i sympathize with everything you've pointed out, colin, so this answer
will be kinda lame . . .
On Sun, 8 Jun 1997, COLIN WIGHT wrote:
> But are the potential ways of resignification unencumbered? Are we free to
> describe it in any way we like? 'The earth is a pink bubble man where peace
> and harmony reign' type of thing.
nothing is "unencumbered", but sometimes, constructed truth can encumber
us as much as "essential truth". i'm not disagreeing with you, just
pointing out the kinds of things that might complicate what the last
poster said . . .
> Well of course, but _we_ aren't beings with differing sensory apparatus. So
> what hangs on this? If I had wings I could fly. If I could travel through
> time I would probably have a differing concept of time/space, but then again
> I can't so I don't.
heck, a lot hangs on it. "if i had wings i could fly" sounds like a
fantasy, right? what if 300 years ago someone had said "in the year
2000, people will be able to clone human life." or what if 100 years
ago someone had said "IQ tests are full of baloney, and intelligence
has nothing to do with race or gender". or what if 700 years ago in the
Vatican (is it that old?) someone had said "Christianity is full of
baloney, and in the year 2000 a man will be able to marry another man in
a church." i'm not saying we should go around acting like anything
goes, but what about kuhn and paradigms?
> Well yes, of course the meanings one gives to things are important,
> crucially so in the social world, but this issue can't logically be
> disconnected from what things are. Why do certain meanings dominate? Why
> can't we simply mean to eradicate global poverty? How and why do meanings
> come to be? When the nasty Spaniards took to the seas and bumbed into alien
> people in far away shores, those alien people took them as Gods, and this
> was the meaning they gave to their contacts. Unfortunately, Cortez and his
> mob had a different meaning in mind and no amount of creative
> resignification by those aliens could make Cortez a benign god, so meanings
> do not exhaust the social world. Equally, of course, the meaning one makes
> of _it_ implies an _it_ that is given meaning too and if this is so then
> perhaps it is a good idea to take the meanings and the it together to
> examine how and why certain meanings dominate and come to be universally
> accepted.
i don't have a problem with this at all, but i just want to bear in mind
that - oh, nevermind. if you take colonialism as the example, and
want to examine, say, economic imperialism, then i'd submit that you
need sometimes to believe in essential truth but other times you need
to question what is accepted as essentially true. a this-or-that approach
probably wouldn't be enough. that's all i'm saying.
sig http://pages.nyu.edu/~scs7891