Forum on Discourse

FORUM ON DISCOURSE

- PROMOTING A NEW PARADIGM IN COMMUNICATION

-Talking about Talk


Open invitation to join discussion of on-going comunications, focused on the American experience today (2010. 9.3 ->..add .4.5. .. .. ). (<= keeping track what can be seen in the Great Mirror of mainstream media )

What this is About: Framing Consciousness (compare: sarc mark)

The field of talk-about-talk is all-inclusive: from language spoken in ivory towers to the argot of New Jersey streets; from all age/educational levels, political brackets, bloodline-ethnic-religious heritages (<-excessive "I-You" not encouraged) to every blogspot on-line (featuring my own, of course sidthomas.blogspot.com). The concept is to claim a new degree of freedom in sign use, by grammatical ("we") shift to the meta-level of discourse, variably specified. As if placing "mental quotation marks" around every sign S* caught in the act of communicating, and commenting on that (the item 'framed' by the quotation marks is the sign-in-use, or S*). This is the same as entertaining a thought, but non-asserted, proposition -- "considering". The common basis of quotation marks and mental framing is "consciousness". (<= the enclosure " "-"" Squares placental-fetal containment by consciousness-thought containment.)

Note: quotation marks are said to "mention" vs. "use" the enclosed expression in standard introductiry logic texts (cf. Quine, Copi). "Mention" vs. "use" is taken as a primitive psychosemiotic distinction, used according to substitution rules of operational token-identity (e.g., perception) vs. assumption of meaning-synonymy, thus not subject to error, in principle. This pre-logical distinction, taken from common discourse, is based squarely on ("Squares") the distinction between token and text. And, by how it works, spatial enclosure, Squares the fetus-placental relation. Informally, citing "what X ("Joe") said" is most accurate when X's exact word-tokens are reproduced -- peferably with "Joe's" specific tonality, context, + videotape of him saying them. This totality would show the meaning, in the sense of what the words communicate, independently of what he himself might claim was intended. This is an important point in forensics. (cf. Conversations are notoriously 'remembered' in opposite ways by participants, e.g., 'he confessed", "I did not" is avoided by having lawyers present; and, today, recording technology.)

(=>Framing the discussion of how details of S* use frame discussions, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?scp=1&sq=Whorf&st=cse)

The New Position of Consciousness

This shift to purely meta-discourse (considered, vrs. asserted) is a new Position of Consciousness on which to ground Thought, thence philosophy.

Previous systems used by philosophers for talking psychology, including Whorf-like meta-language theory (you can think only what you can say) have lacked grounding of the distinction between Consciousness and Thought. Prior to post Enlightenment discovery and assimilation of the causal theory of perception, carrying with it negation of the naive realist* account of empirical knowledge, except in religious/esoteric/priestly cultic contexts of use. These systems lack metaphysical grounding for distinction between inner and outer content.

Scientific appreciation of the fact that visual color qualities, to take one example, are not literally attributes of the front surfaces of material objects -- experience of them is the end product of a causal process originating externally in light reflecting off surfaces, terminating in stimulation of the head-brain's occipital lobes after traversing wondrous eye-muscle, corneal-foveal coordinations -- has taken centuries to soak in. A little bit. Dissimilating the implications of this intellectual realization through the educational system has taken much intellectual effort. It is, in psychosemiotics, however, assumed as the next-bottom-most stratum (S*ii) of the 7 levels of conscious content (aka "the phenomenal' (Kant); "booming buzzing confusion" (Wm. James); "Polymorphously perverse" (Freud) )

The New Position of Consciousness takes tokens from this S* totality (dreams can contain writing, related to weirdly as content) as predicates predicated on, elevating those with names correlated with external causal objects to status of 3-dimensional material objects (the S*iii). With S*iv arises predicates used freely for "I-Do" Action by (the) personal Actors, evoking 'the moral point of view'. From this totality arises S*v content, and "I". (Completing the survey: S*vi is philosophy*: predicates on S*iv content sans "I', but for delegate "we" through reason (ratio; logos). S*vii predicates on the Completing Totality ("God-talk") ("Talk about God is talk about The Completing Totality" is the completing totality of philosophy. (ergo The Philosophy of Completing Totalities is the alternate name token of The System S*).