Chapter 4.4: Structuralism, language and world

[Music] in the previous lecture we looked at the so serious analysis of phonemes and learned about the structuralist idea that things only are what they are because of the greater structure that they are part of in this lecture we will discuss so serious ideas about signs and meaning and about the relation between language and the world the idea is about identity from the previous lecture will turn out to play a very important role language so sphere tells us consists of signs signs always have two sides they consist of a signifier which is something that signifies and a signified which gets signified by the signifier take the word book again if we consider the spoken word then the signifier is a certain sound better book as we know from the previous lecture this sound pattern has to be analyzed in terms of phonemes but what does this sound book signify what is sick the signified of the sound according to secure it is a concept the concept of book it is not a particular book not a material thing in the world it is not even the collection of all the books in the world or the signified is an abstract idea or concept so the science of language according to the secure are combinations of sounds and concepts not of sounds and things alright but why is that interesting it is interesting because the cisu believes that traditional theories of language have put far too much emphasis and indeed a naive emphasis on the relation between sounds and things as an example we can take a famous passage from the confessions of st. Augustine in which he relates how he learned language when he was a small child Augustine writes when they my parents named some object and accordingly moved towards something I saw this and I grasped that the thing was cold by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out their intention was shown by their bodily movements thus as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences I gradually learned to understand what objects they signified and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs I used them to express my own desires Augustine's theory then is this to teach someone a word you show them the object that the word refers to and say the word out loud you show them a bread and you say bread that's it some simple and at first sight it may seem to be a realistic theory of language learning but now let us remember that this so Sewer believes that a word is not defined by a sound and a thing but by a sound and a concept when we keep that in mind we can see that Augustine may have moved far too quickly from the thing the material bread to the concept of bread for how do I know what concept the sound bread is supposed to signify does it stand for all breads or just for this bread in particular or for food in general or for food made of wheat or for things that have been baked or for things that I shouldn't touch because they are yours and so on showing me one example or a few examples can ever teach me what does and does not belong to the concept that is signified by the sound bread at this point we should recall what we said in the previous lecture about phonemes there I pointed out that here in a an example of say the English ooh cannot teach me which sounds do and which do not belong to the ooh phony for that I need to know the boundaries with all the other phonemes in the language now in pretty much the same way seeing an example of a bread cannot possibly teach me what concept is signified by the sound bread the thing itself is not a concept and neither does it unambiguously point to a concept as we just saw a bread can illustrate such diverse concepts as bread food and thing you shouldn't touch because it's mine so Augustin is wrong we can't learn a concept just by looking at things so how do we learn concepts this Sisir solution is perhaps no surprise he believes we learn concepts by learning about the relations between all the concepts in our language you only know what bread means when you know among other things that bread is a kind of food that bread is made by a baker what the difference is between bread and cake between bread and cookies between bread and flour and so on and so forth one only knows a concept in a language when one knows its relations to a lot of other concepts in that language this means that once again according to the structuralist so sewer the identity of something is defined by the place that this thing has in a bigger structure a phoneme is only the phoneme that it is because this surrounded by certain other foldings a concept is only the concept that it is because it has relations with certain other concepts here is a little thought experiment to make this more concrete suppose that all the science parents had only told him the word bread they show him breads they say bread and that's the only sound and the only concept that he knows would he then really know the concept of bread well no he can't talk about bread he can't explain the difference between bread and anything else in fact he would probably use the sound bread for all kinds of things because it's the only sound he knows he would certainly not be able to understand the difference between breads and other kinds of things now the argument that I've just given depends on a very important idea about language it's not ear that structuralist believed in and in fact it's an idea that the vast majority of thinkers of the last century or so believed in the idea namely that thought requires language if you don't have words about things other than breads you can't really think about things other than breads you can only think about things that you have words for or to quote a famous saying of vegan Stein's the limits of my language mean the limits of my world this conception of the relation between language and thought which again is overwhelmingly popular among contemporary thinkers is in direct contradiction with something that augustine seems to presuppose for it seems as if Augustine believes that the small child soon as he sees a bread can already think about breads and now all that he needs is to learn a sound bread that goes with that thought on this conception language is just sounds invented to accompany the thinking we already had before we had language the cisu on the other hand believes that by learning a language you learn concepts and that you need concepts in order to think a direct result of this conception of language and one that will be extremely important in some of our future lectures is that different languages can have different concepts if we were first thinking about trees and breads and then learning sounds to go with those thoughts then all languages would have the same concepts right they would just have different sounds for those concepts tree in English Bohm in Dutch Harbor in French and so on but that is just not true according to the so sewer when human beings created languages they also created concepts and thoughts and there is no reason why all languages would need to have the same concepts on the contrary if concepts are defined by the structure they are part of then two languages could only have the same concepts if they had exactly identical structures but anyone who has ever tried to translate even between closely related languages like Dutch and German knows that languages do not have the same structures that many of their concepts are different and thus if we are structural ist's we must conclude that all of their concepts are different the English tree and the Dutch Bohm will be slightly different because they are part of differently structured ages and sometimes the differences will be far greater making it very complex if not impossible to translate a thought from one language to another we can summarize these ideas as follows according to the structuralist languages have conceptual structures in which concepts have all kinds of relations with each other the meaning of any concept is determined by its place in that structure now this structure is really the structure of the language not the structure of the world so different languages can have very different conceptual structures in turn this means that translation will never be perfect and it will sometimes be very problematic indeed in a later lecture when we talk about post-modernism we will see that this idea that languages have different structures has big implications for what we believe about truth but that is another story you

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Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2017