I.A. Richards, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, writes about how the meaning of individual words cannot be established separately from their context. Each individual word's meaning is established by its interaction with the words that lead up to it, that follow it, that are in the same sentence, paragraph, piece of writing,etc. And our understanding of a word's meaning is not only established by its context but by the words we know and even the words in the back of our minds that our experience connects with this word, in this context.
Words gain life from each other - they interanimate themselves.
Is this an analogue for how we understand/experience the Web?
July 2005
July 31, 2005
Still thinking through I.A. Richard's The Philosophy of Thetoric. He writes about metaphor and how integral it is to to words and meaning. I can see in his work concepts that I think flowered into such post modern thought as I found in laurel Richard's Fields of Play. She says, "Metaphor is unavoidable" (p. 42). She goes on to point out that our language is riddled with metaphors that we use without being conscious of them, and the analogues we use so unknowingly affect our understanding of the subject we are attempting to describe. "Implicit metaphors orient and prefigure knowledge" (p. 44) she says. And I agree.
And a further referencew to Richard's "Interanimation of words" - I see it connecting to Fritjof Capra's ideas about Systems Thinking. "the great shock of twentieth-century science has been that systems cannot be understood by analysis. The properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole." (p. 29, Web of Life) Yes. And that's what I.A. Richards was saying about words in the 1930s.
And a further referencew to Richard's "Interanimation of words" - I see it connecting to Fritjof Capra's ideas about Systems Thinking. "the great shock of twentieth-century science has been that systems cannot be understood by analysis. The properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole." (p. 29, Web of Life) Yes. And that's what I.A. Richards was saying about words in the 1930s.
Keywords: Fritjof Capra, I.A. Richards, Laurel Richardson, metaphor, Systems Theory
Posted by Joan Vinall-Cox | 0 comment(s)
