Com 520 - Philosophy of Communication - Week 11

Yi-Fu Tuan is a Humanistic Geographer.  He views the connections between place and spaces relative to the human experience.   Professor Trimmer synthesizes Tuan’s notions of experiencing the environment and fuses them with writing.

Tuan dismisses questions such as what is real or what is truth. (Trimmer, 1983).  Instead, he uses place and space as positions that can be philosophically debated through abstracts, and empirically discussed as derived by the physical senses.  

Tuan suggests we rely mostly on sight to interpret the world.  Our visual compositions tend to center the most important subjects and frame lesser subjects around them. Tuan views these compositions as artificial structures as we generally compose scenes with ourselves at the psychological center (Trimmer, 1983).  For Tuan, one must live within the scene and fully engage all the senses to adequately perceive it. 

Tuan views language as the framework that creates meaning; “writing has the potential to be more than a mere summary,” and it “can interpret a world and be a world” (Trimmer, 1983, 186). 

Trimmer writes that Tuan’s notions of perceiving a place mirrors the writing processes of invention, exploration and verification.  Invention is the reaching out to locate writing topics.  Exploration is, “Living in the world of the subject” (Trimmer, 1983, 187).  Invention and exploration lead to illumination.  Once a world is framed, then people can derive meaning and make claims.  The written document verifies our perception, but it also becomes a world for the reader to establish associations and form meaning (Trimmer, 1983).   

There is an interesting reference that Aristotle viewed topic “as a place to stand, a perspective from which to view something” (Trimmer, 1983, p. 187).  I find Aristotle’s view and Tuan’s approach to physical places as topics remarkably the same, as either approach can be viewed empirically or in the abstract.  In addition, both approaches are concerned with broadening the viewer’s perception beyond their own centered positions.

Trimmer’s essay highlights many of the topics we’ve read and discussed.  He suggests a tension between authentic experience and the creation of meaning.  He proposes that language forms worlds for people to ponder.  Being in the scene resembles Heidegger’s view of Being in the world.  Heidegger, Tuan, Radford and Trimmer all agree that language is the ultimate structure that allows for human reflection and growth.  Tuan’s notions speak to authentic communication between viewer and environment in the same manner that Radford speaks to language between people.  

References

Heidegger, M. (1993). Basic Writings. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Radford, G.P. (2005). On the Philosophy of Communication.  South Bank, Vic., Australia: Thomson Wadsworth.

Trimmer, J.F. (1983) Yi-Fu Tuan: The Composing of worlds. The Journal of Teaching Writing,  2(2), 181-192. Retrieved from  http://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/teachingwriting/article/view/679/655