OK, I think I get where you're coming from -- you are speaking for the postmodernist who already assumes that there is no basis to my commonsense distinction. I was starting from a different point.
I wanted to show the practical importance of the distinction, so that we don't just give it up as soon as some clever person comes along with a nifty abstract argument like the one you give above. Not that we should refuse to examine his argument, but we shouldn't be too easily bulldozed into throwing in the towel either.
In other words, I agree with you that deconstruction isn't in the real world -- and I think that's a problem for it.

Science runs into problems in its quest to understand the world -- from very simple things like an unexpected experimental result to the tension between relativity and quantum mechanics.
One might react to either kind of problem by just throwing up one's hands and giving up the project of understanding the world. But that would be ridiculously premature -- scientists will rerun the experiment to be sure that the unexpected result doesn't come about through error or fraud. Then, if the result is confirmed, they'll try to fit it within existing theory. If it can't be, they will continue using old theories until they can find a better one that takes account of the anomaly. Even with the quantum/relativity conflict, they try to develop a new theory (superstrings) that resolves the conflict -- they don't just throw in the towel and say "gosh, I guess we just can't understand the world after all." We could conceivably reach this point, but how can we assume that we've reached it already?
Our project was to understand the meaning of texts and to find a way to distinguish between manipulative persuasion and non-manipulative. The postmodernist tells us this can't be done -- the project is hopeless. But the postmodernist's reason for this is itself a certain (empirical) theory of meaning. The conclusion he should draw is, "either the project is hopeless, OR the (structuralist) theory of meaning is wrong".
By what right does the post-structuralist hold his structuralism beyond question? In fact there are other theories of meaning which do not have this extreme consequence (see _Language and Reality_ by Devitt and Sterelny). Even if there were not, wouldn't it be reasonable to go looking for one before just throwing up our hands?

The postmodernist is fond of "calling things into question," but for some reason, he never calls into question his own assumption that structuralism is true.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 07, 2004).]

I guess nobody reads Wittgenstein anymore. Or else you wouldn't be having this argument!

E. A. K.

I've read Wittgenstein. But to read W is not to always to agree with him.
Yes, once upon a time, philosophers were so far in his thrall that anything W (was thought to have) said was accepted as unquestioned truth.
Thank God, we are free of that particular idolatry, at least.
Now Wittgenstein is one extremely interesting philosopher among others.

If you want to mount a Wittgensteinian critique of all one of the issues under discussion, I'll discuss it with you. But no, it's no longer the case that just whispering his name can silence all debate.

Why Structuralism and Poststructuralism must be False
I'd be very interested to see what epigone, or some other post-structuralist sympahthizer (or however I should put it) would say about the following argument. (Sorry it looks so long -- it is about a page and a half in Word and I have tried to make it readily intelligible).

Summary Argument
1. If we accept Structuralism as our theory of language, we cannot account for how language could arise in the first place, nor how language is acquired by individual babies.
2. But language did have an origin in human pre-history and is learned by babies of every generation.
3. Therefore structuralism must be false.
4. And insofar as post-structuralism retains the structuralist assumptions that make this impossible, post-structuralism is false as well.

I assume that (2) is completely uncontroversial. But where does assumption (1) come from?
I start with two assumptions of structuralism:
A. Referents may be “bracketed” The operation of language can be understood entirely without mention of things out in the world beyond our own concepts that the word and or concept refers to or STANDS FOR. To understand how language works, we need to appeal to the CONCEPT of dogs, cats, people and butternut squash, but not to actual dogs or cats or butternut squash out in the world.
B. There are no pre-linguistic concepts. We cannot have the concept of a physical object (for example) prior to acquiring language. This is because individual concepts depend upon the entire system of concepts set out by a language

Intuitively, we can see a problem. Cats and cars are “public objects” things that are accessible to all of us by means of sense perception. If concepts were (as we commonly think) items in the mind, then how can I teach a baby to associate my concept of cat with the word “cat” – unless the baby can read my mind?
The structuralist might well deny that concepts are things in the mind, but this only makes it harder. On the structuralist view, to possess the concept of cat is already to possess an entire language in which the concept of cat figures. How can the baby who starts with no language possibly ever acquire a language?
The baby seems to be in the position of an English speaker who tries to learn Greek solely by means of a Greek dictionary intended for Greeks. Perhaps he can grasp the interrelationship of various uninterpreted signs, but he won’t ever grasp their meanings unless he goes out into the streets of Athens and starts pointing at things or acting things out. Babies, without even a first language, are even worse off. We cannot bracket referents in explaining how language is acquired.

In addition, language would be unlearnable if the baby did not possess some concepts pre-linguistically. To see this, imagine that you have been marooned on an island with a group of people who speak a language completely unrelated to any language you know and who speak no English. A rabbit runs by and one of the islanders points and says “gavagai”. You think, “aha! 'gavagai’ means ‘rabbit’ or maybe ‘there is a rabbit’.” You are very likely right, but the inference is far from certain. ‘Gavagai’ might mean ‘undetached rabbit part’ or ‘rabbit if it is before the year 2020, pastrami sandwich after 2020’ or ‘instantiation of rabbithood’ or ‘time-slice of a four dimensional rabbit-history’ or ‘I detect a rabbitty sensation in my visual field’ or any number of other things. You might hope that learning the rest of the language would eliminate this uncertainty, but it can never do so, because any amount of linguistic behavior you observe will necessarily be finite, while the interpretive theories consistent with any finite amount of linguistic behavior are infinite. (So when I learn what I think is ‘the rabbit hops’, it could mean “rabbithood and hopping are being manifested together.”) To get anywhere with my translation, I must assume for instance that these people have the concept of physical objects like rabbits and rocks, and that they find the same things salient in most situations that I do. (If they introduce me to colors, I assume that they’re more likely to point out ‘blue’ before they point out ‘aquamarine’ or ‘azure’, for instance). Babies are in the same boat except that they possess no language ahead of time. If they did not already possess some concept of a physical object prior to learning language, for example, or if they did not regard physical objects as particularly salient, they could not learn language at all.
(In fact there is experimental evidence that babies do possess this concept before they acquire language – which I’ll describe on request.)
The strange thing is that Derrida actually points out problems of something like this sort in connection with Saussure (see Derrida Positions, p 28, and Culler, p. 95) but he doesn’t reject structuralism – instead he treats the problem as simply ineliminable. But before we reach that conclusion, we ought to try a theory which grants that humans and animals possess some concepts prior to language, and which does not regard referents as irrelevant to an account of language. There are such theories as I said above (see Devitt and Sterelny _Language and Reality_) and they seem quite capable of explaining how language arises historically and in each human child.
I conclude that structuralism and post-structuralism, though interesting to consider as things we could imagine having reason to believe, are false in the real world.

[Acknowledgement: The 'gavagai' argument owes a debt to W.V.O. Quine's argument about the indeterminacy of translation, and to Steven Pinker's use of the argument in _The Language Instinct_ -- though neither of them aims the argument against structuralism, as I do here.)



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 10, 2004).]

It seems I'm something of a thread-killer, and certainly don't wish to work my magic here, Chris, but having seen this effort of yours go unanswered for three days, I thought I might take the chance and respond—-I'm afraid, not with a formal reply to the argument, but a more historical perspective on the entire aporia, as it has established itself as an articulable historical fact. (Just skip this post if you like.)
My school memories of the structuralist debate are too vague to do justice to your argument, as I said, but this much I think seems clear: a lot of very intelligent and highly-trained linguistic minds have argued for and against this position for half a century, and instead of it going away (like the positivism from which, in many ways, it stemmed) it has spawned all manners of yet more improbable progeny. This fact alone would suggest two things:
1) that no Spherical posting can do much to alter anyone's opinion, if that opinion is sufficiently informed as to understand the posting; and
2) that the "solution" to structuralism (and offspring) will ultimately consist, as Wittgenstein would say, in the vanishing of the problem.
That problem, I would suggest, is ultimately a moral or religious one, something like the Enlightenment obsession with knowledge (a sickness virtually unknown to the Greeks, who healthily took the world—-some world at least—-as a given).
It's as if there'd been another deluge on the earth, and this time Noah's boat wouldn't float, and the sons of Cain (who adore floods of every sort) were sea-dooing, here and there and everywhere, amongst all the flotsam and jetsam of the world.
At the risk of seeming 'clever' by deconstructing deconstruction (et al), then, I would suggest that it has clearly thrived on the historical combination, dominating the late twentieth-century, of simmering intellectual hysteria, creative exhaustion and moral quiescence, and is not—-ever—-to be corrected, only healed.



[This message has been edited by Brian Jones (edited April 13, 2004).]

Thanks for responding Brian.
I have a slightly different take, though I think related.

What you call the Enlightenment obsession with knowledge, I regard as a very particular view of knowledge -- the Cartesian or "foundationalist" view of knowledge, where knowledge must start from absolutely certain foundations and build upward more or less deductively.

The project of building up our knowledge in this way has failed (for very good reasons). The solution is not, in my view, to dissolve or heal the problem, so much as to find another conception of how knowledge can work.

As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle had such a model, regarding knowledge as holistic and dialectical. Sense experience and prereflective assumptions give rise to puzzles. Resolving these puzzles in the best way will lead us to knowledge. This is, I take it, the path of science now.

I feel even Wittgenstein was a prisoner of the foundationalist view in a way. Sometimes he seems to believe in foundations, but to regard these foundations as 'brute' foundations -- they are not certain foundations, but justification must come to an end somewhere and this is just WHERE WE STOP (in this particular language game). Or one might read him as giving us conceptual foundations -- we stop here and stopping here is just WHAT WE MEAN BY justification in this context. But on the dialectical/holist view, justification doesn't really come to an end -- our knowledge and justification are in some way provisional. It's always possible that someone could come along with a new set of puzzles that his radical new theory resolves better than ours.
On my view, Wittgenstein comes too close to positivism and behaviorism -- I think one can see this in his discussion of mental states in others and the quasi-definitional way he seems to use the word "criterion". In treating science as just another language game, he buys too much of the skeptical argument he's rejecting. I believe common sense is right: science really does tell us (though fallibly) about the reality that underlies our commonsense world.

Of course this view leads us to another even deeper motivation for anti-realism (or Kantianism) of the structuralist sort and of other sorts:
If science tells us the whole truth, then where does that leave our human world of desires, beliefs, emotions and moral judgments? Don't we need to put science in its place, restrict it to a particular domain to keep it from undermining this realm?
My short answer to this is that it identifies science with physics. Human beings and their beliefs and desires are irrelevant to physics, but human beings and their beliefs and desires are not irrelevant to psychology. And I suggest (controversially) along with Plato and Aristotle that morality is part of psychology and political science -- the justice of a social system may well be relevant to its stability, for instance. We should not be too ready to give up morality and our human world, but we shouldn't be too ready to assume that scientific knowledge automatically conflicts with all morality. We shouldn't be too ready to grasp at desperate expedients like transcendental idealism (of the structuralist sort or any other sort) as though they were the only way out.

Let's not reject the Enlightenment desire for knowledge of reality, let's just reject Descartes' radical and unrealistic picture of what such knowledge has to be like.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 14, 2004).]

imagine that you have been marooned on an island with a group of people who speak a language completely unrelated to any language you know and who speak no English
An aside, but it is claimed that

• indri, the name of a short-tailed lemur of Madagascar, means 'look' - which a French naturalist took to be its name when it was pointed out to him.
• Kangaroo is the reply to Captain James Cook's question about the name of the strange marsupial Cook had just seen. The native had answered, 'Kangaroo' which means 'I don't know'.
• Llama derived its name from 'Como se llama?', Spanish for what's its name?

I think the 2nd of these at least is untrue. See google for details.

I almost wish I were still licensed to practice philosophy, merely to engage with one so articulate as you. Sadly, I'm not; but shall keep one eye open henceforward for anything of yours, and wish you the best, should that be your path.

Brian

Tim,
Some interesting examples. If they're not true, it seems at least that they could be. Of course, the wrongness of these translations could certainly be discovered with a little time (as in fact it has been, if the examples are true). But if one doesn't make some assumptions about the kind of concepts the speakers are more likely to be using (it's hard to see how language learning could get off the ground).
Babies actually learn language with far less evidence than my imaginary linguist on a desert isle.
No one asked me for the evidence that babies start with a concept of a physical object (as well as some mathematical awareness), but maybe this is a good place to mention the experiment.
A baby is shown a Mickey Mouse doll being put behind a screen, which conceals the doll from view. Then another Mickey is placed next to the screen. The experimenter waits until the baby loses interest and then removes the screen. If there is still only one Mickey (the one beside the screen, not the one behind). The baby shows much more surprise and interest than if both are visible.
Since only one Mickey was visible at any time, it seems, first of all, that the baby has, in effect, ADDED 1 Mickey plus 1 Mickey = 2 Mickeys to form her expectation that there should be two Mickeys when the screen is removed.
It also seems to show that the baby expects physical objects to PERSIST UNOBSERVED -- thus it possesses at least one essential element of the concept of a physical object. (For a fuller account of the experiment, see Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ -- I'll find the page number if anyone asks me to -- don't have the book with me now.)

This isn't too surprising. Physical objects are terribly important to survival -- one would expect natural selection to "prewire" some awareness of their nature into us.

This brings me to another point, the structuralist seems to adopt an excessively Cartesian view of non-linguistic animals (including babies). A more naturalistic view of animals would have to admit that some prelinguistic animals think, even reason. If concepts are entirely a product of language, how could animals do this?

Brian,
Thank you for responding and for the kind remarks at the end of your message. If you should ever wish to talk philosophy, I won't ask to see your license.

Though you raise a number of interesting questions, I'll restrict myself to your attempt, following Rorty, to keep science within its limits -- restrict it to finding out about "the SCIENTIFIC reality that underlies our commonsense world." If you are going to draw boundaries, the question arises why you draw them so broadly -- why not say that chemistry deals with chemical reality and physics deals with physical reality and biology deals with biological reality --why not wall the sciences off from each other in the way that you seem to wall science off from other forms of understanding?
The reason is, of course, that some scientists have pursued the possibility that the world is knowable as a whole -- that one can build biology on chemistry and chemistry on physics. Others in history who denied this (vitalists in biology, for instance) have been defeated. Even if we deny this, following Thomas Kuhn, it certainly seems that project of unified scientific knowledge might have failed -- we could be butting our heads against walls around biology and chemistry. Even on Kuhn's view, wishing doesn't make it so.
One might maintain that there is an obvious wall separating the human world from the scientific -- but this seems very dubious. The study of other animals and of our own brains seems to shed light on the human world too -- science bleeds out beyond whatever boundaries you try to set up around it.
Historically speaking, it was very important to the scientific movement to set up boundaries around God and the soul -- promising the powerful Church that it would not interfere in those realms. But in a way the Church was more perceptive than Gallileo on this point: science has no natural boundaries. Natural selection undermines the argument from design -- as well as the Biblical story of creation. Historical inquiry may undermine the authority of certain holy texts or show us the historical impossibility of some of their claims.

Human reality seems no more walled off from scientific reality than "chemical reality" is walled off from physical or biological reality. Reality is reality is reality.

On the other hand, the physicist doesn't just take over the chemist's job -- both have a responsibility to recognize and incorporate the facts turned up by the other. And physicists aren't going to put psychologists, sociologists or novelists out of work by showing that there are no emotions, no people and no societies --only "atoms and the void". If we keep this in mind, we may not find it so necessary to erect walls in the first place.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 15, 2004).]