Aug 2011, 15:23
Mikhail Rozov’s book is being translated
The Language Interface translation team is working on a translation of the book Social Relay Theory and Problems of Epistemology by the remarkable Russian thinker Mikhail Rozov. The plan is to complete the translation and submit the book to the publisher this coming fall.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Rozov died in January 2011, leaving behind this book – the result of his 20+ years invested in researching the means of existence of semiotic objects. In describing his findings the author dives deep into the kinds of linguistic problems that must be solved in order to carry out any cognitive studies. This fascinating, easy-to-understand and convincing book is sure to find an audience in the West. Here are a few lines from it.
“I do not want to sum up and conclude all this. I just want to quote the words of Montaigne: ‘This is a sincere book, my reader.’ It is a result of long searches and contemplations that continue as I am writing these lines, and I do not want to stop. I have presented my thoughts as clearly as I could, without hiding their incompleteness. I am far from thinking that the proposed solutions are final. And perhaps I should have waited much longer before putting this book together, because it is much more exciting to think and search than to write and draw conclusions. The final push for writing came from Kozma Prutkov’s fable:
A shepherd carried milk one day,
But carried it so far away,
That he never came back home again.
My reader! Did you see the man?
All of a sudden I realized that this verse was about me and that it does no good to carry my milk forever. My reader won’t meet me and the milk will turn sour.
If I am asked what I believe is most important in this book, I will reply that the main point is the solution of the problem of the means of existence of semiotic objects. One cannot study signs, knowledge, science or literature without figuring out, in principle, what the nature of the objects we are dealing with is. Take, for instance, such a phenomenon as the meaning of a sign or a sentence. Once you start to examine it, amazing adventures of human thought begin when you are trying to capture and trivialize a fairly non-trivial situation. “The word ‘meaning’ is a peculiar whore among words,” Colin Cherry writes. “’Meaning’ is a harlot among words; it is a temptress who can seduce the writer or speaker from the path of intellectual chastity”. The difficulty is presented by the ‘resistance’ of the meaning or the text content being alienated from the researcher, he cannot jettison them to the distance required for them to be analyzed objectively. I think that this has been overcome through such ideas as social relays and kumatoids.”
The translation team includes Mark Kit, Sarah Hurst, Sergey Sitnikov, Elena Moshkova, and Gennady Smirnov.
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