Blacksmiths etcetera

Deep into a book on activity theory. Been reading about blacksmiths and now scientists and it's making me think about Chomsky. Too much maybe.

Sassure and Peirce, when they each came up with the idea of the inherent arbitrary nature of signs, implied that signs, whether they be words written on a page or utterances of sound, gained their meaning from social/historical processes. A word is nothing without an infusion of meaning, and for the meaning to make sense it has to be social. We share the language process with others. Language is, from this perspective, just another tool, albeit a particularly unique and powerful one. It's a tool that makes tools, but like any tool it exists within contexts of use. (actually, it's more like a toolbox. I think.)

Chomsky modernized the field by saying there must be a language organ, as language was too complex to be explained by any other means. But what if language is inherently shared? if the cognitive task is distributed? We don't know language except in the context of use, and that use is highly scaffolded, collaborative and reliant on a larger culture? Just as I can't make a film without a few thousand employees of Eastman Kodak.

And, as I might as well jump off the cliff now, what if the "works of Shakespeare" really were the works of ALL the actors, stagehands and editors? What if they were collaborative too, and Shakespeare was just the glue?

Now I said it, and that means that I don't have to put that in my dissertation.