Abracadabra: Language, Memory, Representation

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Reading for today:

The Book of Life: Just a metaphor?

  1. The persistence of this particular metaphor.
  2. the operational force of imagining that DNA is a language.
  3. DNA linguistics and bioinformatics "A metaphor literalized." Kay suggests that this metaphor does not stand up to any rigorous investigation of the concept of language: does that mean that genetics is operating under a faulty assumption? what might be the impact of such a state of affairs?
  4. Not all metaphors are created equal. Some metaphors are better than others for the creativity of scientific work.

"Here it a human being; it's me." Are you this book?

  • language
  • letters
  • data
  • information
  • symbols
  • chemicals
  • molecules

History of twentieth century science: biochemistry meets molecular genetics meets linguistics meets information theory.

Can there be a history of a natural, universal, eternal "book of life"?

  1. The meanings of this notion, the book of life, change from historical period to historical period.
  2. In the ancient world of Plato and Socrates, speech is the locus of truth, writing is only the imperfect imitation of truth.
  3. In the old testament, God creates the earth through speech, and Adam names the animals.
  4. In the New Testament, the gospel of St. John says: "I am the word." "The word made flesh." "In the beginning was the word." Augustine, Aquinas and others have written commentaries on the Book of Life.
  5. In the Medieval era, the book of nature is a supplement to the book of life, and is an image of all things ordered according to grammatical categories.
  6. After the 15th c. The "book of nature" became a mechanically printed text.
  7. In the 18th century Kant points out that even knowing all the letters and pronounciations is not enough to understand a book. Something more must be necessary
  8. In the twentieth century, books are "information" or worse, "content" rather than books.
Some words to know...
book
writing
script
text
information
metaphor
literal
aporia
epistemè
technè
logos
gnomos
language
speech
writing
representation
discourse
grammar
logic
rhetoric
communication
information
code
table of correlations
ontology
epistemology
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
paradigm
syntagm
synchronic
diachronic
sign
signifier
signified
referent
picture
image
object
interface
frame
screen
Christopher Kelty
Last modified: Mon Jan 27 18:08:03 CST 2003