Antisemantic

As Albert says to Pogo during the poetry contest: "I made it up. I made it rhyme. Now I gotta make it mean something?" While Albert is almost self-consciously taking a Dadaist artistic position during this interchange, it is also true that his antisemantic tendencies are constantly with him.

To point up Antal's anti-meaning attitude I could still continue recalling quotations: a single one must yet be added here, and this from his work where he tried to outline the distinction between word-declension and word-formation, describing the Hungarian case-system in a strictly antisemantic manner.

But meaning was definitely out of the main purview of linguistics in that period, following Bloomfield's warning that it has the potential to lead to chaos. So, for instance, Hill uses and obscure paper by Joos ("Towards a First Theorem in Semantics") to serve "as one refutation (among many) to the oft-repeated but erroneous charge that American linguistics of the 1940's and 1950's was anti-semantic and materialist, characteristics which it supposedly owed to Leonard Bloomfield,” but interpolated into Hill's paper is a lamentation by Joos that the audience “reacted almost entirely negatively” (Hill, 1991:30).

The most striking feature of the distributionalist approach to language is, however, its antisemantic bias, typical especially of Harris but going back to scholars like B. Bloch, G. L. Trager, and ultimately L. Bloomfield.

Clearly, if the conjunction of realism and antisemantic-realism had the consequence that truth is an accident, that would be a serious problem.

The antisemantic arguments tap into deeply held intuitions that computers are just not the sorts of things one can correctly view as cognitive agents, as persons.

Later, when William suggests that “the desire for children is hardwired,” Otto goes off on another antisemantic rant: “Hardwired.” You know, that's a term I've really come to loathe! It explains nothing, it justifies anything; you might as well say, "Humans have children because the Great Moth in the Sky wants them to." Or "Humans have children because humans have children." Hardwired," please! It's lazy, it's specious, it's perfunctory, and it's utterly without depth.

The event is repressed at the level of direct expression and can only make itself felt again in what Abraham and Torok call the “antisemantic” features of language.