I said above that that I had a problem with structuralism's attempt to make sense of meaning purely in terms of words' relations to each other, leaving out words' relations to the world.
epigone responded that it was common sense to think that names are arbitrary – that calling something a chair doesn't tell us anything about chairs. (Putting it the other way around, there’s nothing about that combination of phonemes or letters that is any more suited to chairs than to skunk cabbages, and nothing about ‘chair’ that makes it capture reality better than ‘Stuhl’.)
This response puzzled me – I couldn’t see the connection between what I had said and epigone's reply.
Looking at epigone's reply to Paul Lake on the Enchanted Loom thread, I think maybe I've got it:
“Structuralism is a theory of how communication is effectuated through a system of recognized differences. The differences are arbitrary and have no connection to their referents, but communication is possible based on the differences within the system. Derrida broke with the structuralists by stressing the “play” in the relationship between the binary opposites and, more politically, by contending that binary oppositions are always hierarchical in nature.” [My emphasis]
The emphasized passage seems to have two readings. I think that, at least pre-reflectively, we assume that the world is the way it is apart from how we talk about it: though the particular sounds we use to mark distinctions are indeed arbitrary, the distinctions themselves are not. Whatever distinctions we may draw in language, there really is a distinction out there in the world between mountains and molehills or between mammals and fish. The job of arbitrary signs is to mark real, non-arbitrary distinctions between things -- things whose nature is the way it is whatever language we may speak (or whether there are any language users at all). In Plato’s metaphor, language or concepts “should cut reality at the joints.” This view is sometimes called "essentialism" and sometimes "realism".
(1) On one reading of the bolded remark, it seems to deny these real distinctions out in the world. It seems to say that conceptual differences themselves are arbitrary: before language makes its arbitrary distinctions, reality has no “joints”. The linguistic system, in marking distinctions, does not refer outward to real distinctions in the world (this is what I called ‘world-independence’ and ‘non-referentiality’). Rather our arbitrary marking of differences in some way creates the distinctions the language is supposed to respect. The way language as a whole carves reality (partly) creates the "joints" which an individual utterance or text must carve at. On this reading, structuralism is a form of transcendental idealism.
(2) On another reading, the bolded remark simply says, uncontroversially, that the difference in sounds tells us nothing about the distinction being drawn. For example, the fact that ‘bank’ closely resembles ‘bunk’ doesn’t give us reason to think that banks will resemble bunks.
It strikes me that epigone’s response to me makes sense if one assumes either that she confuses these two senses of the bolded remark, or if one assumes that she has an argument that shows, quite surprisingly, that the one follows from the other. I find some support for this reading in the paragraph immediately preceding the one I quoted from the Loom thread:
“I take Derrida to mean (and I take this to be a fundamental principle of deconstruction) that our world must be conceived of as a text and that we must be cognizant of the fact that our giving names to things (through a system of recognized distinctions – binary oppositions) inevitably shapes that world or, what for Derrida is the same thing, our understanding of that world. The point is not that texts exist and things do not. Rather, the point is that things cannot be divorced from the way we speak and think of them. [My emphasis again]
And in fact, I can see a reason why a structuralist would be tempted to slide from (2) to (1), if we remember Saussure's point about phonemes. Is there a difference between /a/ when a woman says it and when a man says it? There certainly is a difference in sound, but the phonemes are the same. If I pronounce a ‘t’ in on my teeth or just behind my teeth, is there a difference in phoneme? Whether there is a difference between the phonemes depends entirely on whether the language itself contrasts these sounds (or "marks the difference").
If one generalizes the above point about phonemes to ALL distinctions – between mammals and fish as well as /l/ and /r/, then the language as a whole makes the difference between mammals and fish in the continuum of experience simply by marking that distinction and not another.
But what is plausible with regard to the sounds we ourselves make in language is extremely implausible when we face a real distinction out in the world. From a commonsense or scientific point of view, the claim that we make the world by conceiving it smacks of magical thought.
Sure, our own linguistic behavior is influenced by the distinctions we draw between different phonemes. But how do we infer from this fact that the distinctions we draw somehow influence the world beyond us?
The analogy with phonemes certainly won't be enough to persuade a realist to abandon his view.
[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 02, 2004).]
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