Questions tagged [saussure]
6 questions
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Have I got Saussure's distinction between the form and substance right?
I've read several texts on the topic but I'm still not sure whether I got the concept right. Saussure says that language is a form, not substance. I understand that as saying that language is closer to a mathematical system (a natural law) than to a…
Probably
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What exactly is duality?
As a novice in philosophy, I haven't read all the material available on the subject of duality but I find it fascinating for both its profound simplicity and for being responsible for my brain telling me THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE whenever I attempt to…
Agent Smith
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Is there anything on early to mid Foucault and structuralism?
Is there anything on early to mid Foucault and structuralism? I've just started The Archeology of Knowledge, meant to be I think the bookend of his early writings, and he is going to some lengths to make sure the reader believes he's not basing his…
confused
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Negative meaning in Structuralism
I have a hard time understanding the concept of "negative meaning" in linguistic Structuralism (Saussure). Their proposition is that signs don't have meaning by themselfes but only within the structure they reside in. The difference between the…
Philipp Murry
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Can we have a theory of the colour blue in a Popperian sense?
Saussure in his theory of signs declared that there was no necessary connection between the semantic value of a word and its phonetic sign: the sign 'dog' signifies the physical dog, but in principle (if not possible in practise) we can have the…
Mozibur Ullah
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Saussure and idealism
If terms are arbitrary designations like Saussure says then does semantic idealism [language does not refer beyond itself] not collapse into scepticism?
user6917