All communication is at some basic level about how the messenger/receiver are to live. This is like what Aquinas, when talking about scripture, calls either the tropological or the moral (methinks) sense. And all moral communication is at a certain level about where we are heading, which is like what Aquinas calls the anagogical sense.
I need to write up an allegory about what it would be like (in two cases) to find messages that don't match their contexts: in both cases, the language used is foreign, so that the interpreter must try to figure out what it might mean on the basis of context. tin the first case one finds a speculative message on the beach of a desert island composed by a lone survivor; in the second one finds a message of immediate practical relevance in the pages of a reference book in a science library. Use this to explore how expectation is based upon the practical social context in which something is communicated, and how that expectation is about goals and how to act so as to attain them.
What is the point of all this? I'm not quite sure of WHAT the point might be, but I'm hoping that I'm on to something important...
I need to write up an allegory about what it would be like (in two cases) to find messages that don't match their contexts: in both cases, the language used is foreign, so that the interpreter must try to figure out what it might mean on the basis of context. tin the first case one finds a speculative message on the beach of a desert island composed by a lone survivor; in the second one finds a message of immediate practical relevance in the pages of a reference book in a science library. Use this to explore how expectation is based upon the practical social context in which something is communicated, and how that expectation is about goals and how to act so as to attain them.
What is the point of all this? I'm not quite sure of WHAT the point might be, but I'm hoping that I'm on to something important...
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