Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 20:38:30 +1100 From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au> Subject: Re: M-TH: being determines consciousness ? Hello again, Ralph, A particularly disappointing missive, I'm afraid. You wrote: >Now how much does the existence of language and the capacity to learn >language depend on social relations and how much on biology? Of Course biology is necessary. But a good Darwinian (or should I say one whose knowledge of evolution comes exclusively from David attenborough) would suggest biology itself depended on the specific characteristics and challenges that define the species in question during its development (a bit of a dialectic there, eh?). We were, after all, pretty well ordained to be socially interdependent (being physically clumsy and insubstantial, and also rather tasty). >How much can >you answer this question by referring to philosophers and to Marx or Engels, >and how much can you learn from discourse theorists who come from literature >or philosophy, and how much by referring to linguists, psychologists, >neuroscientists, or evolutionary biologists? And even if you know anything >about sociolinguistics, to whom do you refer and in what capacity? Well, philosophy is sort of everywhere, isn't it (it exists either as conscious or unconscious premises and logic, I'd have thought)? But yeah, I'm a wanker from the humanities who daily sees even more shameless wank than he's capable of soiling the pages of journals in his 'field' (with plenty of noble exceptions, mind). I am not a pomo - I do not see scientific methodoly and laws as just so many tyrannical 'contending' discourses from just so many anointed priests. I am not a discourse theorist beyond a position that demands we must treat conscious humanity differently from the natural world and unconscious humanity. So, yeah, the science is important. And I know bugger-all about it. >And what do you think philosophers understand about the nature of language, >period, let alone the possible status of cognition outside or beyond what is >understood as "language", without having actually studied any of the >specialized sciences? Does anyone from the specialised sciences actually know about the extent to which cognition proceeds independently of language? Babies seem to evince thought long before they evince behaviour uniquely consistent with linguistic intercourse. And chimps think (although they may have language, I s'pose) - certainly their cognition processes become apparent to us most famously when we teach them a language. >The number of Marxists who have learned or understood anything at all about >real linguistics I can count on one hand, or maybe even one asshole. Who's the arsehole you have in mind? I know it shouldn't be, Ralph, but this is beyond me (although I have studied a little sociolinguistics). I gotta go with what I have, and hope to get more along the way. What am I saying that peeves you so much? Cheers, Rob. ************************************************************************ Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia. Phone: 02-6201 2194 (BH) Fax: 02-6201 5119 ************************************************************************ 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.' (John Stuart Mill) "The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital." (Karl Marx) ************************************************************************ --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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