Structuralism And Post-Structuralism

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Structuralism and Poststructuralism Background Summary and Analysis The Kantian Background 1. What defines the nature and structure of human experience? a. Space and Time (the a priori forms of Intuition). b. Categories (the a priori concepts of the Understanding). 2. For Kant, these forms and concepts are fixed and universal, i.e. ahistorical. 3. Problems: Kant’s categories seem arbitrary and their universality is merely assumed by Kant, not proven. 4. In a post-Darwinian world, it seems more likely that such concepts and categories of human experience are historical, i.e. subject to change—contingent. 5. In response to this shift in emphasis, philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and others suggest that we look and see what the status and role of such categories might be independent of our theoretical presuppositions. 6. Social scientists, who approach this issue empirically—through observation, the construction of models, and hypothesis testing—suggest that there may be significant variations in conceptual frameworks culturally and historically. But the evidence is not entirely conclusive. So, from an empirical standpoint, the issue remains open. Summary of Saussure’s Structural Linguistics The French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure studied language from a formal and theoretical point of view, i.e. as a system of signs which could be described synchronically (as a static set of relationships independent of any changes that take place over time) rather than diachronically (as a dynamic system which changes over time). According to Saussure, the basic unit of language is a sign. A sign is composed of signifier (a sound-image, or its graphic equivalent) and a signified (the concept or meaning). So, for example, a word composed of the letters p-e-a-r functions as a signifier by producing in the mind of English-speakers the concept (signified) of a
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