Monday, October 3, 2011
How experience relates to understanding
In Derrida's essay, he says that "...the signified concept is never present in itself, in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself. Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or system, with which it refers to another and other concepts..." (285). Here he is explaining the idea of "trace," where the meaning of a word is dependent upon the meaning of other words and those words depend on the meaning of even more words and so on, thus creating a "chain" of definition which rely on past and future definitions. I related this concept to how our experiences shape our understanding of certain ideas. It's possible that perhaps that as this "chain" of signifiers gets longer and longer, the better the chance for our understanding of a certain idea or word becomes since the more the word is explained, there's a higher chance for a signifier in the chain to resonate in our own experience and finally "make sense."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Ly,
ReplyDeleteI kind of feel the exact opposite about this! For me, the longer the chain of signifiers needs to be to explain a word/idea, the less easy it is to understand that idea. To illustrate, I looked up the definitions to two words, one simple and one a bit more complex:
tree [tree] noun
1. a plant having a permanently woody main stem or trunk, ordinarily growing to a considerable height, and usually developing branches at some distance from the ground.
2. any of various shrubs, bushes, and plants, as the banana, resembling a tree in form and size.
So, a 'tree' is a pretty simple concept, but there are still a lot of signifiers in this chain. "Wood" and "trunk" and "branches" would all potentially need to be defined themselves in figuring out what, exactly, a tree is.
ge·ne·al·o·gy [jee-nee-ol-uh-jee, -al-, jen-ee-]
1. a record or account of the ancestry and descent of a person, family, group, etc.
2. the study of family ancestries and histories.
3. descent from an original form or progenitor; lineage; ancestry.
This one is a bit more difficult. This chain of signifiers includes similarly complicated notions like "person," "family," "history," etc, each of which could be defined, then their definitions could be deconstructed and defined... And the process could go on and on.
Obviously any word could be complicated and over-complicated using the chain of signifiers, but for me at least, the smaller the chain the easier the comprehension.
Perhaps these ideas could be traced back to Locke? I think Derrida thought about language and words in a less concrete way than Locke, perhaps, but the discussion about words and their definitions makes me think of the way that Locke described the different ways that we learn language. He states that, "to make [people] understand what the names of simple ideas or substances stand for, people ordinarily show them the thing whereof they would have them have the idea" (819), whereas for "moral words, the sounds are usually used first" (819). This sort of connects to what you were saying, Blair, about shorter chains of signification leading to a more easily comprehensible word. Perhaps when words are signifiers for concrete objects, they are more comprehensible because the other words used to describe them are also more concrete and we have a clearer image of them in our heads. However, for abstract "moral words," we have a harder time understanding them because abstract words are used to describe them, and humans must use their own experience to really learn what these words mean in the first place...
ReplyDeleteLy, I definitely agree with your idea that as we gain more experiences, we are able to make more sense of words and assign our own meanings or relations to them and therefore make language more personalized. In regards to Derrida, I think this can be seen when he speaks of every person, or groups of people, having their own language which leaves us with some questions: how does one create his or her own language? How do individual languages vary from others? I believe that experience plays a major role in a person’s development of their internal language. It is the events in life and the associations made with those occurrences that frame an understanding of words and their meanings.
ReplyDeleteHowever, like Miranda, I also feel that this idea could be better tied back to Locke’s explanation of the flaws of communication and interpretation. He states that, “words hav[e] actually no signification” (818). Therefore, it is not the actual letters, spelling or pronunciation of a word that allows it to develop a definition, but the way that the word is associated with a distinct feeling, event, object or occurrence that gives it meaning. Similarly, he also mentions that words simply just “fill one another’s heads with noise and sounds” (819). Once again, this demonstrates how people must learn through experience and association before being able to assign a speech sound with personal meaning. As Miranda discussed, there are some words, such as Locke’s notion of “moral words” that cannot be truly understood until they have been experienced. For example, one might believe that they know the meaning of sadness, but their own knowledge of the term will most likely change continually throughout life as additional ‘sad’ events take place and alter their perspective.