Semantically definition

In a couple classes I’m taking, I keep running into the same competition of concepts: it’s the duel between the scientific and the artistic. The quantitative and the quantitative. Or as Kenneth Burke would have it, the semantic and the poetic. The difference, which I’ll explain in a minute, is in itself so interesting to me. Long before I knew the word “epistemology” I was curious about a human’s ability (or maybe lack of ability) to understand or describe an objective reality. But this left brain/right brain battle is particularly interesting in light of another issue that puts me in a fettle: teacher evaluations. Without going into the politics of whether or not teachers ought to walk out on their students as they have done in Chicago in recent days, I think it’s important to make a couple philosophical observations about teacher evaluations and the standardized tests that feed them.

But first, a word on semantic and poetic meaning. Semantic meaning is what any scientist worth his (and yes, that pronoun is deliberate) salt is after. They aim at “making true statements about the world” (Eisner, 1981). Put more colorfully, the goal is to “evolve a vocabulary that gives the name and address of every event in the universe” (Burke, 1989). A noble pursuit to be sure! Such pursuit involves a process of universalizing, or essentializing.

Burke offers the example of a chair. According to an “ideal semantic definition” of a chair, “people knew what you wanted when you asked for one, a carpenter knew how to make it, a furniture dealer knew how to get it, etc.” All the actual chairs in the world are but examples of this ideal “chair-ness;” from the particular we move to the general (and here of course we are floating into Plato’s realm). On the other hand, a poetic definition of a chair might be the chair I’m looking at right now– a stuffed velvet chair of golden hue, which I inherited from my dad, and which will always remind me of him and its spot in the apartment where I spent my teenage years. Or it could be the lovely wooden dining room chairs behind me, which, incidentally, my mother gave me. As you can see, my furniture is filled with meaning beyond the simply material. I associate with these objects memories and meanings, and even aspects of my relationships to my family.

In sum: while a semantic definition of a chair tries to “cut away, to abstract, all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning, ” a poetic definition of my chairs is all for the “heaping up of all these emotional factors… and [for] seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision” (Burke).

Where does this leave us in the messy world of trying to just come to some conclusions for godsakes? And why won’t these teachers stop forsaking their pupils and just get back to work? Good questions, all. But we have to look at what the teachers are protesting. While teacher accountability is of course a good thing, as all accountability is in a social world, we must ask: what are the methods by which teachers are being held accountable? They are being judged by measures of a purely semantic nature (and I’m using the term in a Burkean sense here of course).