[lbo-talk] Kenneally, some notes and background

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Jun 10 15:49:49 PDT 2009


At 04:33 AM 6/10/2009, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>Two observations. First Kenneally's background is linguistics. I get
>the idea that linguistics as a technical field is not overly impressed
>with the social sciences. From her essay and speech, I don't remember
>any mention of psychology, sociology or anthropology. There are many
>references to what are more properly considered branches of the life
>sciences as in animal field studies, cognative science, neuoscience
>and genetics. So it seems to me there are some important dimensions
>and work that is missing in Kenneally's broad review.
>
>Anthropologists, psychologists and sociologist have all done a quite a
>bit of work on human thought, language, and sociey. In fact their
>theories, schools of thought, and findings comprise a much larger body
>of work than the johnny come lately biologists.

not at all. she incorporates work from all over, particularly psychology and anthropologists. I can't recite the variety, I left the book at work, but I'd say you've jumped to an unfair conclusion. Trained in sociology, I'd be the first one to whine if I thought she was ignoring insights from sociology.

Indeed, the biggest take away from this book is the unremitting emphasis on the social -- on social relations -- in the development of language and speech. Even in her chapters on research on the brain and on the following chapter on genetics, which I'm just now reading, what you are confronted with is the fact that you can't understand any of this without considering the effects of our social environment on the brain and genetics. (basically, from what I get on the genetics chapter, which I haven't finished, is that the idea that we have a blueprint for a genome has been tossed, even though it was the dominant view just five years ago. But again, book's at work, so I might need to revise that.)

shag

"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."

-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08

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