By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:13:37 +0000

There is a little (though perhaps not a lot) more at stake than Fish maintains. It is the difference between saying “such-and-such is true (or false)” and “I believe that such-and-such is true, but my belief may be false.” The second position allows one to be open to new evidence, to be sure, but also to deeper appreciations and wider sympathies.

I don’t think luiz’s comment is at all off-topic; it raises the possibility that gesture — like music and movement — has an even deeper structure than propositional language. That makes the whole rationalist/post-structuralist debate academic, in both senses of the word.

By: luiz

luiz — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:59:32 +0000

Entirely off-topic comment, but doing a Sunday reading of some of your old posts and all the enthusiasm you have for the structure of languages couldn’t avoid remembering a sort of old but decisive book by Oliver Sacks on sign language, and all its possibilities concerning an “universal” and pre-reflexive idiom. But the most sparkling idea hidden there is that such language has a tridimensional grammar, constructed in space with gestures, much more complex and sophisticated than we dare guess. Sorry for my english, the book is better than that. “Seeing voices” that I’v read while dating a deaf boy, who told me that in one week in Japan he was able to talk with other deaf japanese, and again in a congress with people from around the globe, sign language, despite some regional variations, slang, coloquialisms, is kind of common and innate; an epiphanic “loquebantur” situation, perhaps?

Comments on: Stanley Fish is my Homegirl

By: Michael

By: luiz