Mairian Corker wrote:
> To clarify for the list, you did not like my suggestion in 'Deaf and
> Disabled', using an example from 'Enforcing Normalcy' that when a deaf
> person and a hearing person say the same thing, they [do] not necessarily mean the same thing, to which I would add now using Bakhtin and Derrida, because everything we say is simultaneously a statement about our past. Bakhtin describes it as every utterance 'passing through the gates of the chronotope' and and Derrida asks 'do we hear, do we understand each other already with another ear?'
Mairian and Lennard,
I hope that interventions by others on this list will not be regarded as
inappropriate. I wanted to interject by pointing out that the question
of whether a hearing person and a deaf person would mean the same thing
in a given context should not be easily dismissed and actually has
widely acknowledged philosophical precursors (besides Derrida).
Most notably, in his work in epistemology and philosophy of language
(Pursuit of Truth, Word and Object), W.V.O. Quine asked how we can ever
be certain that people from different cultures actually MEAN the same
thing even if pointing to the same object. This Quine referred to as
"The Indeterminacy of Translation". On one reading of the indeterminacy
thesis, someone could assume that Quine was referring simply to
translation between languages and cultures. However, there is another
more (radical or skeptical) reading of the indeterminacy thesis which
holds that Quine was asking how, if at all, we can EVER have certainty
that ANY of us means the same thing as another person when we refer to
people, objects, etc. (Wittgenstein was also preoccupied with questions
of this sort.) Notice that either reading of the indeterminacy thesis
would make Mairian's suggestion a legitimate one.
As you were.
Regards,
Shelley Tremain
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