
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