Hi folks,
excuse me for the great delay in answering but I'm selling
goods abroad and have not too much time for thinking, thus...
I wish to reply to Warren contribution.
Warren says I told that deixis originated in linguistics[1].
I don't remember of having said anything like this, yet Warren
quote against my criticism Buehler [not Buhler, if you cannot put
the umlaut (alt+252) you can set an 'e' after the vocal] theory.
It is really funny because 'Buehlertheorie' is considered a
psycholinguistic
one, and his use of (ocular) 'deixis' as Warren himself points out,
served
to him as a metaphor in describing such meaningful activities as
thinking,
imagining, speaking and so on. Such metaphorical use of 'deixis' is what
I
criticise, since it is nothing but a good shoulder for an old conception
of
meaning.
I referred to linguistics but only with reference to the problem of
'meaning'
which is a general problem within human sciences. If we agree that
meaning is
not only a linguistic problem in the sense of linguistics as the science
taking
into account verbal languages, but a more general problem in the sense
of a
'linguistics' of languages (as gesture, proxemic, making gesture and
speaking,
filmaking etc, i.e. of a 'semiotics'), we are concerned with the problem
of
meaningful deixis.
Well, I'm not interested in something like ocular deixis, thus if Warren
is
thinking to use the deixis in the general sense as a moving of some
organ towards
something within a space (just like the ocular moving) I find that this
cannot be
a great tool for the understanding of 'filmseeing' as a cultural event,
yet it
could be good for a treaty dealing with the physiology of filmseeing.
Therefore I speak to all people interested in filmseeing as something
involving
meaning [that means naturally, that it involves necessarily
perception/cognition
(although I use the two terms here I'm not so keen on such a
distinction)].
Coming back to the fact of 'pointing' I think that Buehler [2] theory is
based
unfortunately on a pure model of the relationship human/world where the
perception
is not a hard problem, inasmuch as he thinks to the object as accessible
in its Truth
in front of us. This is indeed the first psychological setting (and
unfortunately
is the most shared Setting of anyone using deixis), and although the
school of Wuerzburg
(not Wurzburg) is important for its going beyond the quantitative
conception of Wundt [3],
I find there is something better in the psychological mainstream of our
century as
for example Piaget's theory or its cybernetic relatives and/or followers
as Maturana
& Varela, and Glaserfeld, or the cybernetics of second order. According
to these authors
and school the key is in the abandoning of a pure human/world
relationship trying to
conceive the knowing relationship as a complex relationship of
inter-exchange between
human and world.
In this sense it seems to me that filmseeing is not something as a mere
perception
of something which causes some reactions (the oriented-imagining) but a
communicational
event, where a relational space between a filmic text and humans is
created.
I wrote some pages on the matter within my postdoctoral thesis [4], yet
as Karen suggested,
it is not the case to enclose them here.
Anyway if there is someone interested to my criticism in regard, I will
be pleased to
explain it better.
Best regards,
Paolo
[1] I quote from my previosu e-mail message:
'Deixis' for example is something coming from the impossibility of
linguistics to explain meaning 'per se', i.e. without going out of the
sentence. thus they tried to find a contact with the world able to be
the basis for some description, so that it could then be possible to
save the 'meaning view of language' (i.e. the semantic view, the last
rationalistic tendency of western thinking in the passage from the
ideology of ratio and 'progress' to the ideology of 'communication').
An analogous tension is present in the first psychology of our century,
in its attempt of going beyond a 'pure' mentalism of mind, recovering
its being in a body and in a space.
Yet, as in Buehlertheorie, many of the attempts do not go out of the old
conception which is at the ground of the problem, i.e. the A=A identity
conception.
[2]I enclose a little biography of Buehler for people interested:
Karl Bühler
Born: 27 May, 1879, in Meckesheim.
1899 Went to Freiburg to study medicine.
1903 PhD in medicine in Freiburg for Johannes v. Kries
on the physiological theory of seeing colour.
1904 PhD in philosophy in Strasbourg for Clemens Baeumker on the
psychology
of Henry Home (Lord Kames).
1904-1907 Studied in Berlin under Stumpf and in Bonn under Erdmann.
1907-1909 Assistant to Külpe in Würzburg. Postdoctoral thesis on
"Tatsachen und Probleme
einer Psychologie des Denkens" (Facts and problems
of a psychology of thinking).
1909 Went to Bonn with Külpe.
1913-1914 Went to Munich with Külpe (Associate professor).
1918 Professor at the Technical University of Dresden.
1922-1938 Professor at the University of Vienna.
1926/27/29 Visiting professor in the USA (Stanford, Johns Hopkins,
Harvard, Chicago).
1938 Briefly imprisoned by the Nazis. Emigrated first to
Oslo, later to the USA.
1939 Scholastica College in Duluth, Minnesota, USA.
1940-1945 St. Thomas College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.
1945-1955 University of California, Los Angeles.
1960 Honorary president of the 16th International
Psychology Congress in Bonn.
Died: 24 October, 1963, in Los Angeles.
Quoted from "The Würzburg School" by Joachim Hoffmann and Armin Stock,
Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg.
[3] And for the fact it opened the door to the Gestalttheorie...
[4] By the way: I'm looking for an english mothertongue reviewer to
arrange the publication of my Ph.D.
I need someone with a background in philosophy, semiotics, linguistics,
psychology, psycholinguistics, cybernetics, communication theory and
informatics,
I will pay honestly. Is there anybody interested?
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