Understanding beyond language: perceiving meaning in reality (original) (raw)
Related papers
Language as Representation, as Agency, as Being
S. Cormeraie et al.(Eds.), Revolutions in consciousness: local identities, global concerns in Languages & intercultural communication -- ISBN-1-898883-09-2, 2002
Human utterances actualise much more than what is predicated by the propositional content they may have. Thus, over the centuries, another current of language studies has developed as well, one that sees ordinary speech as the concrete expression of situated meaning, revealing both an individual psychology and a people's mind set or Weltanschauung. The present paper will try to justify this second linguistic current and, with it, the teaching of cross-cultural communication as a redefinition of one's existential stance.
The Dialogic Reality of Meaning
The American Journal of Semiotics, 2003
This paper offers a non-representational alternative to semiotic notions of meaning as the designatum of signs, the content of messages, or what a text is about. It derives from considerations of how things -artifacts and objects of nature -could mean something to somebody. Rather than treating things as signs of themselves and thereby undermining the two-world ontology of semiotics, it explores the cultural roles that artifacts acquire in the lives of their users and when questions of their meanings arise and how they are answered in conversation. The paper presents a dialogical conception of meaning, which relies on Bateson's recognition of the importance of multiple descriptions, Wittgenstein's "seeing as", theories of embodied narratives, and bricolages involving technology.
Phenomenology and Mind, 2011
The paper traces the particular quality of human existence as linguistic embodied existence. In asking whether language is like body, it spells out what linguistic experience entails and what kind of picture results from this analysis as grounding the “person” (following Gallagher & Zahavi’s definition) in space/time/body and language. Understanding linguistic existence as embodied existence also facilitates an argument against a representationalist view of language. Nietzsche’s concern is taken up and analyzed: Does the self-reflexivity resulting from linguistic experience threaten individuality? Against his pessimistic conclusion, the article suggests to see language as enabling the individual agent-self.
The Dialogical Reality of Meaning
2015
This paper offers a non-representational alternative to semiotic notions of meaning as the designatum of signs, the content of messages, or what a text is about. It derives from considerations of how things — artifacts and objects of nature — could mean something to somebody. Rather than treating things as signs of themselves and thereby undermining the two-world ontology of semiotics, it explores the cultural roles that artifacts acquire in the lives of their users and when questions of their meanings arise and how they are answered in conversation. The paper presents a dialogical conception of meaning, which relies on Bateson’s recognition of the importance of multiple descriptions, Wittgenstein’s "seeing as", theories of embodied narratives, and bricolages involving technology. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/asc\_papers/51
Language and the Conception of Reality
There is a popular belief that, language is a veritable instrumentum laborat (working tool) for the communication of thoughts and the conception of reality. There is equally a lingering belief that, language pictures or mirrors reality. But to what extent can we authenticate this existing opinion? Is it the case that the conglomerate of reality, can be represented linguistically without any iota of defect/fallibilism? Can language mirror reality perfectly as it is, in itself? What really is the ontological status of language? What is language anyway? How does it relate to the world? How does it relate to the mind? Should our view of language influence our view of the world? Even more seriously, what is the limit of language in the herculean task of conceiving and revealing reality? Armed with the concerns highlighted above, this paper, attempts to grapple with these questions, by first seeking insights into the meaning, nature and use of language; the nature of reality; and the role of language within the context of effective representation and a veridical a fortiori conception of different ‘forms of life and states of affairs’ of reality. Keywords: Language, Reality, Conception, Forms of life, States of affairs.
Language, Giving-the-Meaning and Interpretation
Entelekya Logico-Metaphysical Review, 2021
The subject that we have tried to mention in this article mainly intensifies on the meta-ontological or metaphysical field. Although we cannot know the real existence of objects, at least, we say something that cannot be expressed. Then, we should not ignore that our judgments belonging to the unknown field can be interpreted, more or less, on account of the relation to the area of the facts we know them. It is clear that trying to get the meaning of the world in itself or noumenon through the image of the concrete world is useless. Nevertheless, this condition does not mean that it should not make inquiries concerning the noumenon world and discontinue thinking about what the field of existence in itself is. Interpretations on this field of existence in itself cannot be expressed by mere knowledge of the actual area or the real notions. Because, in our image of the real world, there seems a situation that continually changes and which converts its meaning in each change.
Considers the mechanics of meaning and meaningfulness in linguistic practices
The Destinal Question of Language
How can we think the destinal place of language in the essentially historical condition of our existence if such historicity cannot be understood on the basis of the labor of negativity alone? The attempt is made here to think language in a more originary manner, as non-negative finitude, that affirms what is outside dialectical-speculative closure, what is to come. The notion of 'destinal' itself is thus transformed. No longer being merely a categorical grasp of "entities presently given", language is an originary exposure to the event of arrival in its lightning flash. Destiny appears as that of the messianic arrival of the 'not yet' which is not a telos that the immanent movement of historical reason reaches by an irresistible force of the negative. This essay reads Schelling, Heidegger and Kierkegaard to think language as a "place" of exposure to the non-teleological destiny that may erupt even today, here and now, without any given conditionality.
Chapter 3. Language, Speech, Meaning
In this chapter, I argue that metaphor supplies the basic means by which we connect or separate those aspects of experience that we characterise as either intangible or material, and that this constitutes a “reading” of experience in terms that enable us to position these experiences on the same conceptual plane and in relation to one another, despite their very different qualitative features—that is, despite the distinction of one being “real” and the other imaginary, felt, or purely intellectual. By bringing these different types of experiences together, we are reproducing our expectations in a bodily sense as beings with minds and bodies. This entails the characterisation of experience as either belonging to the position of being a subject or of being an object. We arrive at these metaphorical positions via bodily entailments like point of view, utilising our experience as seeing bodies to characterise these abstractions in terms that construe one as immaterial and related to mental processes (subjective) and the other as material and real in the same sense that our body is experienced as real and externally apparent (objective). The mind thus becomes the site of subjective experience and the body supplies experiences that can be intersubjectively realised and thus held to be objective. What this means for the novel is that its symbolic values are likely to be characterised along the same lines, that it will endeavour to reproduce the same relations when establishing verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is always sought on some fundamental level, even in texts that breach expectations of reality, because the attribution of meaning to the phenomenal world relies upon the intersubjectively determined expressions of experience that constitute metaphors. Nonetheless the novel will likely seek another form of meaning beyond verisimilitude, for to mean only that this text resembles reality is not, of itself, of sufficient interest—some other meaning (about reality, perhaps) must be given in the artistic text. It is when the relations of separating and connecting establish meanings in excess of verisimilitude that we typically identify the presence of a rhetorical figure like metaphor—but also other rhetorical figures, like analepsis, hyperbole, any form of repetition, and even litotes because in understatement what is excessive is the degree to which the meaning lacks what it might be expected to convey.