"experience" and narrative

[David Samuels]

Jim (and other listers),

This is a really important question; the deep Whorf problem, language
analyzing experience but "experience" being constituted in language.  I
haven't encountered it in the variety you talked about (I'm not sure I'd
try what you're talking about at an intro level; I once tried to explain
alternative logics by saying that the Kaluli think people become birds, but
we know that's silly because people are really all apes, which I think
rocketed quickly over their heads to lodge deeply in the center of the
clock at the back of the room).

I've encountered this question as a more general philosophy of language
problem.  I don't know that I've solved it at all, but I think I've been
able to scratch the surface a bit by revolving the question back around to
what students think language is, and thus to their ideas of how language
"encodes" experience -- or rather, their ideas that language encodes
experience, since this is generally what they think language does.

My experience (sorry, it's the only word I can think of) is that students
walk into the room holding what Max Black would call a "cloak" theory of
language, i.e., that language simply dresses up ideas so that they are
communicable between people.  But all people's ideas ("experiences," to
push it back in your direction) are identical, because we're all human
(their nervousness about losing "humanism" that you mention).  The
difference between languages/styles/registers, etc., then, is how (or how
well) they are variously able to "encode" these experiences for purposes of
communication. I'm constantly looking for ways to move them away from the
notion that language is "for" communication.

Most of them, in short, have a fairly Aristotelian take on language - that
the experiences (sensory inputs) of all people everywhere are the same, and
then language dresses those inputs up into forms (output) that allow people
to communicate their ideas to experiences and ideas to each other through
the use of contractually agreed upon, secondary symbols.  What Roy Harris
calls "telementation."  They use their experiences with computers and
telephones to vouchsafe this theory of communication.

It's comparatively easy to move them from this stance, but they usually
take up another that is harder to get them to work through, more-or-less in
the Bertrand Russell line.  That is, they'll accept that some lexicalized
concepts are "fuzzier" than others. But they really want to reserve a space
for things that are simply "true," no matter who the speaker or what the
language.  To use another of Harris's examples, they come to understand
that the truth of "democracy is a sham" depends on what your definition of
'democracy' is, but they are perplexed by the notion that the truth of "two
plus two equals four" might depend on what your definition of 'four' is.

Or, they take up a semi-Peircian "token-and-type" position, without, of
course, any other Peircian trappings, because they still want the heart of
language to be about symbolic referentiality.  Either way, the position is
based on the preservation that there are "facts" that are the same for all
people because they are simply out there in the world, and, while this may
not be the only thing that language does, the sine qua non of language is
to make propositional statements about those facts in the world, that is,
language exists (practially, philosophically, evolutionarily) because of
it's ability to refer.

My "solution" (and as I say I don't know how successful it is) has been to
push metaphor rather than reference as the heart of what language does.
This allows me to consistently (meaning both "regularly" and "from a
considered position") question the pre-existence of "facts" or
"experiences" prior to language.  Without going overboard, of course (I
prefer to avoid that thing where someone pounds their coke can on the desk
to prove that reality exists).

A few of the readings that have helped me dance around this topic are Ochs
and Schieffelin's piece on lg socialization in three communities; some of
the stuff in Child Discourse (the Brenneis & Lein piece on arguments); I've
really liked a piece called "The theory of translation" by W. Haas (1962,
Philosophy 37:208-228 - I've never found out what the W stands for).  In it
he takes a proto-Kristeian approach, arguing that there is no "meaning"
outside of language (i.e. that translation can't be a technique for
preserving an independent meaning as it is carried from one vehicle to
another), because the meaning of a word is no more nor less than the
history of its uses.  I've also used some of Derek Bickerton's and Terrence
Deacon's stuff to get into the biological and neurological aspects of this
-- why the fact that brains process information means that there can't be
some independently given objective experience that all beings everywhere
have.  (Remember Victor's imperviousness to cold; it can't be that sensory
data is simply consistent across the globe.)  I've never used them, but I
wonder if Feld's Sound and Sentiment and Weiner's The Empty Place might not
work well in this context, too.

Am I completely on a tangent here?

Best,

David


* *  *   *     *        *             *                     *
"The impossible is the watchword of the greater space age."  The space age
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