T: I thought I would add to this by posting a piece from a forthcoming article of mine. 'Abstraction as a limit to semiosis' (forthcoming in Semiotica 2012 or 2013). I explain this very phenomenon with reference to French mathematician, Rene Thom:
"I begin the explanation of this by drawing attention to the fact that we nominalize certain discourse processes in an onomasiological way. That is, the progress of discourse creates new meanings that stand in need of naming, of a signifier. These nominals become more and more abstract in their nature, insofar as their function is to summarize those parts of prior discourse that one wishes to evoke without having to repeat them laboriously. The recursive mechanism in language that gives birth to such processes is found according to Thom (1983: 176) also in mathematical discovery. He alludes to “a direct extension of this mechanism of symbolic creation” whereby “the mathematician sometimes sees an expression, or a relation, turning up again and again with an embarrassing insistence”, so that he will “introduce a new symbol to condense this expression into a single form and so continue the work on a new basis.” The new basis here is a higher level of abstraction.
In the quoted passage Thom shows with great clarity how this recursion and advancement to new levels of abstraction occurs in relation to the semiosis of mathematics. The more general principle of abstraction is that a statement or set of statements is represented by a new sign or nominal expression. But then this new nominal itself enters into new expressions in its turn, thereby raising the level of abstraction. It is in these accretions of discourse that are nominalized and “profiled” (Visetti and Cadiot 2002) via abstract expressions that the full potential of the symbolic order, as well as its aporiae, are to be located. Just as Thom’s new mathematical form has a group of preceding others as its meaning, just so in language more generally must we retrace our steps into prior discourse in order to find the original meanings of certain nominal expressions we use.
Thom says that creating a new symbol like this “promotes a kind of tearing away, with the establishing of a new semantic field which will be the support of the new actant and so free the mental movement from the obsessional presences which impede it” (1983: 276). Just so with language in general; a new symbol arises which allows the mind to fly free of the obsessional particulars of its previous moments. But what we have added to this imagery of semiosis without limit (in this case abstraction without limit) is the caution that this freedom requires that we be able to trace our way back whence we came and to show others the same path, lest we forget what we mean. The ability, the opportunity and the will to do this, however, cannot always be taken for granted."
Tahir -------------- next part -------------- All Email originating from UWC is covered by disclaimer http://www.uwc.ac.za/emaildisclaimer