chuck,

i do not want to get into the old designer game of classifying concepts as
outdated vs. current, just because someone published them more recently.

i like gambatista vico, for example, who wrote 250 years ago, is not too
well know today, but has still much to say, in my opinion.  i am citing the
ancient greek philosopher protagoras who is believed to have been the first
to say that "man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they
are, and of things that are not that they are not."  you seem to want to
locate different mental activities in different parts of the brain.  to
convince me that this can be done, i'd suggest that you open one up and show
me the particular function, better still replace it with a mechanical
replica of that part of the brain.  if the brain does as well with the
replica as with the part that it replaces, then you have convinced me that
you know.  i for one am not a brain surgeon, neither is pinker.

you mention pinker. he does not have a clue of languaging, of how reality is
being constructed in talk.  read his supposedly devastating critique of
bejamin whorf who as an anthropological linguist, was just not interested in
the kind of cognitivism that pinker is.  they are worlds apart, although i
admit that whorf's research would have been done differently today than at
his time.

to me the brain is a remarkable organ that coordinates an unimaginably large
number of patterned phenomena, both from inside and outside the body
(without ever knowing what it responds to).  it creates a reality that it
can live with.  its structure is not entirely a physiological one, it has
much to do with the history of bodily interactions, especially with the
environment, and since the human environment is full of other people, social
relations, conventions, concerns, the brain is partly social too.
cognitivists do not think so and seek to infer from the behavior they can
observe some underlying structure that they then claim accounts for that
(sorry, yes, individual) behavior.

to me language is a social artifact by being culture, group, or even
conversation specific.  abstract objectivists try to study language as a
system independent of its use and lo and behold they abstract features from
languaging that are relatively stable in a particular group and thereby omit
or declare secondary that  what varies from situation to situation.  this
was saussure's devastating doing that is still echoed in chomsky's theory of
language, particularly his universal grammar.

you expressed irritation with my saying that you regard "language as
transparent." well, i merely took your own words seriously when you said "I
thought we were using language to discuss how the brain works in perception"
not how edelman's language conceptualized the brain, the metaphors he used
to construct his notion of the brain, and how the grammar of english lead
him to certain constructions (my elaboration).  by taking "language as
transparent" i meant precisely the condition of taking it for granted.

you said that "If you start severing up brain function you need to entertain
the possibility that your view is incomplete." this is well said and i
couldn't agree with you more, but it was you who talked about the brain and
various functions, the executive function, for example, not i.  i was
talking about coordination, which involves senses and action in a braiding
that we can to some extend monitor, and talk of.  i am just not willing to
carve up the brain based on other people's writing.  i am more comfortable
with the realities that i can construct and test in the practice of everyday
living.  i prefer to leave my brain whole and out of the hands of brain
surgeons.

coming back to design, designers are pretty creative people who must
nevertheless make that what they propose clear to others, and that involves
arguments based on demonstrations and tests.  designers need to enroll
others in their ideas or nothing comes to fruition.  enrolling others in
ones ideas means making an effort to coordinate others' understandings and
actions relative to ones own, a design.   language does just this --
regardless of which part of whose brain is involved, regardless of what is
actually perceived, but not regardless of what participants say they
perceive and do as a consequence of it.  what people say they perceive is a
social phenomenon and of utmost importance to design.  what people do
perceive is everyone's own business.  i think treating language as
transparent, inferring what people perceive from what people say they
perceive moves the phenomenon of enrolling others in a designer's project
from the social domain into a psychological/cognitive domain.  doing this is
a game that one can play, but i wonder if it is not besides the point of
design.

frankly, i don't quite know, chuck, what upsets you.  i am far from
compartmentalizing the brain.  i am not pursuing an old theory of
perception.  i am fully aware of not being able to cause anyone to make the
gestalt switch that i went through a while ago when i abandoned the
abstract/objectivist notion of language (volosinov/bakhtin) in favor of a
dialogical one.  yes, i would side with wittgenstein more so than with
popper (although he too has taught me).  maybe i should be silent for a
while after quoting wittgenstein who described the trap one can be in when
ignoring language.  he said:

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in
our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably (1953:115).

klaus


klaus krippendorff
gregory bateson term professor for cybernetics, language, and culture
the annenberg school for communication
university of pennsylvania
3620 walnut street
philadelphia, pa 19104.6220
phone: 215.898.7051 (O); 215.545.9356 (H)
fax: 215.898.2024 (O); 215.545.9357 (H)
usa


-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Burnette [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, May 16, 2004 10:14 PM
To: klaus krippendorff; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Theory-focused understanding of ontology & epistemology


Dear KLAUS,

I assume the e-mail below was intended for me, And
typically, what you suppose I have learned and am
trying to communicate to you is entirely your
erroneous supposition. Similarly, the sources that you
cite (although excellent, most are around 40  years
old) underline my point about the old fashioned view
that perception occurs through sensory motor
coordination without reference to the prefrontal
cortex. While sensorimotor processing is basic to the
simplest perceptual categorizations, stored knowledge
influences the outcomes of these lower level systems -
memories of a similar object shape the detection of
features as they are being perceived and are essential
to interpreting what is perceived.

Without acknowledging the role of memory in perception
you take a position that undermines your emphasis on
knowing only through language which does not depend as
much on sensorimotor coordination as on the functions
of the temporal lobes and the prefrontal cortex. I
recommend reading Ledoux, Damasio, Edelman, Pinker,
Kosslyn and Dennett for an update.

Also visual abstractions do exit outside of language -
an infant learns to distinguish facial features and
associate them with real people without having
acquired language. The perceptual construction of that
formal, patterned and symbolic identification happens
before names can be voiced. Also one knows that a less
than natural image can refer to and qualify something
that is naturally perceivable (concrete) without the
operation of language, otherwise graphic designers and
artists could not function. Language may be needed to
convey how such a presentation is interpreted but the
meaning of the presentation has already been felt as
an aesthetic perception and may never find adequate
articulation in language.

Best,
Chuck

Dr. Charles Burnette
234 South Third Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Tel: +215 629 1387
e-mail: [log in to unmask]