Abstract
No one, I think, would wish to challenge the obvious truth that language is implicated in the construction of reality. The question that I wish to address in this section, however, is the extent to which reality is intra-linguistic and language is the agent or medium in virtue of which reality is structured or constituted. More particularly, I shall question the radically nominalist assumption, common to many post-Saussurean critics, that the traffic is all one way: that language structures reality but reality does not influence the structure, the system of differences, that is language. And, more specifically still, the claim that such radical nominalism is licensed by the ideas put forward by Saussure.
Criticism has taken the very idea of ‘aboutness’ away from us. It has taught us that language is tautological, if it is not nonsense, and to the extent that it is about anything it is about itself.1
There is no unmediated experience of the world; knowledge is possible only through the categories and the laws of the symbolic order.2
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.3
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Notes
Robert Scholes, The Fictional Criticism of the Future’, TriQuarterly, vol. 34 (Fall 1975).
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980) p. 46.
John B. Carroll (ed.), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956) p. 213.
For a marvellously suggestive and wide-ranging exploration of the implications of the idea that ‘the universe’ is itself an idea, see Paul Valéry’s essay ‘On Poe’s “Eureka”’, available in Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé, trans. Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler, vol. 8 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
See Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘The Intentionality of Sensation: a Grammatical Feature’, in R. J. Butler (ed.), Analytical Philosophy, Second Series (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965).
Geoffrey Leech, Semantics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974) p. 29.
B. Berlin and P. Kay, Basic Color Terms (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) p. 14.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Fontana; Glasgow: Collins, 1974) pp. 111–12.
See, for example, P. Lieberman, ‘On the acoustic basis of the perception of intonation by linguists’, Word, vol. 21 (1965) pp. 40–54.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, selected and trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977) p. 65.
John Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning (London: Duckworth, 1961)
Jacqueline Rose, The Imaginary’, in Colin MacCabe (ed.), The Talking Cure (London: Macmillan, 1981) p. 137.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Mill & Wang, 1975) p. 62.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) p. 108.
Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977) pp. 16–17.
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967) p. 68.
For a lucid account of the arguments and the structuralist and post-structuralist use that has been made of them, Jonathan Culler’s Saussure (London: Fontana, Modern Masters, 1982)
For an excellent discussion of this distinction see John Lyons’s Semantics (Cambridge University Press, 1977) vol. I, section 1.2, pp. 5–10.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) pp. 115–20
L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
See, for example, D. H. Hubel and T. N. Wiesel, Terrier Lecture: Functional Architecture of Macaque Monkey Cortex’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B vol. 198 (1977) pp. 1–59
C. G. Philips, S. Zeki and H. B. Barlow, ‘Localisation of Function in the Cerebral Cortex: Past, Present and Future’, Brain vol. 208 (1984) pp. 328–61.
Quoted in Manfred Bierwisch, ‘Semantics’, in J. Lyons (ed.), New Horizons in Linguistics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970) p. 171.
Roland Barthes, The Elements of Semiology, trans. Colin Smith and Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) p. 57.
Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana, Modern Masters, 1970) p. 32.
Robert Scholes, ‘The Fictional Criticism of the Future’, TriQuarterly, vol. 34 (Fall 1975).
Gottlob Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 2nd edn, and trans. P. Geach and M. Black (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
I owe this way of putting it to Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973).
Quoted in Norman Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959).
Quoted by Jonathan Culler in Barthes (London: Fontana, Modern Masters; Glasgow: Collins, 1983).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) p. 50.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York, Hill & Wang, 1974) p. 40.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972) p. 113.
Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami Linguistics series No. 8 (Coral Gable, Flor.: University of Miami Press, 1971).
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© 1995 Raymond Tallis
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Tallis, R. (1995). The Illusion of Reference. In: Not Saussure. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23963-4_4
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