Crikey Ken
you are really giving away your committment to the intellect and its bullying, 'big headed' position of actively negating or suppressing imagination and intuitive, embodied ways of knowing in your recent reply to Jinan's very enlightening post when you wrote:
"...The shift to an argument against language itself moves into the realm of religion and mysticism. Your claims are apparently not based on research or on a serious engagement with the scholars you cite or the disciplines they represent."
Is this design you are talking about? Creativity?
Global knowledge is changing Ken - merging, deepening, evolving...and it requires less thinking and more being and experiencing. I know its a tricky one for an email discussion list whose currency is words and writing about what other people have written ( in the West during a mere century) but its time to wake up and witness what is going on in the world and learn from it......
Best
Fiona
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From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Ken Friedman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 22 April 2013 08:23
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Language
Dear Jinan,
One cannot enter every thread productively, so I’ve been staying out of the thread titled “Re: [New post] New Book Announcement: McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight by Robert K. Logan.” The claims about language in your latest post call for a response. Your claims yesterday about the views of Stephen Toulmin and Harold Innis caught my eye, but I thought not to respond on the list. Now I’ll respond to both posts.
Yesterday, you made the astonishing claim that Toulmin and Innis argued for a return to orality and against literacy. You wrote about Toulmin and Innis without reference to their work. You argue for the primacy of experience without yourself experiencing what these authors write. Your post misinterprets these authors. Your view of Toulmin seems to be a second-hand or third-hand reading through Wikipedia.
You also misinterpret Harold Innis. Innis did not plead for a return to orality, nor did he argue against literacy. Innis studied the effects of different kinds of literacy on civilizations with respect to duration in time or extension in space, as well as other issues. He did not argue that we should step back from literacy to orality. His view was quite the contrary.
To maintain effective social organizations above the local level without literacy of some kind would be impossible. This has always been the case. In modern times, only the ability to aggregate and deploy resources in organizations higher than local levels makes possible such useful ventures as hospitals, railroads, or universities possible. Large-scale social projects such as evidence-based medicine, long-distance trade, or the Internet also require literacy.
Innis was an economist who appreciated and recognized the virtues of different forms of communication. His interest was understanding more deeply how these mediate and influence the societies built around them. To state that “the plea of Harold Innis” was a “return to orality” is entirely inaccurate.
Innis’s classic book (1995 [1951], 2005) on communication had a chapter titled “a plea for time,” but he made no plea for “a return to orality.”
Your latest post seems to me even more misguided. You write about: “being-ness getting rooted in the realm of language from very young age. Children are forced in to the linguistic world before letting them to root themselves in the real world.”
You move from the claim that literacy somehow harms children to the sweeping and grandiose claim that language itself harms children!
You’re ignoring at least two and a half centuries of work in philosophy, social science, psychology, and cognitive science on the role of language in human development.
Human beings become human – it is through language that humans take on the being that defines them as distinctly human. Language is the medium through which human beings develop as human. It is the medium through which we shape societies and societies shape us. It is the medium through which we build cultures and through which cultures build us. To suggest that we can be human without language is a mystical, romantic vision. We use many kinds of language, and we need them all.
It might have been possible to make this kind of argument back in the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; no l0nger, and not for a long time.
This kind of assertion stopped making sense in the world of Dewey, Mead, and the Pragmatists. It makes no sense in a world where Searle or Berger and Luckmann address these issues. This notion entirely misses what we have learned from symbolic interactionism and social construction in the social sciences. It neglects psychology and cognitive science.
Your argument against literacy misuses the sources you cite. The shift to an argument against language itself moves into the realm of religion and mysticism. Your claims are apparently not based on research or on a serious engagement with the scholars you cite or the disciplines they represent.
There seems to be a “real” world outside the realm of language, but it is impossible for human beings to “be” in this world without the mental and cognitive structures that language creates.
Perhaps you’ve got some reasoned argument that it should be otherwise, or some evidence – conceptual, theoretical, or empirical. So far, there has been none posted here. It is certainly the case that neither Stephen Toulmin nor Harold Innis shared your views.
Best regards,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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References
Innis, Harold. 1995 [1951]. The Bias of Communication. Reprinted with an introduction by Paul Heyer and David Crowley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Innis, Harold. 2005. The Bias of Communication. Second Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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