epigone,
Do you regard your second remark ('And yes...) as equivalent to what I called structuralism's non-referential world-independent, holistic account of meaning?
I don't. I accept that words do not name by some intrinsic fitness to the object they name (neither German nor English is "wrong" where they differ in their words).
And I do regard that as common sense.
What I don't accept is that the meaning of a word is given entirely by its relationship to other parts of the language. Saussure (I gather) treats language as like the game of chess:
"But just as a game of chess is entirely in the combination of the different chess pieces, language is characterized as a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units."
Words have meaning only by their interrelationship with other words.
This is quite a different proposition from the conventionality of words, and it is actually quite implausible (if I am understanding it properly).

As for your first point, you're right that the difficulty of achieving agreement for complicated texts is one of the phenomena to be explained, but so is the intelligibility of the simple, mundane texts. I have some fairly boring explanations for the former. One is precisely that the texts ARE more complex, and a theory of its meaning will have more phenomena to account for. Another is that the narcissism of small differences often exaggerates the apparent degree of disagreement. Another is precisely that all justification is dialectical (the point about justification I've been harping on) and provisional -- no debate is beyond being reopened if a really new theory comes along. And there are other explanations.
It isn't clear to me whether the post-structuralist view has a very good explanation for my datum (the fact that we can understand simple texts). (I think the self-enclosed nature of language I described above gets in the way.)

Robt,
I think I agree with you. I guess that the author is demoted to god's prophet or oracle. And this might still seem a bit too romantic a position to Barthes -- my additional remarks were meant to make him even more human.

In bridge we use a highly-specific language for bidding called "conventions". In any given situation, a specific bid (say, 3 hearts) will have a different "meaning", and this meaning is "conventional"; that is to say, we have agreed beforehand upon the interpretation of this bid in this circumstance or situation.

Toa player who does not understand conventions at all, the bid has no "meaning". To a player who uses a different set of conventiuons, and is unaware of the nature of my conventions, the bid has "meaning" but the "meaning" is false.

In bridge tournaments we are required to "disclose" our conventions at the beginning of each round of play, and me be disqualified for using undisclosed conventions.


This analogy must be good for something...

(robt)

Hmmm. I do not think Saussure's "concrete units" are words. I think they are sound units -- phonemes, which do indeed have meaning (or at least that's what my common sense tells me) only through their interrelatioship with other phonemes.

epigone

Epi,

That's correct: Sauserre is referring to phonemes as the base-units of language. To him, apparently, words are ordered constructions of phonemes. About as anti-literary a perspective as one can imagine.

(robt)

epigone,

I'm a little puzzled by your saying that the phonemes have meaning, since I'd have thought the word was the smallest unit with a meaning. (I do admit to being pretty ignorant of Saussure et al., however).
I understand Saussure starts with the observation that phonemes have their identity only through contrast (some languages don't mark the distinction between /l/ and /r/)and interrelation with other phonemes (where one can or cannot substitute a /g/ for an /l/. And this does seem plausible to me.

But I gather (from a few sources -- the clearest statement being Devitt and Sterelny, _Language and Reality_, which is certainly quite critical of structuralism in linguistics) that Saussure implicitly and other structuralists more explicitly generalize this account to other dimensions of language, including semantics. (Certainly the bit about binary oppositions among concepts seems like a generalization to concepts from "binary feature analysis" of phonemes.
And in fact the quote I produced above (quoted from another book, so it's true I don't know the context) does appear to make the point about "language" in general, not just to phonology.

I'll put Course in General Linguistics on the reading list too, but in the mean time, is this view a complete misunderstanding?

PS Here's something I pulled off the web from a Google search by a Proffessor John Lye:

1. Meaning occurs through difference. Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among signs in a signifying system. For instance, the meaning of the words "woman" and "lady" are established by their relations to one another in a meaning-field. They both refer to a human female, but what constitutes "human" and what constitutes "female" are themselves established through difference, not identity with any essence, or ideal truth, or the like.
Here is the link to the whole thing:
http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/struct.html



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 31, 2004).]

Chris,

It's not that phonemes, of themselves, have "meaning"; it's that they don't. But "words" (which we believe do have "meanings", are composed of building-blocks of phonemes. Therefore, the statement's logically coherent — it's in fact true that phonemes have no meaning except in opposition to each other: e.g. when they are arrayed into the form of words.

Logically, if we don't accept that then we have to accept that human beings cannot "think". Not a position I'd want to defend :)

(robt)

Robt,
I see that you are probably right about what Epigone meant -- reading "interrelationship" as "combinations with". Your use of "in opposition to" is an odd way of describing "combination".

Here's a quote from Jonathan Culler in _On Deconstruction_:

"Saussure begins by defining language as a system of signs. Noises count as language only when they serve to express or communicate ideas, and thus the central question for him becomes the nature of the sign: what gives it its identity and enables it to function as a sign. He argues that signs are arbitrary and conventional and that each is defined not by essential properties but by the differences that distinguish it from other signs." [my emphasis]

and later in the next paragraph:
"Indeed, he concludes that "in the linguistic system there are only differences, without positive terms"" [Saussure's or Culler's emphasis]

and later in that paragraph:
"signs are the product of a system of differences; indeed, they are not positive entitities at all but effects of difference."
Culler explicitly makes the connection of "meaning through difference (not combination) to signs, not phonemes.

Also, isn't it the case that structuralists infer the rejection of essentialism from the structuralist view of language? Don't they, in other words, infer that when we talk about things, we cannot be referring to "real essences" out in the world?
If signs gain their meaning only through difference from each other, this would seem to follow. It doesn't even seem to follow from the fact that phonemes can only gain meaning by being combined into words.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 01, 2004).]

An Englishman, by name Sir Babbit,
went hunting for to shoot a rabbit.
At length, one burst from out a thicket
and, while still running very quick, it
fell, two arrows in its heart.
Instantly did Sir Babbit start
to fetch the rabbit he had shot,
a tasty morsel for the pot,
when sudeenly there did appear
a hunter, garbed for hunting deer.
A brilliant fellow, the hunter said:
"I do believe my rabbit's dead!"
"The rabbit's mine!" said Babbit, acidly.
"Let's split it." said the hunter, placidly.
"Forget it!" said Babbit (putting on airs),
"I don't believe in splitting hares!"

(from memory, author unknown or forgotten-by-me)

jejeje™

(robt)

Hello Robt,
I didn't mean to be hairsplitting or haresplitting either.

The issue is whether to interpret Saussure and the others as saying something very mundane (phonemes have meaning only when combined into words) or something very radical (words gain their meaning entirely through their relationships to one another).

I took your use of "opposition" there as an attempt to explain some of the texts I brought up besides epigone's remark, and I wanted to suggest why I didn't think it would work as a reading of the others.
I apologize if it appeared that I was making some cheap point about your not quoting epi exactly right -- that wasn't at all my intention.
I assume you don't regard the two interpretations of Saussure as a distinction without a difference?
Chris

Chris,

the fault is mine: I should have added a comment along with the doggerel that made clear I posted it as an amusing sidebar to the discussion. I did not mean to imply that YOU are "splitting hairs" in some offensive way.

The case could be made that the entire discussion is an extreme example of splitting hairs, but that's not to fault YOU: it's a fasinating discussion regardless, and I'm well aware that I can (and do) split hairs with the best of them.

I find it existentially amusing the great lengths the more rabid deconstructionists go to in their race to make the "commonsensical" so opaque that mortal minds can no longer believe anything they see or hear, but that's another story and I'm not sticking to it...

Peace,

(robt)