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Doing, Making, Meaning: Toward a Theory of Verbal Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Paul Hernadi
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Abstract

All discourse evolves in all three dimensions of verbal practice: doing, making, and meaning. While there are special links between speaking and action, between writing and creation or production, and between quasi-verbal thinking and signification, we should avoid reducing any instance or type of discourse to nothing but action, creation, or signification. The analogous triad of intersubjective culture, objective nature, and subjective identity likewise points to three complementary modes of existence: the social, the physicobiological, and the personal. At any given time, we tend to experience human beings, including ourselves, in just one mode: as players of socially assigned roles, as physically situated and genetically determined organisms, or as free and responsible selves. Yet we should not turn any of these ways of experiencing into a master doctrine designed to debunk the other two as mere delusions.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 103 , Issue 5 , October 1988, pp. 749 - 758
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1988

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