From: Kenneth Van Oost (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Fri 01 Jul 2005 - 20:23:33 GMT
Kate wrote,
" Words may have different connotations, or different meanings in different
contexts, but this doesn 't imply that they have no meaning at all, or that
it is impossible to use them to say exactly what you mean.
Well - I hope not . "
<< I 'm afraid I must dash all the hope you' ve left Kate !
In his 1984 book, Illusion and Reality, D. Smail writes on pg 67, (Dutch
version), " It is sure that without words we can 't think in the ways we use
the word. But it is also true that words aren 't always necessary to perform
complex activities. You can try to put those things, like how a cat plays
with a mouse , but none will satify.
This isn 't a simple question, they have complicated philosophical and
psychological consequentions."
What is important is making a clear distinction between experience, Smail
uses the word intuition, and language.
What then comes alight are two things, first that language has become
within our society the plomp instrument of the objectiviness and secondly
that distorting the truth has become the main function of language.
What language does_ because we ain't got the precise linguistic elements
to say what we really want to say, although we think it is fair enough_ is
always talking with a near- the- truth- system, reality as it is somewhere
out there isn 't ours to grasp. No doubt that we're pretty sure that someone
can actualy explain his behavior and reasons for it ( or he should damn lie)
but that is just because we live within the same representational system.
So it becomes very easy to conclude without any further thought on our part
that what someone talks about must be the result of an internal pro- contra
process where in fact there isn 't such a thing. Most things we do/ talk about
aren 't well considered, but mostly automatic social/ cultural representations
to use the term.
Order of the day is that if someone talks to us that we consider it as being
the truth and that thus this is the real sense of the events happening.
But with language in mind that ain't true, we extract meaning from it, and
the possibility exist that we drag different meanings out of it in different
settings but it is impossible to know that the things someone says to
us are exactly what he means. Neither his linguistic system and our
representational system is up for that task.
Regards,
Kenneth
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