"meaning"

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Jaimi, 

The issues of psycholocism or solipsism are only important if one (erroneously?) considers meaning as an origianally mental operation. If I correctly understood both you and Klaus wish to keep to this fundament that providing meaning is a mental and therefore individual operation.

It seems to me that meaning is provided at the interpersonal level and reflected individually: one has to learn to make sense among the multitude of possible meanings and their interactions. Without this grounding in double contingency, one cannot handle symbolic meaning. I further articulated my position on pp. 175f. as follows:

In addition to his many discoveries about mental illnesses, Freud carved out the epistemological boundaries of the psychological domain with biology on the one side and sociology on the other. Using the metaphor of Ego sitting as a rider on a horse (Freud 1933), Ego is not to be considered as an energy system but as a “cybernetic” (Parsons 1958, p. 88, note 16). In relation to sociology, Freud commented (at a workshop in Vienna in 1926) “that he felt like the skipper of a barge who had always hugged the coast, who had now learned that others, more adventurous, had set out for the open sea.” He wished them well, but he could no longer participate in their endeavor (Waelder 1958, at pp. 243f.). Parsons (1968), however, argued that Freud himself—approximately at the same time as Durkheim (e.g., 1894, 1912)— had discovered the social as the proper subject of sociology. He summarized Freud’s demarcation of sociology from psychology, as follows:

Relatively early, Freud gained the insight that the expression of instinctual need was regu­lated by the society’s moral standards—often, but in no simple sense always, in conflict with instinctual needs—and that these standards were introjected into the personality itself, becoming components of its structure. The final form of this conception crystallized about the famous idea of the superego. Later this basic mode of conceptualization was extended to the social environment, conceived of as an environment much in the Cartesian-Durkheimian sense. The famous “reality principle” came to focus on “object relations,” which for Freud meant relations to other persons, especially the parents, considered as agents of socialization. But these human objects were not only “adapted to” in the sense true for physical objects; they were also introjected—or, as we now usually say, internalized—to form part of the personality structure, particularly of the ego, in Freud’s sense. (p. 432).

Why had Freud himself become reluctant to investigate the social at the above-individual level. Parsons (1952) formulated a begin of an answer to this question, as follows:

The inescapable conclusion is that not only moral standards, but all the components of the common culture are internalized as part of the personality structure. Moral standards, indeed, cannot in this respect be dissociated from the content of the orientation patterns which they regulate; as I have pointed out, the content of both cathectic-attitudes and cognitive-status definitions have cultural, hence normative significance. This content is cultural and learned. (p. 23)

Parsons saw a possibility to relate Freud’s concept of internalization to central tenets of American pragmatism. “Society,” as Cooley (1902) argued, exists inside the individual in the form of language and thoughts. Action is then based on reflexive selections among options. On this basis, Parsons (1951, p. 94) formulated the concept of double contingency as the cornerstone of social order.

“Double contingency” means that each of us (Ego) expects another human being (Alter) to entertain expectations as we entertain them ourselves (Elmer 1995; Vander-straeten 2002). A second contingency among expectations comes on top of the first contingency of empirical processes in the physical and biological domains. In this model, both consciousness and communication develop in substantive and reflexive layers in parallel. The communicative structures are double-layered: they are both actions and pervade actions to various extents. However, the relations between the two contingencies are asymmetrical. The first contingency (res extensa) is internal­ized in the second (res cogitans); the second leaves traces (e.g., cultural artefacts at the social level and memory traces at the individual level) in the first.

I have a draft manuscript in which I try to work this out in relation to Bateson. It had hitherto no priority. Perhaps, I should change this.

Best, 

Loet

_______________

Loet Leydesdorff

"The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discusive Knowledge"(Open Access)

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam 

Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

lo...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7835-3098;    

[Jaimi Hendrix]

Hi Loet,

I cannot speak for Klaus, but for me, meaning is created in the processes of reading and writing.  Reading and writing are creative interactions with linguistic symbols.  There are different strategies that people use to read and write.  They are a function of how they think about language usage.  That itself, is a function of how they are introduced to these processes after they have been pushed out of the womb. 

I will write more later, but right now, I am wondering what the ultimate goal is of your email.  It looks like you are pigeonholing Klaus and me.  Klaus gave a presentation on the existence of multiple theories of language-usage, each one with its unique feedback-feedforward consequences. 

The reservations that I expressed were about your use of Claude Shannon's work on transmission of data via telephone lines.  I never said anything about your work on Parson.  

If you'd like to continue sharpening your understanding of how the two of us might differ, let us focus on how Shannon has been used to misrepresent the communication among two humans by overidentifying it with the communication between computers hooked up phone lines, ethernet cables and wi-fi connections.  Insofar as I understand and have read the work of Shannon, he never agreed with that application.  

To be sure, in the bigger picture, this particular type of problem of overidentifying with one's metaphor -- a violation of the semantic principle that the map is not the territory-- started with Leibniz when he decided to work with the idea of man as a machine and had dreams about a pure machine-type of language to get rid of misunderstandings.  So, the problem that I am zooming in on is the one of the trivialization of Ogden & Richard's triangle of reference.  Or to be more concrete, the problem of the abuse of Leibniz's law of identity to trivialize distinctions when they ought to be taken seriously.  

I am aware that many people have dismissed George Spencer-Brown's model of a pure distinctions, but I think he still deserves credit for having drawn our attention to the fact that we work with distinctions and there is much more going on than Plato implied with his butcher metaphor that definitions cut nature at its joints: humans also use the orientational/spatial metaphors of a circle and a container while working with the notion of a distinction as GSB points out.  

To get back to the womb (a container), a human comes into existence in a relational context.  I never suggested thinking of a human mind in isolation of its environment.  But modeling the human mind as a node in a network of feedback-feedforward loops does not mean that I have decided to ignore everything that makes humans unique and different.  It just means that I am working with his particular network model, but that I am at the same time aware of its limitations.

My best, Jaimi H.

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[Jaimi Hendrix]

So Loet, as a follow up to my previous email, I am interested to understand why what motivated you to pigeonhole Klaus and me?

 

As a footnote, if I remember correctly, I already sent you a link to one of my papers.  It is an old one, but I still stand by it.  Tell me which paragraph or section in that paper implies that I am tending towards the position of solipsism or psychologism.

(99+) What can management researchers learn from Donald Campbell, the philosopher? An exercise on philosophical hermeneutics. | Margaretha Hendrickx - Academia.edu

With respect, Jaimi H.

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Jaimi, 

I intended to answer you. Obviously, I made a mistake; I apologize. I most appreciate our communications. 

Best, 

Loet

_______________

Loet Leydesdorff

"The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discusive Knowledge"(Open Access)

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam 

Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

lo...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7835-3098;    

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[Jaimi Hendrix]

Hi Loet,

I didn't mean to come across as strong as I did.  It was just that I was truly puzzled and trying to understand what was going on.

Having said this, let us turn it into a topic for discussion or test for your model of the evolution of discursive processes.  The making of attribution errors is a topic belonging to social psychology.  In the past, you and I have discussed that there is a difference between social psychology and a sociologist.  So, yes, the sociologist focuses on the interpersonal and the psychologist focuses on what is going on inside someone's head.  But there is still the question whether sociological models of interpersonal dynamics trivialize the problem of attribution errors or recognize it as a problem that must be taken seriously given that attribution errors can lead to runaway positive feedback loops.  

Or to put it in a different manner,  I am rereading your work now -- I am doing it slowly, for sure  -- to explore how you have incorporated, in your model, the possibility of attribution errors during a communication .  

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[Loet Leydesdorff]

Thanks, Jaimi: that is very interesting. 

I'll focus on reacting to some comments of the last meeting. 

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