Posted by Andy Dingley on 02/20/07 12:12

On 20 Feb, 01:50, dorayme <doraymeRidT...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> (in Australia, we call it bullshit).

That's why the two most important publications in post-modernist
theory are Sokal's
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics
of Quantum Gravity"

and "Social Text"'s commentary on having published it
"its status as parody does not alter substantially our interest in the
piece itself as a symptomatic document."

There's no shortage of sociological bollocks out there, and it's our
responsibility to dispel it with our Flaming Clueirons of
Righteousness ((c) Jonathan Aitken)


> There are words and sentences and these have meanings. We do not
> need some third ghostly intermediary called a concept.

Of course we do! As a HTML author, haven't you felt its acute lack?
My overall point here, in all these thousands of words, is that good
HTML authoring practice demonstrates the validity of the Structuralist
approach (at least within this narrow field). There _is_ an underlying
and hidden "concept" within our sites and shared between our pages.
Good authors are already recognising this (if unconsciously) and are
using it as a binding post for CSS presentation groupings. Making this
subtlety manifest represents the education of less skillful authors.
Making it automatically processable is a direction for useful progress
in authoring tools.



> The whole terminology of "signifier" and "signified" is
> hopelessly based on false ideas.

Which are?

> "only the signified conveys real meaning"? What?

Yes. That's what we define it to mean. We invent these new term-usages
and we define them as "expression of" and "thing expressed". Thus far
I don't see much scope for bollockspeakery. Signifiers don't have
meaning, they just point to the thing that does carry the meaning.
Sometimes this pointed direction is short and direct, sometimes it's
vague and torturous.

As it is, a simplified "60-Minutes" English has no ability to discuss
such concepts. I totally and utterly reject any attempt to make me
stupid by limiting the language I can use to express thought (this is
one reason I don't own a TV). Humpty Dumpty was right, sometimes you
have to make words mean whatever you wish them to mean, but you have
to do this carefully and to take notes of how you did use them so that
others can follow.


> I shudder to think of a panel of folks making a wsiwig anything

That's the camel design problem though, not the concept. Although
fluffy concepts often have turned into radical new (and useful)
products they've usually been the conceptual work of one person. It's
hard to organise committees anyway, trying to organise them aroudn
something so vague and hard to quantify as well would be impossible.


>BenC> You possess the concept of a cat if you know how to use the word "cat".

With cats, that's all you get to possess.

[Back to original message]