Monday, August 17, 2009
Grammatical Propositions
It's interesting to consider Wittgenstein in the face of a syntax-connecting machine like Gnoetry. Are the utterances merely expressions of grammatical rules, since it is through the random survival of these rules that the utterances have any meaning at all. When we read a gnoem, are we only merely accepting rules and finding meaning that can be niether confirmed nor confuted by experience. Or, are we engaging in language that has been jarred from its moorings in such a way as to be much better arbiters of messages of and from the world at large?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think of it as reconstructing meaning (sculpting new meanings) from grammatical shards. It is the breaks in syntax that form the most powerful "stitches" [that's three metaphors already].
ReplyDeleteIn terms of whether a reader is "finding meaning that can be neither confirmed nor confuted," there is definitely a heavily abstract quality to many gnoems, but abstract concepts, to make any sense, must rely at some level on the experience of the reader and author, and a connection between the two occurs on this level.