kelley wrote:
>
> in order for carrol to have typed what he did, he has to have been
> completely oblivious to any of the posts i've written where we've explained
> that it's not about communication, but COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
And no one has thought it necessary to justify coining this term. I had forgotten it, but being reminded of it, I am a bit more suspicious of the term 'praxis,' since 'commuicative action' seems yet another in the unending series (going back to the late 19th century) of attempts to dematerialize materialism, of subverting the fundamental assumption of all real knowledge, the priority (in principle and in chronology) of motion to thought.
> -- a term
> habermas uses to denote symbolic social interaction.
If term X merely denotes term Y, why are both needed? We are moving deeper and deeper into the world of Pope's Dunciad where
"Since Man from beast by Words is known,
Words are Man's province, Words we teach alone . . ."
Why do you need the redundant phrase, "social interaction"? (I am reminded of the phrase that has informed my intellectual life since I first came across it nearly a half century ago, Dryden's "Thou last great master of tautology.") And "symbolic social interaction" is either an utter nullity or, again, it is an intentional or unintentional attempt to sneak in thought unanchored in action. First make the symbol one with that symbolized, then separate them focusing on the symbol itself, and -- Words we teach alone.
> therefore, i see no
> reason why anyone should take carrol seriously since he hasn't bothered to
> take this conversation seriously.
And you haven't taken seriously my intermittent and parenthetical suggestion that before taking any of this stuff seriously, one should go back and read Korzybski, _Science and Sanity_, Odgen and Richarda, _Meaning of Meaning_, and the long bibliographies contained in each. The whole 20th century has been one long desperate effort to escape to a world that can be understood merely by studying the language in which we talk about the world. The effort gets more and more sophisticated (I doubt that Habermas yet represents the acme of the sophistication -- adulteration, but clearly he has had his little impact.)
It boils down, essentially, to an effort to waste the time of the educated sectors of the working class by convincing them that they haven't yet read the book that will make everything clear.
My biting at the edges of this thread has been just one more little guerilla raid on the bizarre academic fetish that one cannot know anything till one knows everything, that one cannot understand one book until one has read a hundred more books, and that someone who hasn't read the particular book _I_ have read has no place in the conversation.
I haven't read all of this thread, but I've read enough to establish pretty clearly that the study of communicative action belongs in the same rhetorical category as a Senate filibuster.
Carrol