Dear Isabel,
You are quite right. You capture many of the relevant issues where you write, “… meaning in language and culture are always moving targets so to say that adds to the difficulty. But being someone that has spoken at least 2 languages all her life going on my 4th (I'm fluent in Swedish, and roughly competent in German) I rebel to the impossibility of translation. The entire context will be lost but so are the original words used. The words used are in themselves an abstraction of the concept that wants to be transmitted so the core of the message is not that much on the words and language used as in the situation and intention that lead to the intention of communication. That I believe in many cases transcends the language being used. In many cases is does not and we are bound to restudy the classics in new light of what we know their cultural context was.”
In 1983, the late legal scholar Robert Cover wrote a beautiful introduction to a discussion of the 1982 sessions of the United States Supreme Court titled “Nomos and Narrative.” What makes this essay especially apt in this conversation is the care with which Cover examines the interlayering of culture, meaning, and nomothetic worlds. In an interesting sense, we are translating from one world to another whenever we speak from within our world and culture to people who inhabit another world and culture.
Just the other day, I was speaking with a colleague who is developing a research project that deliberately recruits participants from different research communities to examine the same topic. It reminded me of Graham Farmelo’s 2019 book, The Universe Speaks in Numbers. Farmelo describes the difficulty that physicists and mathematicians have had learning to speak with one another and learning to work together, even though physics relies on mathematics. Much of this has to do with the nomothetic worlds each group inhabits, despite the fact that they want to communicate with each other, and despite the fact that physical mathematics has emerged as an important discipline over the past century and a half. I can think of dozens of similar examples.
You’ll find a copy of Robert Cover’s “Nomos and Narrative” attached to this email as a .pdf.
Cover opens his essay by quoting Wallace Stevens’s poem, Connoisseur of Chaos:
“B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)”
This also seems quite apt.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Visiting Professor | Faculty of Engineering | Lund University ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|