Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy: A Confluence of Ideas (Ontological Explorations) by Mingers John
Author:Mingers, John [Mingers, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317684619
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-04-24T04:00:00+00:00
7.4.2 Concepts as difference and distinction
It is interesting to bring in here the other authors mentioned above.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1960, originally 1916) revolutionized the subject of linguistics and provided the foundations for structuralism as later developed by people such as Levi-Strauss (1963) and Chomsky (1957). Prior to Saussure, language was seen as primarily representational. That is, words were intrinsically associated with the objects they represented, be they actual objects or notional objects such as concepts and ideas. Moreover, there was a historical dimension in that if one traced back the roots of current languages and words one would expect to be able to see closer and closer links between the word and its object.
Against this, Saussure argued that in fact words bore very little relation to objects that they might stand for. Rather, a particular language is a complex system of differences and distinctions between terms – each language effectively cuts the world up in its own way. Particular terms or words then gain their meaning not directly from an object but only in terms of the system as a whole: only, in other words, through their similarities to and differences from other terms in the language. ‘In language [langue ] there are only differences. Even more important: a difference usually implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.’ (Saussure 1960, orig. 1916, p. 120.) Saussure also brought in the important semiotic distinction between signifier and signified , already developed in a different way by Peirce (1931–1958). The word itself is a sign, a signifier, which goes with an associated idea, a signified, but which does not relate strongly to a real-world object. Moreover, in opposition to the historical approach to language, a signifier has no intrinsic relation to its signified – it is arbitrary in that it could be anything, although clearly once the association has been instantiated there is a de facto relationship. These ideas were taken further by Jakobson and Halle (1956) in terms of two dimensions of meaning – the syn-tagmatic (metonymy) and the paradigmatic (metaphor) (see Wilden 1977, Chapter 2). In the syntagmatic dimension, a term gains meaning through its combination with other terms in time or space. In the paradigmatic dimension, it gains meaning by its selection from other possibilities within a code or set of rules. For example, in the sentence ‘fetch me the hammer’, the word ‘hammer’ is combined with (syntagmatic) ‘fetch me the …’ (it could have been ‘where is the hammer?’), and selected from other possibilities (paradigmatic) such as ‘screwdriver’ or ‘cup of tea’.
Gregory Bateson is not primarily a linguist but a cybernetician, although his work has been influential in many areas. In a seminal essay – ‘Form, Substance and Difference’ (Bateson 1973a) – he considers Korzybski’s famous statement that ‘the map is not the territory’, in many ways the basic problem of epistemology.
A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness….
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