(See http://www.iep.utm.edu/w/wittgens.htm#H5)
Sect. 43 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations says that: "For a large class of cases--though not for all--in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."
It is quite clear that here Wittgenstein is not offering the general theory that "meaning is use," as he is sometimes interpreted as doing. The main rival views that Wittgenstein warns against are that the meaning of a word is some object that it names--in which case the meaning of a word could be destroyed, stolen or locked away, which is nonsense--and that the meaning of a word is some psychological feeling--in which case each user of a word could mean something different by it, having a different feeling, and communication would be difficult if not impossible.
Knowing the meaning of a word can involve knowing many things: to what objects the word refers (if any), whether it is slang or not, what part of speech it is, whether it carries overtones, and if so what kind they are, and so on. To know all this, or to know enough to get by, is to know the use. And generally knowing the use means knowing the meaning. Philosophical questions about consciousness, for example, then, should be responded to by looking at the various uses we make of the word "consciousness." Scientific investigations into the brain are not directly relevant to this inquiry (although they might be indirectly relevant if scientific discoveries led us to change our use of such words). The meaning of any word is a matter of what we do with our language, not something hidden inside anyone's mind or brain. This is not an attack on neuroscience. It is merely distinguishing philosophy (which is properly concerned with linguistic or conceptual analysis) from science (which is concerned with discovering facts).
One exception to the meaning-is-use rule of thumb is given in Philosophical Investigations Sect.561, where Wittgenstein says that "the word "is" is used with two different meanings (as the copula and as the sign of equality)" but that its meaning is not its use. That is to say, "is" has not one complex use (including both "Water is clear" and "Water is H2O") and therefore one complex meaning, but two quite distinct uses and meanings. It is an accident that the same word has these two uses. It is not an accident that we use the word "car" to refer to both Fords and Hondas. But what is accidental and what is essential to a concept depends on us, on how we use it.
This is not completely arbitrary, however. Depending on one's environment, one's physical needs and desires, one's emotions, one's sensory capacities, and so on, different concepts will be more natural or useful to one. This is why "forms of life" are so important to Wittgenstein. What matters to you depends on how you live (and vice versa), and this shapes your experience. So if a lion could speak, Wittgenstein says, we would not be able to understand it. We might realize that "roar" meant zebra, or that "roar, roar" meant lame zebra, but we would not understand lion ethics, politics, aesthetic taste, religion, humor and such like, if lions have these things. We could not honestly say "I know what you mean" to a lion. Understanding another involves empathy, which requires the kind of similarity that we just do not have with lions, and that many people do not have with other human beings.
When a person says something what he or she means depends not only on what is said but also on the context in which it is said. Importance, point, meaning are given by the surroundings. Words, gestures, expressions come alive, as it were, only within a language game, a culture, a form of life. If a picture, say, means something then it means so to somebody. Its meaning is not an objective property of the picture in the way that its size and shape are. The same goes of any mental picture. Hence Wittgenstein's remark that "If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of." Any internal image would need interpretation. If I interpret my thought as one of Hitler and God sees it as Charlie Chaplin, who is right? Which of the two famous contemporaries of Wittgenstein's I mean shows itself in the way I behave, the things I do and say. It is in this that the use, the meaning, of my thought or mental picture lies. "The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it."
Saussure's Sign (http://www.criticism.com/md/the_sign.html)
By Steve Hoenisch
Last updated on November 18, 2005
Copyright 1996-2005 www.Criticism.Com
Table of Contents
1 THE SIGN, THE SIGNIFIER, AND THE SIGNIFIED
2 LEXICON
3 SIGN VS. SYMBOL
4 MISTAKES
5 EXPANSION BEYOND LANGUAGE
6 A FINAL WORD: THE INDETERMINANCY OF MEANING
7 REFERENCES
8 RELATED
1 THE SIGN, THE SIGNIFIER, AND THE SIGNIFIED
The sign, the signifier, and the signified are concepts of the school of thought known as structuralism, founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, during lectures he gave between 1907 and 1911 at the University of Geneva. His views revolutionized the study of language and inaugurated modern linguistics. The theory also profoundly influenced other disciplines, especially anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism.
The central tenet of structuralism is that the phenomena of human life, whether language or media, are not intelligible except through their network of relationships, making the sign and the system (or structure) in which the sign is embedded primary concepts. As such, a sign -- for instance, a word -- gets its meaning only in relation to or in contrast with other signs in a system of signs.
In general, the signifier and the signified are the components of the sign, itself formed by the associative link between the signifier and signified. Even with these two components, however, signs can exist only in opposition to other signs. That is, signs are created by their value relationships with other signs. The contrasts that form between signs of the same nature in a network of relationships is how signs derive their meaning. As the translator of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Roy Harris, puts it:
"The essential feature of Saussure's linguistic sign is that, being intrinsically arbitrary, it can be identified only by contrast with coexisting signs of the same nature, which together constitute a structured system" (p. x).
In Saussure's theory of linguistics, the signifier is the sound and the signified is the thought. The linguistic sign is neither conceptual nor phonic, neither thought nor sound. Rather, it is the whole of the link that unites sound and idea, signifier and signified. The properties of the sign are by nature abstract, not concrete. Saussure: "A sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern" (Course, p. 66).
2 LEXICON
At least two other terms are used for signifier and signified:
signifier = signal = signifiant
signified = signification = signified
3 SIGN VS. SYMBOL
Saussure choose the term "sign" over "symbol" because the latter implies motivation. For Saussure, the sign is arbitrary. Virtually all signs, Saussure maintains, have only arbitrarily ascribed meanings. Since Saussure, this notion has been taken as axiomatic in Western linguistics and philosophy.
4 MISTAKES
A common mistake is to construe the signifier and the sign as the same thing. In my view, another common mistake, perhaps related to the first, is to speak of a signifier without a signified or a sign, or to speak of a signified without a signifer or a sign. Used in reference to Saussure's original formulations, both locutions are nonsensical. In language, a lone signifier would be an utterly meaningless sound or concatenation of sounds. But it is even more absurd to speak of a signified without signifier or sign: It would, I believe, have to be a sort of half thought, something never thought before, a thought that exists solely outside the domain of language, a fleeting, private, chaotic thought that makes no sense even to the thinker -- an unthought. Another mistake is to endow a sign with meaning outside the presence of other signs. Except as part of the whole system, signs do not and cannot exist.
5 EXPANSION BEYOND LANGUAGE
Saussure provides an explicit basis for the expansion of his science of signs beyond linguistics: "It is possible," he says, "to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. ... We shall call it semiology. It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance."
Roland Barthes is one scholar who took Saussure's counsel to heart. He helped found the modern science of semiology, applying structuralism to the "myths" he saw all around him: media, fashion, art, photography, architecture, and especially literature. For Barthes, "myth is a system of communication." It is a "message," a "mode of signification," a "form" (Mythologies, p. 109). With a plethora of complexities and nuances, Barthes extends Saussure's structuralism and applies it to myth as follows:
"Myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth" (Mythologies, p. 114).
Because of the complexities and nuances of Barthes's semiology, I will stop here and let you pick up the strand for yourself by reading the highly informative chapter "Myth Today" in Mythologies.
6 A FINAL WORD: THE INDETERMINANCY OF MEANING
Regardless of how linguistic signs (and perhaps other signs, too) are analyzed, meaning may in fact be unrecoverable, both to the analyst and to the participants in an exchange of signs. It is my belief that meaning is indeed ultimately indeterminate, a position that bodes well with what very well be a fact of language. With respect to indeterminacy, some linguists, postmodern theorists, and analytic philosophers seem to be in agreement. Brown and Yule, both of whom are linguists, write that "the perception and interpretation of each text is essentially subjective."
The postmodern theorists, meantime, hold that every decoding is another encoding. Jacques Derrida, for example, maintains that the possibility of interpretation and reinterpretation is endless, with meaning getting any provisional significance only from speaker, hearer, or observer: Meaning is necessarily projection. Bakhtin, too, says "the interpretation of symbolic structures is forced into an infinity of symbolic contextual meanings and therefore it cannot be scientific in the way precise sciences are scientific." Both Bakhtin's and Derrida's views are surprisingly not unlike those of W. V. O. Quine's in "The Indeterminacy of Translation," where Quine argued that "the totality of subjects' behavior leaves it indeterminate whether one translation of their sayings or another is correct."
Wittgenstein pays homage to the indeterminacy of meaning as well: "Any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine
(http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/peir.htm)
In his extensive logical studies, Peirce developed a theory of signification that anticipated many features of modern semiotics [Theory of signs, comprising both semantics and syntactics, especially in the philosophy of language of Peirce and Saussure], emphasizing the role of the interpreting subject. To the traditional logic of deduction and induction, Peirce added explicit acknowledgement of abduction as a preliminary stage in productive human inquiry. Continuing to defend a Kantian system of categories, Peirce proposed a descriptive metaphysics that presumed the reality of external referents for our sensations.
(Introduction: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html)
(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#3)
Traditionally, hermeneutics is taken to have its origins in problems of biblical exegesis and in the development of a theoretical framework to govern and direct such exegetical practice. In the hands of eighteenth and early nineteenth century theorists, writers such as Chladenius and Meier, Ast and Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was developed into a more encompassing theory of textual interpretation in general -- a set of rules that provide the basis for good interpretive practice no matter what the subject matter.
Inasmuch as hermeneutics is the method proper to the recovery of meaning, so Wilhelm Dilthey broadened hermeneutics still further, taking it as the methodology for the recovery of meaning that is essential to understanding within the ‘human’ or ‘historical’ sciences (the Geisteswissenschaften). For these writers, as for many others, the basic problem of hermeneutics was methodological: how to found the human sciences, and so how to found the science of interpretation, in a way that would make them properly ‘scientific’.
Moreover, if the mathematical models and procedures that appeared to be the hallmark of the sciences of nature could not be duplicated in the human sciences, then the task at issue must involve finding an alternative methodology proper to the human sciences as such -- hence Schleiermacher's ambition to develop a formal methodology that would codify interpretive practice, while Dilthey aimed at the elaboration of a ‘psychology’ that would elucidate and guide interpretive understanding.
Already familiar with earlier hermeneutic thinking, Heidegger redeployed hermeneutics to a very different purpose and within a very different frame. In Heidegger's early thinking, particularly the lectures from the early 1920s ('The Hermeneutics of Facticity’), hermeneutics is presented as that by means of which the investigation of the basic structures of factical existence is to be pursued -- not as that which constitutes a ‘theory’ of textual interpretation nor a method of ‘scientific’ understanding, but rather as that which allows the self-disclosure of the structure of understanding as such.
The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic thinking, and that had been viewed in terms of the interpretative interdependence, within any meaningful structure, between the parts of that structure and the whole, was transformed by Heidegger, so that it was now seen as expressing the way in which all understanding was ‘always already’ given over to that which is to be understood (to ‘the things themselves' -- 'die Sachen selbst’).
Thus, to take a simple example, if we wish to understand some particular artwork, we already need to have some prior understanding of that work (even if only as a set of paintmarks on canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to be understood. To put the point more generally, and in more basic ontological terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must already find ourselves ‘in’ the world ‘along with’ that which is to be understood.
All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in a prior ‘ontological’ understanding -- a prior hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be understood as the attempt to ‘make explicit’ the structure of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the explication of this situatedness -- of this basic ontological mode of understanding -- is essentially a matter of exhibiting or ‘laying-bare’ a structure with which we are already familiar (the structure that is present in every event of understanding), and, in this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger's thinking, as just such a ‘laying bare’.
It is hermeneutics, in this Heideggerian and phenomenological sense, that is taken up in Gadamer's work, and that leads him, in conjunction with certain other insights from Heidegger's later thinking, as well as the ideas of dialogue and practical wisdom, to elaborate a philosophical hermeneutics that provides an account of the nature of understanding in its universality (where this refers both to the ontologically fundamental character of the hermeneutical situation and the all-encompassing nature of hermeneutic practice) and, in the process, to develop a response to the earlier hermeneutic tradition's preoccupation with the problem of interpretive method.
In these respects, Gadamer's work, in conjunction with that of Heidegger, represents a radical reworking of the idea of hermeneutics that constitutes a break with the preceding hermeneutical tradition, and yet also reflects back on that tradition. Gadamer thus develops a philosophical hermeneutics that provides an account of the proper ground for understanding, while nevertheless rejecting the attempt, whether in relation to the Geisteswissenschaften or elsewhere, to found understanding on any method or set of rules. This is not a rejection of the importance of methodological concerns, but rather an insistence on the limited role of method and the priority of understanding as a dialogic, practical, situated activity.
Deconstructing Deconstructionism (http://www.answers.org/issues/derrida.html)
Dr. Tom Snyder
By now, most American scholars have heard of deconstruction, the postmodern literary theory and philosophy popularized by French intellectual Jacques Derrida and others.
This theory is false for several reasons.
One of the major tenets of the postmodern literary theory called deconstruction is that all language systems are conventional. In fact, they are so dependent on social conventions, say the deconstructionists, that they are completely artificial and, therefore, all language systems must be false and/or deceptive.
This idea confuses the word "convention" with the word "artificial" and mixes them up with words like "false" and "deceptive." Why isn't it possible for human beings to objectively observe the universe and create useful conventions based on their accurate observation? More importantly, however, if all language systems are conventional, then so is the statement that all language systems are conventional. To claim that all language systems are conventional is a self-contradictory statement. Therefore, it is a false statement. This means that we can completely reject this particular belief of the Derrida gang.
Another major belief of these social critics is the idea that the relationship between the sounds or letters of a word and their meaning is arbitrary and that the relationship between the meaning of a word and what it refers to is also arbitrary. The Derrida gang derive this idea from Ferdinand de Saussure, a linguistic scholar who wrote in the early 1900s, but they draw false conclusions from it. First, they assume that, because these relationships are arbitrary, the meanings of words have nothing to do with reality. Second, they falsely conclude that a word "is simply a fact about language" and not a fact about the world.
Derrida draws another false conclusion from this theory of Saussure. He believes that the arbitrary quality of sounds, letters, and meanings makes all meaning indeterminate or uncertain. According to the back cover of a collection of essays by Derrida titles Limited Inc, Derrida's "most controversial idea" is "linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate." Derrida's conclusion here is self-contradictory and therefore false because, if linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate, then so is the linguistic meaning of that statement. To say that meaning is indeterminable is like saying, "I cannot utter a word of English." It is silly intellectual nonsense that should be rejected by all thoughtful people.
John M. Ellis in Against Deconstruction explains, "Saussure had argued that meaning is not a matter of sounds being linked to concepts existing outside a given language but instead arises from specific contrasts between terms that are differentiated in specific ways." According to Ellis, Derrida takes Saussure's idea of contrasts and substitutes the word "play." "Play is no longer a matter of specific contrasts," Ellis notes, "it is 'limitless,' 'infinite,' and 'indefinite'; and thus meaning has become limitless, infinite, and indefinite."
If what Ellis says is true, then Derrida has illogically switched categories by substituting these words for Saussure's idea of contrasts. Switching categories in this manner is an informal logical fallacy and makes Derrida's argument logically invalid. "The meaning of one word does indeed depend on the meaning of many others," Ellis argues; "but to choose one word from a system is to employ all of the systematic contrasts with other words at that very moment -- the process of contrasting does not stretch out into the future" as Derrida's concept of play attempts to do. That is why the immediate context of a word in a sentence or paragraph, or the immediate context of a scene in a film or play, usually determines its meaning. This is a general rule of all interpretation that Derrida and his gang ignore. By ignoring this rule, they clearly show the inherent fallacies of their whole theory. Deconstruction is a theory that is beyond being intellectually bankrupt -- it is intellectually meaningless and thus had no intellectual capital to begin with!
Deconstructionism is part of a movement called poststructuralism. Like deconstructionism, this movement has many problems with it. Poststructuralism builds on many ideas developed by structuralism, its precursor.
As Terence Hawkes points out in Structuralism and Semiotics and as John Sturrock notes in Structuralism and Since, many of the most noteworthy structuralists seem to have thought that reality is unknowable and, therefore, we should stop trying to seek some ultimate truth or meaning to all things. Instead, we should "delight in the plurality of meaning."
I am skeptical of this extreme skepticism. If reality is unknowable, then how do we know it is unknowable? If there is no absolute truth, then is that an absolute truth and am I supposed to believe it absolutely? According to Sturrock, the structuralists and poststructuralists don't like authoritarian interpretations, but their fuzzy-minded pluralism is just as authoritarian as any other system of interpretation. To say there is no one way to truth (or no one way to God) is to actually offer one way to truth. Such an absolute pluralism is inherently self-contradictory. Consequently, it is absolutely false.
Either reality is objectively knowable or reality is not objectively knowable. Either absolute truth exists or absolute truth does not exist. Either there is one way to truth or there is no one way to truth. Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God. Since the second statements in each of these four sentences are clearly false, we must conclude, therefore, that reality is indeed objectively knowable, that absolute truth does indeed exist, that there is indeed one way to truth, and that there is indeed one way to God. I don't reject everything that the structuralists and poststructuralists say, but I hold the preceding truths to be not only ontologically absolute but also epistemologically self-evident.
Please contact jmomandia at gmail dot com for any heresies found here.
First Edition. Hong Kong, 11 July 2007