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Thought of the Week Archives
June 2001
June 4
Language is surely for Tolstoy what it is for I. A. Richards: "the
supreme organ of the mind's self-ordering growth." Now it is impossible
to entertain ideas of the heuristic power of language if it has been reduced
to a "communication skill." The concept of verbal behavior has been substituted
for that of the making of meaning, and if that is not the cause of all
our woe, it is evil sufficient unto the day. To develop an organic conception
of language requires recognizing that word and idea are dialectically
related and that the place to begin considering them both is "the unit
of meaning."
- Ann E. Berthoff
The Making of Meaning: metaphors, models and maxims for writing teachers
(p. 85)
June 11
In the science of interpretation, the methodology applied to texts
can also be applied to the social sciences and to a person's actions within
the learning process. The text is the meaning brought to a form of communication,
and how something gets to be a text is through a four-step paradigm: event,
experience, meaning, and text. The event deals with one's place in the
world and what occurs or takes place; experience deals with how the events
are sensed; meaning is assigned by each person to the experiences; and
the text is the meaning brought to a form of communication. The ultimate
implication of these four principles lies in the understanding that one
cannot truly know oneself unless the process of event, experience, meaning,
and text is brought to the forefront of one's consciousness. The implication
of these principles can be carried even further -- a person can only know
as much about himself or herself as he or she is able to communicate to
another. To take that one step further, a person can only get to know
another individual or what has made that person what he or she is except
through texts, whether written or spoken.
Craig Eilert Abrahamson
"Storytelling as a pedagogical tool in higher education", Education
(03-22-1998)
June 18
The object of interpretation is understanding, not explanation; its
instrument is the analysis of text. Understanding is the outcome of organizing
and contextualizing essentially contestable incompletely verifiable propositions
in a disciplined way. One of our principal means for doing so is through
narrative: by telling a story of what something is "about." But as Kierkegaard
had made clear many years before, telling stories in order to understand
is no mere enrichment of the mind: without them we are, to use his phrase,
reduced to fear and trembling.
Understanding, unlike explaining, is not preemptive: one way of construcing
the fall of Rome narratively does not preclude other ways. Nor does the
interpretation of any particular narrative rule out other interpretations.
For narratives and their interpretations traffic in meaning, and meanings
are intransigently multiple: the rule is polysemy. Narrative meanings,
moreover, depend in only a trivial way on truth in the strict sense of
verifiability. The requirement, rather, is verisimilitude or "truth likeness,"
and that is a compound of coherence and pragmatic utility, neither of
which can be rigidly specified.
- Jerome Bruner
The Culture of Education (p. 90)
June 25
Mythic thought generally moves from an awareness of contradictions
toward their resolution. Through the creation of unifying symbols, your
psyche reconciles the opposing tendencies that inevitably exist within
you. Jung referred to this unifying property of symbols as their "transcendent
function." ...Because life challenges you to find a constantly evolving
balance of inner polarities, unifying symbols are the guiding stars
that orient you toward greater harmony and wholeness.
Perception is a match-mismatch process. If what you see in the world
corresponds reasonably well with your guiding mythology, a basic psychological
equilibrium will tend to be maintained. But if your myths and your experiences
do not match, you will be spurred toward thought and action...
Your unending stream of experience flows in a feedback loop with your
existing mythology. Your myths guide you toward particular actions, and
the consequences of those actions either reinforce or challenge the guiding
myth. When you experiences and your myths to not correspond, two basic
possibilities emerge for handling the contradiction: You can alter your
perception of the experience, or you can alter your myth.... you may unconsciously
distort your perceptions so they can be assimilated into the mythology
you hold, or you may, also often unconsciously, revise a guiding myth
to incorporate new or freshly perceived experiences. Your mythology gradually
evolves as it adjusts to experiences that do not fit its premises.
- David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner
The Mythic Path (p. 153-154)
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