> BTW it is worth mentioning that the arbitrariness of the sign was the
> one insight -- dodgy as it is -- that poststructuralism took from
> linguistics. You take that away from them and the whole edifice
> collapses, from Lacan to Derrida to Barthes to Althusser and the rest
> (perhaps not Zizek), as well as a generation of French
> semiotician-linguists from Benveniste to Greimas to Rastier and many
> many more.
====================
The edifice, so-called, no more stands or collapses on the arbitrariness of the sign than Marx's political economy collapses when one dispatches the labor theory of value [a term KM never used]]
> Now I don't mean to say that the arbitrariness of the sign is 'false'.
> What it is, at its most useful, is a speculative proposition. It affords
> the opportunity for reflection on its own truth and falsity alike. But
> if you lose the speculative sense of a proposition like that, as
> Saussure himself most certainly did, you are into the terrain of dogma
> and ideology.
================
So we should rather just accept the tentativeness and speculatory aspects of the hypothesis in humility or are you still stuck on casting aspersions on a school of thought you don't like even though, by your own admission you can't prove it is false?
> In linguistics there is more than a tendency to move back from the
> post-structuralist abyss and the various imbecilities of postmodernism
> that flow from the dogma of the arbitrary sign. This broad movement
> draws on, inter alia: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception;
> Gestaltist and cognitivist psychology; the catastrophe theory semantics
> (and math) of Rene Thom, Jean Petitot and Wolfgang Wildgen; Cassirer's
> Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; and, more recently the autopoiesis of
> Maturana and Varela. See the recent work of Yves-Marie Visetti (2004),
> Visetti and Pierre Cadiot (2002) and Alexander Kravchenko (2006; 2007)
> for some examples. In American linguistics, some of the Cognitive
> Linguistics school can be regarded as a roughly cognate development,
> e.g. Langacker et al. Saussure finds very little space in all of this.
> BTW the most emphatically anti-Saussure and anti-poststructuralist
> school is the 'intergrationist linguistics' group that is clustered
> around the Oxford professor Roy Harris, but that is another story for
> another day.
=================
Well one could make the argument, I won't attempt it here because an email list is not conducive to graduate seminar level discussion/debate, that M-P and M and V are even more problematic for left conservatives regarding the words/worlds dynamics....
>
> I hope that the requirement of names, dates, facts, etc. has been
> satsified here. But it is not always needed. Sometimes people really
> need to be able to respond to the propositional content of the arguments
> presented rather than the presence or omission of their favourite brand
> names.
==================
Looks like you've done some advertising of brands yourself.
Ian