An Re: Whorf Lives (re: Whorf Hoax, etc

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Fri Dec 22 00:25:03 PST 2000



>THESES ON FEUERBACH

Yes, definitely this. I think the focus of the Theses would meet up with the "pragmatic" aspects of speech in the approach I was mentioning. (Where its pragmatics that has more phenomenological concreteness, is more related to concrete activity and social context, than semantic aspects of speech.)

--M

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In this endless debate over Whorf, Chomsky, linguistics, cognitive sciences and so on, and the search for constants, or structure or a formal armature or at least the systematic regularities in languages and thought, seems to ignore one giant half of an obvious dialectic. That other half is the physical world within which all these are embedded and function.

Relative to these studies, the physical or material world is relegated to the domain of content and dismissed. If the phrase phenomenological concreteness has any meaning, then it should at least include the material world in its scope.

But linguistics and cognitive science is hardly alone in their dismissals. Most of the controversial and difficult to justify constructs in many of the biological sciences suffer the same blindness. These organic systems evolved from and are completely co-mingled with the physical systems of their own foundation and origin. To not take this into account is a kind of narrow minded view that functions to inhibit a more complete understanding of what is going on. Genetics and evolution are obvious examples.

Chuck Grimes



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