Dear Chuck,
Thank you for responding to my arguments. The respective ways we are
looking at these issues are very different, but I have found it
valuable to see them juxtaposed, and I am sure that the attempt I have
made to counter these views has deepened my own understanding. I have
appreciated the dialogue.
Part of my argument concerns an appreciation of the differences between
physical explanations of 'natural' events, and human ascriptions and
avowals of reasons, motives, influences etc. on the other. I consider
these to be different in principle. There is also a difference between
the terms by which an event is understandable, and crediting some
agency to the event. Thus, I am not claiming that conversational
situations have some mysterious, supernatural, or metaphysical
'influence' over their participants, or that situations are agents they
way that people are. My statement was simply that an understanding of
what takes place in conversation is possible by reference to its
organisation, and with little recourse to the construction of a
universe of cognitive 'encodings' which posits that the world must
first be 'represented' in the brain in order for theorists to account
for human behaviour. This is a matter of accounting, not a matter of
assigning agency.
But the core of my position concerns what it makes sense to say. When
neuroscientists claim that my brain talks to your brain, or my neurons
talk to yours, language has gone on holiday. A talking brain, or
indeed, talking neurons, would be a spectacle. We could charge
admission. Reading your response, however, I feel that many of the
points I was trying to make have not been appreciated. I don't doubt
that I have yet to learn a better way to express these ideas, and that
may be the crux of the problem. My point remains, however, that the
very things that neuroscience is seeking to explain ('emotion',
'thought', 'mind') are things they are first transforming, redefining,
and changing the meaning of; thereafter they identify them (or, on this
view, misidentify them) as a physical phenomenon instead of a patterned
and varied way of speaking. In pursuing their physiological studies,
they may learn many things. But the phenomena they considered as
*worthy* of explanation and investigation in the first place were
phenomena they first identified through their appearance in ordinary
discourse, through vernacular pre-theoretical understandings of
actions, and through the offering of reasons and explanations for
actions. I am only proposing that this phenomenon (the one we are both
trying to explain) first be examined before we determine, a priori, the
nature and physical location of its existence.
You suggest that I am "not willing to look at "words", meaning and
embodiment in any other framework or from any other point of view than
the one I believe in." While I might have appreciated lip service to
the possibility that the position I have adopted is one I have been
convinced by, rather than one I merely believe in, it nevertheless
remains that I have read Pinker and Damasio, and have very likely spent
more time considering the issues that they raise than many of my
discussants have spent engaging with Wittgenstein in any serious way. I
am not certain my posts have made much headway, but I have enjoyed the
discussion. Thanks for your time.
Kind regards,
Ben
Ben Matthews
Assistant Professor, PhD
Mads Clausen Institute for Product Innovation
University of Southern Denmark
Grundtvigs Alle 150
Sønderborg 6400 Denmark
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Ph +45 6550 1675
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