[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:39:58 +0900
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> So we have four confused commentators: Walter, Eric, John McCreery, and me.
> I come last, so I'm the most confused of all.
>
How Socratic of you.;-)
But, shifting gears a bit, I wonder if it mightn't be interesting to ask if
we can distinguish different types or modes of confusion. I note, for
example, that it may be possible to misread a text yet take something useful
from it. Thus, to me, pragmatically speaking, I am not particularly
perturbed if Eric has misread Wittgenstein when he writes,
Finally, the 'meaning' in a game is not to be found by examining the rules
> nor even, generally, in examining how the rules constrain the choices before
> the players. It is, instead, to be found in how the players interact with
> one another through the actions offered by the rules -- the meaning is in
> what they're doing, not in syntactic analysis the rules might offer.
The idea that Eric articulates, that meaning is to be found in interaction,
which is only partially constrained by the rules, is to me a useful and
important one. I might quibble a bit with "the actions offered by the
rules," since much of meaning is generated when rules are stretched or
broken. But what he says speaks very nicely, indeed, to some sociological
articles I'm reading in which the relation of structure to agency is
discussed. My sense that something has clicked, that illumination has
occurred, may also be confused; but this, it seems to me, is a different
sort of confusion than that involved in misreading a text.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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