re: AUT: Progress

[andrew robinson <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tahir is flip-flopping.  He wasn't going to engage
with my stinking excrement, and then he decides he'd
better, after all. Well here's another toilet full,
lol

Your theory of language is very foolish, for the
following reason.  You can say the mental image of a
table is specific, but you can't explain why a
one-legged round table would nevertheless be called a
table.  In other words, you have isolated the
fantasmatic/mythical function of words, not their
symbolic function.  You falsely maintain that their
symbolic function operates fantasmatically.

Thus, the crucial determinant of the categorisation of
any specific entity as a cat or a table is not
dependent on the fantasy-image (which in any case is
absent for some words, for example, "being", "thing",
"mammal", "economy"), but conformity to a set of
differential criteria.  The ultimate proof of Saussure
is the computer game Pangolin, which can accurately
identify a particular animal based on a series of
differential criteria, and can even learn new animals
by the addition of new differentiations.

And it may indeed be true that most people (i.e.
normal idiots) use the prototype model some of the
time, and this leads them into all kinds of silly
confusions (e.g. imagining that all Iraqis conform to
their assumption that Iraqis are terrorists).  But it
is not true that this is crucial to language-use as
such, even in normal use - it cannot, for instance,
make sense of complex concepts such as the verb "to
be", not to mention the possibility of any kind of
systematic thinking.  The "prototype" is not
generative of a concept, but rather, is a way to
symbolise the concept - a second-order signification,
like a Barthesian myth - or a kind of mnemonic for
easy recall of the concept.  Otherwise, there would be
no possibility of identifying anything other than the
prototype itself as belonging to the concept, because
(for instance) the circular one-legged table may LOOK
more like the prototype for a stool, and at most would
be indeterminable between table and stool.  If it is
nevertheless decisively identified as a table by most
speakers, this suggests their meaning operates on a
Saussurean model.

And of course, this fantasmatic use of language is
something to be overcome even more urgently than the
representational use of language, because of the
confusion it spreads about the referents of concepts
and the distortions it introduces into any attempt to
analysis (because the specific cat is confused with or
reduced to its "prototype", and thereby
essentialised).  In other words, it happens, but it is
not inevitable and it needs to be overcome.

Your confusion is probably between the development of
language and the structure of language.  It may well
be that the development of fantasmatic formations
occurs prior to or simultaneously with the emergence
of language, or that fantasy operates as the means of
passage from solely nominal (single object/word
articulations with no broader resonance) to more
complex forms of language.  But nevertheless, there is
no symbolic structure in the strict sense, where this
happens.  I think issues of autistic language-use
decisively rebut your claims, because autistic people
who develop the use of nominal language do not
necessarily pass to concepts with multiple referents,
and they have clearly obtained the "prototype"
function", so therefore, the passage from prototype
function to multi-referent concepts cannot be a
function of the prototype function but must involve
the addition of something else (the symbolic Order,
with a Saussurean structure).

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