[Xmca-l] Re: meaning and sense

[Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>]

Andy,
I'm not convinced that this gets to the cultural-historical transformation
of meanings. Seems like he is saying that a word can have different
meanings in different contexts.

He says "Isolated in the lexicon, the word has only one meaning." That
seems to suggest a culturally historically synchronic view.

But that is not to say that Vygotsky doesn't have a strong appreciation for
the transformation of meanings across time (it would be weird if he
didn't). Just that I'm not seeing it here in this example.
-greg


On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 12:24 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I was just looking into this business about Vygotsky imputing excessive
> stablility to word meaning. The following key passage from Chapter 7 of
> "Thinking and Speech" does not, it appers to me, to imply such stability:
>
>    "First, in inner speech, we find a predominance of the word’s sense
>    over its meaning. Paulhan significantly advanced the psychological
>    analysis of speech by introducing the distinction between a word’s
>    sense and meaning. A word’s sense is the aggregate of all the
>    psychological facts that arise in our consciousness as a result of
>    the word. Sense is a dynamic, fluid, and complex formation which has
>    several zones that vary in their stability. Meaning is only one of
>    these zones of the sense that the word acquires in the context of
>    speech. It is the most stable, unified, and precise of these zones.
>    In different contexts, a word’s sense changes. In contrast, meaning
>    is a comparatively fixed and stable point, one that remains constant
>    with all the changes of the word’s sense that are associated with
>    its use in various contexts. Change in the word’s sense is a basic
>    factor in the semantic analysis of speech. The actual meaning of the
>    word is inconstant. In one operation, the word emerges with one
>    meaning; in another, another is acquired. The dynamic nature of
>    meaning leads us to Paulhan’s problem, to the problem of the
>    relationship between meaning and sense. Isolated in the lexicon, the
>    word has only one meaning. However, this meaning is nothing more
>    than a potential that can only be realized in living speech, and in
>    living speech meaning is only a cornerstone in the edifice of sense."
>
> As I read this, the stability of meaning is merely relative to that of
> sense, i.e., in the context of speech, rather than "teh aggregate of all
> psychological facts." He is not at all denying the fact of polysemy or the
> cultural and historical migration of meaning.
>
> Andy
> mike cole wrote:
>
>> I agree, very clearly statements of the sense/meaning relation, along with
>> the Mandelshtam line, " I forgot the thought I wanted to say, and thought,
>> unembodied, returned to the hall of shadows."
>>
>> In the quote here, I think LSV is somewhat overstating the stability of
>> meaning across contexts; yes relative to the microgenetic processes of
>> sense making capturable with
>> modern technologies, but not totally "context independent." Even
>> dictionary
>> meanings change, as LSV was well aware from his interest in the history of
>> words in relation to their appearance in children's vocabularies in
>> ontogeny.
>>
>> Keeping the simultaneous relevance of several time scales in mind in these
>> discussions seems really important, as hard as it is to do.
>> mike
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>


-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
883 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson