The talking going on in one's head

Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Wed, 20 Oct 1999 12:05:28 -0500 

Steven Gabriel wrote:
 
> I think you are trivializing the idea of language by using a definition of
> it that implies that any possibly information containing object is
> language.  

Quite the opposite.  I am universalizing it.  I am approaching
language as the single most familiar manifestation of the sign system
that generates all cognition, emotion, tactile perception, etc.  I am
saying--and I'm by no means the first to come at it this way--that any
given individual consciousness makes sense of its experience and of
itself (very important) only by means of differences, and the more
complex system of signs and symbols precipated by the first instance
of differentiation.

> I think language requires possibility of communication and buy
> Wittgenstein's arguments that there is no such thing as a private language
> That implies that internalized ideas are not language but something
> altogether different.  It further implies that language in mental
> going-ons is actually borrowed from this outside realm of social
> communication and is not native to the mind.
 
Please clarify.  You agree with this?

> As for Freud being the root of all psychology, I think the reverse is
> true.  Freud's name is fun to invoke, and he had some interesting ideas
> certainly, but he was a man very good at detecting some surface features
> of a subject that is much too deep to be taken in by one man from one
> perspective.  He was not a prophet, just a guy with some interesting
> observations.

Perhaps you dismiss Freud prematurely.  For me to defend his
contribution to western thinking any further would not be in good
faith...I am not qualified.  Instead, I offer this, from Foucault:
	"In saying that Freud founded psychoanalysis, we do not simply mean
that the concept of libido or the techniques of dream analyiss
reappear in the writings os Karl Abraham or Melanie Klein, but that he
made possible a certain numger of differences with repsect to his
books, concepts, and hypothesis, which all arise out of psychoanalytic
discourse." ("What is an Author?")
	Foucault numbers Freud among the first of the "founders of
discursivity," by which he means Freud with his thinking cleared a
space much, much larger than his actual publications take up. 
Standing on the shoulders...that sort of thing.

> A few other quick words.  I think it a common but silly mistake to put too
> much importance into language when dealing with mental processes.  I
> believe that most modern cognitive scientists would agree that the talking
> going on in one's head is best analyzed as speech without using the mouth.

Here, I suppose, is the source of the contention.  So let us do away
altogether, for now, with the word "language."  In its stead, we'll
use the ungainly phrase "all phenomena predicated on difference." 
Unfortunately, careless word choice early on left me seeming to have
said something I never meant.  Ah, ambiguity.   

> I for one find this best revealed by the fact that I most often conduct my
> mental mutterings in the context of fictitious conversation.  Another good
> example, is that of early readers who found themselves unable to read a
> text without uttering the reading aloud.  

Found themselves unable?  Surely there is a difference between learned
behavior and native incapacity.   

 
 
-- 
Matt Kozusko    mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu