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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (37518)	8/13/2002 10:00:43 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

One more link and excerpt and link before I clear the old desktop. From users.voicenet.com The Linguistic Move: Metaphoric Realism Postmodernism is also characterized by a linguistic movement in philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein came to reject his own earlier positivist theory of language, which provides an important transition in charting the move from modernism to postmodernism. Wittgenstein came to recognize that all languages, from the mathematical to our mother tongues, are internally self-referential. Language is understood as a kind of game theory, in which the rules are arbitrary to each particular user-group. What we can talk about is language games within the boundaries of rational, irrational, and other rational. Human reason is a polyglot. Crossdisciplinary and crosscultural translation projects result. Within the rules of their respective language games, an Orthodox Jew can be every bit as rational as a particle physicist; indeed, they can be one and the same person. There is, however, no master language of Truth, as the scientific positivists and religious fundamentalists had hoped. Words achieve their denotative function only through connotative associations in established usage. Because the function of language is first established in connotation, we end up with a theory of metaphors as linguistically primordial. A metaphor achieves it's effect by holding in tension two incompatible meanings that reveal some new insight. Metaphors can be simple or extended, overused or innovative. A metaphor expresses an "is/is not" tension that creates meaning. By extension, it is possible to argue that models, symbols, and theories also function like complex metaphors. Whether we equate God with a father or evolution with a jungle, we are using metaphoric associations to create meanings that are literally untrue. These metaphors are powerful and productive in their ability to create meaning. Common metaphors are often taken-forgranted in our thoughts. The postmodern move involves exposing taken-forgranted metaphoric usage in some kind of deconstructive reversal. While it is possible to reductionistically present all human knowledge as linguistically mediated and therefore also metaphoric in some primordial sense, postmodernism can take this too far. To say that language has no external reference renders much of human experience nonsensical. Natural phenomena are not simply a blank slate for human metaphoric projection. Nature and our embodied natures present themselves as structured, limited, and frequently causatively determinative of human experience. If you don't think nature is real, try going without water for a few days and see how well you think. Perhaps what we need is a metaphoric notion of reality in which we see metaphoric association as issuing from all of reality and not simply from the human subject. The periodic table of elements is an extended metaphor of basic chemicals. Humans have discerned this grammatical guide to the elements after careful labors in "listening to" and "conversing in" the language "spoken" by atoms. The Genesis creation myth is also an extended metaphor spoken by the cosmogenesis and transcribed into human culture. Indeed, it is possible and necessary also to understand human beings as a kind of metaphoric projection of nature and thus enact yet another postmodern reversal. Nature speaks its own reality and it can be difficult to distinguish who is really dreaming of who in the bio-logical structuring of our bodies, psyches, and habitats. The ancient Taoist sage, Chuang-Tzu wrote: Last night Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly, spirits soaring he was a butter fly (is it that in showing what he was suited his own fancy?), and did not know about Chou. When all of a sudden he awoke, he was Chou with all his wits about him. He does not know whether he is Chou who dreams he is a butterfly or a butterfly who dreams he is Chou. Between Chou and the butterfly there was necessarily a dividing; just this is what is meant by the transformation of things (Koller, 1991, 460).