Philosophy is invigorating; it challenges the intellect and colors the worldview. There are times, however, when philosophers and their fancy word tricks are simply nonsense.
One such example is the writings of French philosopher and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, or as some have dubbed him, "Daddy Deconstruction."
Derrida claims that language is a self-contained system in which a relationship between the "signifier" (the audible sounds made when speaking a word) and the "signified" (the object representing this word) is both arbitrary and merely culturally defined.
Harvard Cognitive Psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book "The Blank Slate," explains that the original philosophical observation was "that many words are defined in part by their relation to other words."
For example, Pinker explains, when a word is looked up in the dictionary, it is defined by other words, and so forth until one comes full circle to the original word. From there, deconstructionists claim "language is a self-contained system in which words have no necessary connection to reality."
According to Pinker, even most linguists believe that "deconstructionists have gone off the deep end."
And, well, they have.
Can words have intrinsic meaning?
Before we can attest to the validity of words, I must first deal with the postmodern statement, "There is no truth; all truth is relative."
What postmodernism does when it asserts that there is no such thing as truth, is make a truth statement negating truth. In other words, "The absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth" is a more complete postmodern statement. This notion not only sounds silly, but is logically inconsistent. How can philosophers say language bears no meaning and yet use language to do so, expecting that I understand their argument (which is, again, constructed via words)?
Here's a more tangible example: Chris and I are a couple and we enjoy cooking meals together.
Chris strictly adheres to the recipes - every teaspoon of salt is exact; the timer is set to cook even pasta precisely. I, however, am a bit more haphazard. I would go as far as to say that I despise structure (this is a fact in nearly all areas of my life).
I may study the recipe beforehand, but I rarely set timers and measure very little. In fact, my measurement as to whether something is done in the oven is gauged by sight and aromatics rather than time.
On a particular day, I spontaneously decided that making a béchamel sauce was necessary for our meal. I know there is flour, milk and butter involved but that is about it.
This of course, in my mind, is OK, because recipes are not "my thing," anyhow.
Chris, heeding my vocalized desire for béchamel sauce, quickly strides toward the computer to find a recipe.
"Chris, why do we need that?" I snap. "You always need your recipes and timers…and measurements!" Grumbling, I say, "We shouldn't use recipes anyhow. Your structure…well, it aggravates me."
He replies remorsefully,"Um, well, I just thought we could use parts of a recipe to…"
"And don't think I don't see the irony here either Chris!" I interrupt and burst into laughter.
Why the laughter? Because what I was doing was chastising his way, or structure and at the same time arguing that he ought to do things my way, or my "non-way way." In other words, while his approach may be significantly more structured than mine, non-structure is still a type of structure.
In order to continue my rant, I would have to appeal to an outside standard from which we could examine one another's structural claims and differences. Perhaps, in this case, that standard would be taste.
I would have to make a case as to why my non-structure would positively affect taste. Sure, we probably have differing tastes, but we could decide how to structure our cooking around qualities of taste (i.e. texture, sweetness, or saltiness).
What is important about this? As stated, the postmodernist begins with the notion that there are no absolute givens. Well, except the given that they are correct and someone else, perhaps a person who acknowledges foundational truth claims, is wrong.
Frankly, the postmodernist cannot state a foundational truth and yet not recognize foundational truth. Logic doesn't allow it just as it did not allow me to say Chris shouldn't appeal to structure when I was, in fact, demanding he adhere to my non-structure structure.
"The given is that there are no givens," or perhaps more accurately, "the truth is that there is no truth," while rhetorically playful, is self-defeating. Truth, by definition, is exclusive. Once we rescue truth, language follows closely behind.
If the arbitrariness of languages makes perfect communication impossible, I wonder how a postmodern deconstructionist philosopher can assert that without having some idea of what perfect communication is, especially considering that they negate reality, or the "transcendental signified", altogether. What a mess.
Who determined, and why, that language and its power are inherently bad? Sure people can use language to manipulate and attack – but language also has the ability to refresh, exalt and give life to others. How we use language speaks more to our own motives than to the legitimacy of language itself.
"Like all conspiracy theories," Pinker writes, "the idea that language is a prisonhouse denigrates its subject by overestimating its power."
"Language is the magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another, and we can co-opt it in many ways to help our thoughts along. But it is not the same as thought, not the only thing that separates humans from other animals, not the basis of all culture, and not an inescapable prisonhouse, an obligatory agreement, the limits of our world, or the determiner of what is imaginable."
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7 comments
You're probably right. Isn't Pinker's focus cognition and language from a scientific, rather than philosophical, perspective? Maybe that's why he was used...