Saturday, October 6, 2012

Circle-jerk jargon

Balder referenced a paper by Gendlin here. I replied:

Yes, Gendlin's article addresses many of my recent concerns. But damn that guy's writing style is a jargon-laden circle. Reminds me of the Lingam in that way. Still, he gets at the organism-environment behavioral patterns I'm calling image schemas. And that these patterns, like with J&R, arise within a field of behavioral possibilities, i.e., how an organism can make use of its environment. I appreciate his distinguishing the different kinds of 'environment,' and I thought his third definition might approach Bryant's endo-relations. But it did not. In fact the different definitions got a bit muddled for me, given that by the time he got there we were in full circle-jerk jargon.*

* I like that expression, "circle-jerk jargon." Has a lyrical quality. I'm going to have to re-use that.


I then refined the definition of the phrase here and as follows:

The origin of "circle-jerk jargon" comes from this post, discussing how one's own set of definitions get more and more complex and circular, referring only to themselves in such reiterative loops as to be dizzying and eye-glazing. And very often only fully understandable to the jerker, with little or no concern for a broader communicative interaction as in masturbation.

Still, some (many?) of us are fascinated by watching another masturbate. I guess it fires our mirror neurons and thus there is some kind of resonant transfer, even if not 'intelligible.'



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