-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Byers <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, January 25, 1999 12:19 PM
Subject: Re: arch-theorists' Lament


>[snip]
>    As you say, "The  world  'is'  whatever  it  means  to  us, whatever
we
>think  it  is. (Mostly, what  we  have  been  told  it  is.)

This is an insight into the importance of social interactive contexts that
is regrettably ignored in the shift of focus to "the attending self" latter
on:

>    [snip] ... "our experiencing of the world is whatever it means to us
..."
>By shifting the focus to our attending itself  - which is your question -
>rather than the objects to which we are attending, then we find the true
locus
>of meaning.

In my opinion, the "true locus of meaning" is a social context of symbolic
interaction. It's hard to avoid this social-psychology, even after we find
out what 'is', is: that is, "The  world  'is'  whatever  it  means  to  us,
whatever  we think  it  is. (Mostly, what  we  have  been  told  it  is.)"

Since that telling is done, said, and gone, it has to be re-told, and told
again to recreate and sustain any one "locus of meaning." The same with our
methods of re-discovery of that meaning. In that process of the retelling
there is no "true" telling, there are only tellings! For you and I to
approximate the meaning of a "telling" as outside observers is to first
understand the nature of the social context(s) in which the dialog and drama
was originally taking place!

>In this way it then becomes quite understandable how we can change
>our understanding of the world simply by attending to it (again) while the
>world of its physical aspects to wich we are attending remain unchanged.  I
see
>this as distinguishing between how observation - as a causal process in the
>world - can change the world while the changing of our understandings of
this
>world do not.

Well, your "world" above is a pragmatic one, but the "attendant" one is the
meaningful one. And if the "attendant" world changes it will have a
pragmatic effect on the empirical one!

>The understandings - the meanings - are cognitive properties so
>they reside in the world only by residing in us. When speaking about how a
new
>discovery in science, i.e., a change in our understanding of the world,
changes
>the world, then, we have to insert the subject here and point out that that
>aspect of the world that is changing is our collective experience of the
world.

I note again a reference to "collective experience" and yet the re-current
focus upon "attendant" psychology in the definition of meaning!

>The world was just as round before this was discovered and the changing of
our
>understanding of the form of the world did not change that form one bit.
>    With regard to the artefact, we can change our understanding of the
>artefact without at all changing the artefact itself. Similarly, we do not
>change the meanings of the artefact as held by those prehistoric subjects
who
>were responsible for it - since they are dead.

Since they are "dead," what is there for an "attendant" archaeologist to
discover? As you say, the "artifact" hasn't change, the people have told
their stories and gone. How can this approach ever hope to understand the
cognitive properties of attendant past people through an appeal to
psychological analogies?

>Hopefully, of course, the change
>in our experiencing of the artefact might be closer in correspondence to
the
>way the prehistoric users experienced it.

Seems to me like there's no way to know this through the "attending self"
metaphor!

>I am not saying this, however, in
>order to claim that our goals should be simply to produce a facsimile of
the
>understandings of the users. But if we are to understand the social and
>material conditions that brought this artefact into existence, we first
have to
>understand it in these emic terms.

By what archaeological method can we first emically understand the social
and material conditions that brought an artifact into existence? And, next,
if you do manage an "understanding" in emic terms of the meaning of these
"artifacts", what is it that we've gained given the "collective experience"
in the contextual and contingent nature of what 'is' is?

Cheers,

--Lenny__






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