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Hermeneutics: Not Saussure continued

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Freundlieb offers several criticisms of Saussure’s notion that language is purely differential. First, “If the meaning of a term could not be specified positively but only in relation to (all the?) other terms in the lexicon, no one could ever learn the vocabulary of a language, except in one stroke as it were.” Obviously, this is not the case.

He goes on: “Furthermore, there is now a considerable body of em- pirical evidence that human categorization-in spite of the variability of human languages-is governed by specific principles and thus is far from arbitrary. . . . Another problem usually overlooked by structuralists is that, even if Saussure’s theory were better supported by argument and empirical evidence than it is, it would still apply only to lexical meaning and not to sentence or utterance meaning. The potential number of sentences in a language is infinite so that the idea of differential meaning becomes inapplicable at the level of sentences or utterances. ”

Derrida moves from this last point: Differential meaning applies to utterances, but since the are infinite, their meaning is deferred.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, July 19, 2008 at 6:12 pm

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Hermeneutics: Not Saussure continued

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