CWJ Harris (DD)

Structuralism and Early Wittgenstein on Meaning

By CWJ HARRIS

This essay will concern the linguistic work and implications of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and Wittgenstein (1889-1951) around the time of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (Logische-Philosophische Abhandlung trs. 1922). Saussure would later be held up as the Father of Structuralism: a loose set of beliefs dominating French philosophy and critical studies from the 1960s onwards, primarily through high-profile post-Structuralists such as Derrida and Foucault. They were associated with what is often disparagingly termed Continental Philosophy. Conversely, Wittgenstein, especially in his early work under the tutelage of Russell, demonstrated a vehement adherence to Logical Positivism 1 and what is termed Analytic Philosophy. In actuality, though the many might not like to admit it, there is a more than passing affinity between the core ideas of Structuralism and the Cambridge school which has dictated 20 th century philosophy in this country. In certain cases the French have been even more thorough in their pursuits. In particular, these two thinkers worked independently and in markedly different circumstances, to create works with a strong correlation in method and conclusions. Furthermore, I would claim that Wittgensteins underrated Tractatus can lead, when read correctly, to a new and enlightening interpretation of Saussures linguistic concept of meaning. At first, the work of Wittgensteins later period, from 1929 culminating in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), would seem more amenable to comparison with Structuralist ideas. It proposed a more fluid linguistic structure, putting the onus of language on its usage rather than in direct correspondence to objects. Previously, he had been called a Logical Atomist 2, as with Russell and the Vienna Circle3, espousing an epistemologically Realist 4notion of language where words and sense-data corresponded to particulars in reality. Atomic propositions corresponded to atomic facts. As Russell stated: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted. 5 By the time Wittgenstein was writing the Tractatus he had already rejected this verficationist6 outlook. The reason a Logical Atomistic
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Positive existential claims (e.g. there is at least one human being) and negative universals (e.g. not all ravens are black) allow for clear methods of verification i.e. find a human or a non-black raven, negative existential claims and positive universal claims do not. 2 The term was introduced by Russell in his 1911 lecture to the French Philosophical Society, Le Ralisme Analytique (1911). However, he advertised The Philosophy of Logical Atomism as being very largely concerned with explaining certain ideas which [he had] learnt from [his] friend and former pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein 3 c. 1922, including Moritz Schlick, chairman of the Ernst Mach Society, Gustav Bergmann, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gdel, Hans Hahn, Victor Kraft, Karl Menger, Marcel Natkin, Otto Neurath, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Theodor Radakovic, Friedrich Waismann 4 In modern philosophy it is the opposite of idealism. Nave realists regard objects as being exactly that which is perceived i.e. having an existence independent of being perceive. Critical realists have attempted to defend anomalies such as hallucinations and other perceptual errors. These ideas are in contrast to those of Hume and Kant (and also modern linguistics). Platonic Realism in medieval philosophy regarded Platos forms or universals (called essences by Avicenna) as real. Opposed to nominalism. A middle ground was found in moderate realism and conceptualism (Abelard). 5 Russell, B. (1912, Oxford) The Problems of Philosophy, chptr 5 6 Delineated into strong and weak verificationism by AJ Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic. With strong being "A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience." (Ayer 1946:50) (It is this sense of verifiable that causes the problem of verification with negative existential claims and positive universal claims). Weak is characterised as a proposition that is "verifiable... if it is possible for experience to render it probable." (ibid) After establishing this distinction, Ayer goes on to claim that "no proposition, other than a tautology, can

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interpretation of the text has perhaps gained weight must be due to their contemporary preponderance, concerted championing of Wittgenstein and the very ambiguity of the text itself. His later work rejected verificationism in a more outright way; language became derived from its particular use within societal units called language games. The meanings of words not discovered through correspondence to an object but through family resemblances to other words worked out within the game. For example, the word game itself could refer to any number of things. In order to understand which of these it is, the context must be understood and the family from it originates; be it an amusement, object of ridicule, a diversion or set of rules. Moreover, he rejected any notion of internalism in linguistics. Private languages were a nonsense to him, as were solipsisms; for concepts signifieds in semiological terms exist only in usage. Thus he turned Cartesianism on its head: I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say I know what you are thinking, and wrong to say I know what I am thinking. (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.)7 The drop of grammar was the usurpation of the ego in the infamous cogito ergo sum dictum. Under linguistic scrutiny, the fact of ones thinking became unsatisfactory, giving no actual clue as to ones existence because it is predicated upon social interaction. Saussure reached a similar conclusion through a detailed phonetic study of language. He moved away from historical interpretations of language, famously stating: in language there are only differences without positive terms8. This new method was influential because it was synchronic rather than diachronic. It understood language in terms of changing relations dependant open one another. The word dog in one language did not evolve phonetically to imitate the sound of a dog but in negative relation to other words thus accounting for the fact of widely differing pronunciations. Differences in the structure of language are what create meaning. Even if one makes a diachronic study of the shifting relations in language, for instance in the meanings of word like gaywhich has only dramatically changed in the last century- one is still actually making a synchronic study because it is the relations of words studied at particular time-points: so there is no such thing as historical grammar. Furthermore, the linguist can neither describe it nor draw up standards of usage except by concentrating on one state 9 This was an important shift from the linear historical and dialectic approach propagated by Hegel and his ilk, which in a linguistic context treated each word individually. This gave creed to an organicist picture of reality. Rather than the piecemeal essentialist, perhaps atomistic view, Saussure could not pick out one object singularly without indicting the whole. This is the tenet which would give Structuralism its name. The 20 th Century, with its shifting poles of class, race and even geography, seems to have been a truly holistic one.
possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis" (Ayer 1946:51) and therefore can only be subject to weak verification However, many still maintained that gerneral propositions were nonsense. The work of W.V. Quine and Thomas Kuhn convinced many it is not possible to provide a strict criterion for good or bad scientific method outside of the science we already have. Hence, the Logical Positivist and Coherentist Otto Neurath stated Science is a boat which we must rebuild on the open sea 7 Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, II, xi, 222 8 Saussure, F. de (1916) Cours de linguistique gnrale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger, Lausanne and Paris: Payot; trans. W. Baskin, Course in General Linguistics, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977. 9 Ibid.

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Another important linguistic distinction which Saussure drew is one which has been constant from the Milesian beginnings of philosophy; between la langue and la parole. La langue is the structure of reality into which all people are born into, hence it is timeless (synchronic) and unchangeable. On the other hand, la parole, which includes production of speech sounds, written texts or speech acts 10 are individual and intentional11 actions. Unlike la langue they can be subverted, however their intelligibility depends on a particular subversion of the unintentional language structure. Intriguingly, what is natural to man is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language. This is where Saussure seems to be differ from late Wittgenstein and where one can see the influence of his ideas in Poststructuralism (or Postmodernism), particularly Derrida. It was he who developed in De le Grammatologie (1967) a theory of logocentrism which proposed that the whole Western literary tradition, from Plato through to Keats and Nietzsche, had valued speech over the written word. This led to the abundance of arbitrary binary oppositions, the chance valuing of presence over absence, truth over deception, reality over dreams. These oppositions can create a dangerous worldview, such as the male hegemony of the 19th Century which placed women at the other end of the gender opposition. Instead, Derrida put forward a Logic of Supplementarity12. I would not accuse Wittgenstein of purposely supporting false binary oppositions, however, he does seem to take an overly external view of language in his latter period. Language seems so multivocal and situation-dependent that one questions, in a multiethnic era and amidst an almost limitless sea of supposed language games, how any solid meaning can ever be derived or conveyed. If it is such a fluid structure why does it not slip totally out of comprehension? Saussure had a solid conception of the linguistic structure. Speaking of la langue he wrote; from the very outset we must put both feet on the ground of language (la langue) and use language as the norm of all other manifestations of speech 13. This view leads to a certain conundrum; one is left to question how la langue changes as it seems to if one is born into such a permanent structure. In order to even conceive one requires la langue, thus one understands Saussures comment. If oral speech preceded it, which the latter Wittgenstein seems to suggest, then it would be a fluid structure; but it would also be a structure without any conceptual basis, like the notorious house built on sand. One can comprehend how the rules and conventions of language are absorbed; but one questions how they could
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HOLDCROFT, DAVID (1998). Saussure, Ferdinand de. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved July 31, 2006, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/U049SECT1 11 Intentionality was originally a concept from scholastic philosophy, and reintroduced in contemporary philosophy by the philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano in his work Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte. While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of "psychical phenomena" (psychische Phnomene), by which they could be distinguished from "physical phenomena" (physische Phnomene). Every psychical or mental phenomenon, every psychological act has a content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that it is about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish psychical phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether. Through the works of Husserl, who took it over from Brentano, the concept of intentionality received more widespread attention in current philosophy, both continental and analytic. 12 Nothing is fully presence or fully absence; everything is composed of interlinked parts. The debt to Saussure is evident. 13 Saussure, F. de (1916) [Original Emphases]

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possibly develop without use of those conventions, especially if they are integral to understanding the world; as Saussure stated: nothing is distinct before the appearance of language 14. The entering of la langue is the point where one comes to truly exist; before that one is indistinguishable from a chair or puppy in understanding the world on anything more than a primeval level. The structure must come before thought. Other philosophers have labelled this the Saussurean Box: a linguistic trap that seems incompatible with the existence of what Kuhn labelled paradigm shifts15. True shifts in knowledge, such as the Copernican revolution which wholly reject accepted convention would require thinking outside of accepted thought, but extra-linguistic thinking is evidentially impossible. Hence, a box doesnt seem an apt metaphor; it suggests the possibly of something external to it; I would suggest the label of Saussurean reality. Wittgenstein made the last point in the foreword to his Tractatus: The limit canonly be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of this limit will simply be nonsense or even more starkly; what can be said, can be said clearly, whereof we can say nothing thereof we must pass over in silence16. The use of signs makes this clear. The sign is composed of the signified, which is a concept such as rose or red, and the signifier, which is the sound used to indicate the concept. It has been established by the sheer multiplicity of pronunciations of the similar signifieds, such as the domestic cat, that the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary: the example used by Saussure was of the signified ox [which] has its signifier b--f [boeuf] on one side of the border and o-k-s (Ochs) on the other17. It seems clear then that there are no extra-linguistic states which have a bearing on the relationships comprising signs and their development. A complete arbitrariness of sign is a dangerous idea though. It is also illogical. If signs were totally arbitrary, one would find it difficult to clearly distinguish the correct signifiers and the relationships between them. There must be some semblance by which to order signs and, as they are the lens through which reality is viewed and meaning attributed, develop in relation to one another. Yet again Saussure realises this, saying: the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign would lead to the worst sort of complication if applied without restriction 18. Instead, signifier and signified move together systematically- not randomly- within the structure. This is especially evident in systems such as geometry and mathematics where the systematic relation of signs enables one to say that 40 is larger than 3. If there were a totally arbitrary set of relations, language would slip out of practical usage and addition would be impossible. Here there is another correlation to the Tractatus in the case of picture theory. Wittgenstein says that we picture facts to ourselves: it is the way in which we understand the manifest world. A picture is in many ways comparable with a sign;
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ibid. Kuhn, T. S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 16 Wittgenstein, L (trns. 1923, Routledge) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 17 Saussure, F. de (1916) 18 ibid.

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2.12. A picture is a model of reality 2.13. In a picture objects have the elements of the picture corresponding to them. 2.131. In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects. 2.14. What constitutes a picture is that its elements are related to one another in a determinate way. This is a passage which could easily be misinterpreted. A realist such as Russell may choose to accentuate the aspects of picture theory whereby it corresponds to reality and read the logical correlation of atomic propositions to atomic facts into it. This is exactly the type of hypostasization19 that Russell attempts in his Problems of Philosophy when he attempts to reify20 relatives into existence; a similar category mistake is made by Anselm in his Ontological Argument. In truth, Wittgensteins it is more of a projectivist theory. The importance lies not in whether there is any correspondence to an objective or subjective reality but that the elements of the picture are related to one another in a determinate way. The logic of the picture itself is what determines the projected reality and all meaning. Anyway, to attempt analysis of anything beyond propositions would be to abnegate his seventh proposition whereof we cannot speak thereof we must pass over in silence. Wittgenstein, like Saussure, believed that the problems of philosophy, such as disputes about the world arise from misunderstanding in linguistics: saying philosophy is a critique of language. The only facts which Verificationists such as Russell and the Vienna Circle supposed to be incorrigibly true of the world were tautologies like all bachelors are men yet even those were notably dismissed as literally nonsense because they must necessarily be always true and thus can tell us nothing of the world. Instead, we must picture it: 2.18. What any picture of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it correctly or incorrectly in any way at all, is logical form, i.e., the form of reality. 2.181. A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture. 2.182. Every picture is at the same time a logical one. (on the other hand, not every picture is, for example, a spatial one.) 3. A logical picture of facts is a thought. 3.1. In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses.21 This makes a comparison to Saussure even more evident. In 3.1. the sense-data he refers to could also be labelled the signifier, whilst the signified is the pictorial fact. Wittgenstein goes on to develop this relationship in a more methodical and logical manner. One must clarify the meaning of the word fact as well. He definitely does not intend it in the Russellian sense of atomic facts; if anything, it is a direct refutation of that. He refuses to use the word object and thereby enter into the unknowable; specifically he says: 1.1. The world is the totality of facts,
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Hypostasization is a particular type of reification that occurs when from presupposing that what can be named or conceived must actually exist. Plato, Hegel and Heidegger have all been accused of this ontological category mistake, I would add Anselm to the list who attempts to define into existence an intrinsically apophatic god (at his own admittance). 20 To reify is to treat as a thing. Lukacs and other Marxists [in their political thought] regard reification as the attempt to turn human beings into marketable commodities. 21 Wittgenstein, L (1923)

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not of things22. He can avoid venturing into reality through this notion. Facts become only what correspond to true propositions. Words, as has been established by Saussure, are signifieds which are completely meaningless by themselves and their correspondence to an object cannot be established outside of the context of the proposition: words refer to objects but they mean something only insofar as they are part of a proposition23. This seems to be a crucial clarification of Saussures doubts on the extent of the arbitrariness of signs, which he left unresolved upon his death in 1913. The relation of signs within the proposition itself might be the key aspect which Saussure failed to consider. However, the very fact he died so inopportunely means there are large gaps in his work, fruitful for development and comparison. The Cours de linguistique gnrale were merely his lectures compiled and published posthumously by diligent students. Another aspect to the Tractatus even more important is the determinate relation of pictorial elements (words) in a logical way. It was so important that Wittgenstein repeated himself in 3.14., adding: 3.141. A proposition is not a blend of words. (just as a theme in music is not a blend of notes): to accentuate the logic quotient. He also developed a major example of a courtroom model used to represent an accident 24. What interested him was that the spatial relations between the model figures represent the spatial relations between the cars, people, etc. in the real world. Each rearrangement of the elements gives a different picture of how things stood at the time of the accident. 25 This is a limited example because it applies only to spatial relations. For example, if the rests in a piece of music were used to represent objects then it would be represented in temporal relation. The significant thing is that it is a logical proposition, which is also any thought (3.1. A logical picture of facts is a thought), and must correspond to a possible state of affairs. If it does not provide an adequate representation- even if the thing does not actually exist, such as a representation of a dragon- it will be nonsense. This is Saussure solidified. The proposition, or sign, must only have a sense, be logical and have words in logical determinate relation to one another; then it can either be validated or falsified 26 by the state of affairs. But that, of course, is not the actual reality, merely the totality of facts (1.1.). To not picture reality one would not simply picture a fact, for example Only facts can express a sense, a set of names cannot (3.142). Reality is still a malleable essence, logically organised by the mind in the structure of language. Meaning is totally fluid; anything which is logical is intelligible even if it describes some utter absurdity, such as a hippopotamus playing poker with Jean Cocteau, it can still have meaning. Meaning only disappears one when ventures from logical sense, such as dog rack hat cicada latte.
22 23 24

Ibid. Monk, R (2005, Granta) How to read Wittgenstein He apparently read about a court case in Paris concerning a car accident during the First World War, around which time (c.1916) he was writing his first draft of the Tractatus. 25 Ibid. 26 Falsificationism was developed primarily by Popper. Things might not be falsifiable and hence not scientific (e.g. metaphysical statements, psychoanalysis) but that does not mean they are not meaningful or necessarily wrong. Furthermore, psychoanalysis (for example) could conceivably evolve into something falsifiable and therefore scientific. His answer to the question positivists were asking fails in exactly the same ways; Negative existential claims (There are no unicorns) and positive universals (All ravens are black) can be falsified, but positive existential and negative universal claims cannot

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Ultimately, Saussure and Wittgenstein offered a similar diagnosis of the linguistic state of affairs. They both recognised the arbitrariness of signs or pictures and attempted to show that the signifier and signified, or elements of the picture, must develop systematically and logically together in order to make a proposition which has meaning. Most importantly, they recognised the limits of language. One cannot escape the bounds of la langue, or whatever one calls it; one is born into the logical synchronic system, and to contravene it would lead to babbling nonsense. This is the most startling development they both reached. Throughout the 20th Century, on either side of the channel, two schools have been attempting, if not to solve these problems, then delve deeper into their intricacies. On one side great thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida and Foucault have done further studies; whilst elsewhere other such estimable figures as Ayer, Davidson and Austin have partaken in the very same investigations. Now it is clear that linguistics has replaced metaphysics as the direction to which we must turn in order ask questions concerning the substance of reality and other such weighty ontological issues27, in line with the so-called linguistic turn; it is strange there is not more of an international pooling of resources in universities. I believe the example of Wittgenstein and Saussure intriguingly shows how two disparate philosophers can shine a light on one another, even if the conclusion is irresolute darkness: whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence.

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Or perhaps, the need to ask them is entirely obliterated by the field of linguistics. I would say not.