Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
>
> I cannot fathom why
> you are interested, perhaps even determined, to establish a minimalist
> understanding of communication. Should we eliminate all lexical duplications?
>
1) "Communication" does not name any object of study. Communication (a) offers no difficulty and (b) does not exist outside of specific situations. It is as silly to study communication as it is to study shirts-with-one-button-missing or junk-yard-objects. This shirt I am holding in my hand has no interesting connection with the shirt someone in Bombay is wearing this moment. This act of communication at 3:00 a.m. est in the southwest quadrant of Wasshington D.C. has no interesting connection with an act of communication occurring in a sandwich shop in La Paz.
2) There is no need to eliminate lexical duplication except when it is not a duplication, and under the pretense of a new name an old object of study is hidden. As an empirical observation I would say that no one ever uses the term "social cosntruction" except with the more or less deliberate intention of confusing the topic being discussed.
To repeat an earlier point. Later ages will look back on the 20th century's obsession with language, symbol systems, semantics, etc. as being even dippier than neoclassical economics. One symptom of this is that when the obsession is challenged, it is defended in one of the three following ways:
a) The challenge is caricatured ("materialism of fools")
b) The challenger is told: you're just saying what we're saying. (This reply, in which Kelley specialized, is an implicit admission that Habermas had nothing to say but merely to repeat trivialities.)
c) The topic is changed from the subject under discussion to the personal weaknesses of the challenger (Doug's specialty: apparently outside economics he only discuss the weaknesses and/or strengths of persons, but never pursue the subject.)
Carrol Carrol