the price of linguistic reduction
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

30::March::2005 12:40 → permalink

the sheer indeterminacy of ideas about things and actions and events:

Bohr was the first to recognize that the new quantum theory presented us with a view of experience in which different interactional arrangements resulted in complementary perspectives that need not be logically consistent, compatible, or commensurable, and in many critical cases could not be so. The reductionist trick was predicated on the assumption that the different ‘pieces’ or views from different perspectives could always somehow be neatly fit together. But we now know that material processes cannot be comprehended, cannot be exhaustively described within any one single self-consistent formal discourse. They always overflow the limited possibilities of our semiotic models of them. It is only by building more and more semiotic-discursive models, each internally self-consistent, but not limited by requirements of mutual consistency with each other, that we can, by adding together such ‘complementary’ views, attain to the most complete possible account of material phenomena, including semiosis itself. Thus we still come back to a version of ‘assemblage’ but hopefully a more sophisticated one, one that takes into account our own role and perspective as observers, as well as the material means by which we observe, compare, and assemble — the material mediation of our semiotic practices. — J. L. Lemke, in Material Sign Processes And Emergent Ecosocial Organization

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