Talk:Structuralism
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If someone could fill in the missing that wouldbe great. It's been a while since I've taken it, but someone should add something about economic structuralism here. I would myself, but I'm not fully confident in my grasp of the various terminology (esp the differences in the endnote below the Balaam quote). If someone could elucidate this in the article that would be great. I'm looking at a text on International Political Economy at the moment (Introduction to International Political Economy by Balaam and Veseth) and it mentions economic structuralism.
"...Marx's analysis finds a home under the general heading of structuralism (or perhaps economic structuralism) because he views the economic structure to be the strongest single influence on society. Marx focused on the production structure inherent in capitalism, seeing in it a dynamic that produces classes, leads to class struggle, and generates crises that lead to revolution and the next stage in history. For marx it is the structure that dominates events, more so than ideas, nature, or military generals. Marx saw people trapped in a production structure that shaped them and that they could change only by acting collectively and heroically. ..."[Balaam 73].
The preceeding quote has an endnote which reads:
"We have used the term structuralism in a general sense here. At a more advanced level "economic structuralism" is differentiated from "political structuralism." In economic structuralism, it is the structure of economic relations that influences society most. In political structuralism, it is the structure of political power that is most influential."
It would be nice if the origins of structuralism were elaborated on, maybe even in a seperate article, since the history section talks about structuralism first emerging in the 19th century. i've seen it said in a couple of places, namely Terrence Hawke's Structuralism and Semiotics, that the structuralist view can be traced back to Giambattista Vico and his book The New Science, although how robust, self-conscious, and contiguous the lineage of structuralism actually is would have to be analyzed.
It would be useful to elaborate on the nuanced and tacit relationship between structuralism and semiotics, one which is often stated but seldom analyzed systematically. i think it has to do a lot with a common base in the sign (and the formal structure of the sign as the associative total of the signifier-signified), but it would be good to deliniate them and track how they feed and have fed onto each other.
structural linguistics deserves its own page (as structural anthropology has), and the Russian formalists, which Roman Jakobson was also a part of and whose theoris were taken up by different sectors of structuralism, needs to be mentioned in the structural linguistics section in the same brief way that the Prague school is.
Structuralism in psychology: What about Georges Lacan? --HJH
You mean Jacques Lacan? 68.88.233.134 23:32, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
"So, implicitly, languages are not translatable into each other. This is a possibility taken up by deconstructionism."
I'm not sure from what point of view this is written, but, in my opinion, it's complete nonsense. What seems to me to be lacking, is the notion that spoken and written languages are only an intermediate stage - they try to represent the thought process that takes place within ones brain. As humans have much in common, it's possible to replace (or translate) one intermediate level of expression (a language) with another. I hope someone understand this! Dduck 19:17, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)
[edit] Weasel words
While the following section may well contain some valid points, its use of weasel words makes its style non-encyclopedic. I've copied it here in the event that someone wants to either cite sources (ie, "Joe Smith suggests that... Erwin Brown, on the other hand, says...") or rephrase it to avoid the use of weasel words. Also, beyond the first use of the word in the article, 'structuralist'/'structuralism' doesn't need to be bolded.
- Some feel that a structuralist analysis helps pierce through the confusing veil of life to reveal the hidden, underlying, logically complete structure. Others would argue that structuralism simply reads too much into 'texts' (in the widest sense) and allows clever professors to invent meanings that aren't actually there. There is a variety of positions in between these two extremes, and many of the debates around structuralism focus on trying to clarify issues of this sort.
-Seth Mahoney 15:33, May 5, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Possible non sequitor
I suspect there is a problem with the text:
A secondary use of structuralism has recently been seen in the philosophy of mathematics. According to structural theory, meaning within a culture is produced and reproduced through various practices, phenomena and activities which serve as systems of signification. A structuralist studies activities as diverse as food preparation and serving rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of entertainment to discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture.
As far as I can tell there is no connection between this text and anything to do with the philosophy of mathematics.
I am an innocent when it comes to Structuralism, so I'm reluctant to jump in and remove the bold text. Innocent or not, I can tell that it is in need of urgent medical attention (elaboration, or else surgical removal). Who can help? --Philopedia 7 July 2005 19:27 (UTC)
- In addition to being a non-sequitor, the (bolded) statement is incorrect. Structuralism in the form of structural analysis evolved relatively early, and if my meagre knowledge of the history of math and engineering is accurate, it evolved in the early to mid 1800's. If it had not been changed already, I will do so. Vonkje 14:51, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Structuralism in anthropology
I don't know how one can broach this topic without mentioning the paleontologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan, who wrote 'Geste et Parole' (Gesture and Speech) in the 1960s. AS the MIT Press website says "Combines in one volume 'Technics and Language' and 'Memory and Rhythms', the cornerstones of Leroi-Gourhan's comprehensive theory of human behavior and cultural development", it's a highly structuralist work which directly informed later thinkers like Derrida, little known in the Anglosphere because it was not translated into English until the 1990s.
Copple's abstract from Gesture, Vol 3 No 1 2003 sums it up quite nicely;
(Contrary to) Chomsky’s contemporary mentalist view ... that espoused Cartesian rationalism ... Leroi-Gourhan takes an integrated approach to human evolution: gesture (conceived of as ‘material action’) and speech are seen as twin products of an embodied mind that engendered our technical and social achievements. His explanation of the evolutionary association between the hand and the face provides a biological basis for cognitive as well as communicational aspects of gesture, with culture emerging as an extension of our zoological foundation. He asserts that the liberating of the hand from locomotion led to the liberating of the face from prehension, thus creating the duality of instrument and symbol whereby human beings physically and mentally grasp the world in which they live.
[edit] Structuralism in linguistics
This treatment is somewhat incomplete, and quite foreign to what goes on in the current practice of linguistics. In particular, saying that structuralism has been primarily supplanted by post-structuralism and deconstruction is not really true, at least in Anglosphere linguistics---Chomsky's views have long been much more dominant, and are primarily challenged for primacy by other views vaguely from the same tradition, not from the structuralist/post-structuralist/deconstruction tradition. --Delirium 03:01, 8 December 2005 (UTC) -Contrarily to Chomsky, structuralism has the main defect of not being formal enough. Maybe that's why so many well-known structuralists were caught by Sokal inserting calculus (Lacan, Deleuze, ...) or topology (Lacan) without justification and without clarity into their theories... Plwase, make my day, and read Fashionable Nonsense.
[edit] Course in general linguistics is not a book by Saussure
It's rather a transcript his students made in his lectures. It was published only after Saussure's death. Since I'm not a native speaker I don't want to spoil this article with my english, but someone should do a little research to be 100% correct and edit the article...
for what it's worth, some of his own writings were discovered in Geneva in 1996 and have been recently published as "Writings in General Linguistics," and apparently deviate from the Cours and clarify some central and long-staining ambiguities within the latter.
[edit] Kinds of the same structuralism, or just different things called "structuralism"?
Though I don't know a lot about structuralism other than in philosophy of mathematics, the various kinds of structuralism in this article seem to be very different from each other (certainly different from the mathematical kind). Both the linguistic and mathematical kinds of structualism focus on relationships rather than individual compontents, but does this vague similarity make these actually the same? Furthermore, the 19th century pscyhological kind seems to be exactly opposite; it is apparently about reduction of a whole to individual components. It seems that some kinds of structuralism in this article are variations on the same idea (e.g. linguistic and anthropological), but others are entirely separate—maybe they should be split into their own articles. (I could move the "structuralism in philosphy of mathematics" section to philosophy of mathematics which lacks a section on structuralism.)
-- I agree COMPLETELY. The psychological structuralism has absolutely nothing to do with the rest, and even the linguistic and mathematic structuralism are two different stories. Why not make two or several different articles? The way things look here, it's like an article on APPLE with sections about a fruit, about a city and about a computer company... It's ridiculous! Golioder 09:30, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] The Logical positivists: Canap, Schlick, and Neurath
There needs to be a new section on structuralism devoted to the logical positivists, particularly Carnap, Schlick, and Neurath. The structuralism of the logical positivists is spelled out in Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness by Paul Livingston. The connection between the structuralism of the logical positivists and the literary critics was suggested by Paul de Man. De Man mentions a convergence between I.A. Richards and logical positivism in his essay "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism" which is in Blindness and Insight. Specifically de Man says, "The promise held out in Richard's work, of a convergence between logical positivism and literary criticism, has failed to materialize." It failed to materialize according to de Man because of Empson's questioning of the core assumptions of the structuralist (or formalist) critics.
I might be willing to write the section if people were in favor of adding it and no one else wanted to write it.
[edit] Question from comments page
It would be nice if someone could explain the connection between structuralism and analytical philosophy of language. Aren't they addressing the same central problems? Uidog 15:20, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Definition of subject
It would be nice if someone could define structuralism. The opening paragraph seems to assume that the reader already knows what it is.
Eliotistic 05:38, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] structuralists and post structuralists
The article defines certain people as structuralists, and then says that they very strongly denied being structuralists. The post-structuralist page lists many of those same people as post-structuralists. I think this needs to be resolved. Or at least, there has to be an argument for how they could be structuralists when they them selves did not think so, and if some people categorize them as post structuralists. Novium 11:05, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
- Structuralism is such a complex& confusing scientific literary theory. Can it be further dymistified here before the end of today? —Preceding unsigned comment added by DSKING (talk • contribs) 11:04, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
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- See my delineation of the definitions of structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernity, and postmodernism, over at poststructuralism's talk page to get a basic gist of why the term is so problematic. --Le vin blanc (talk) 12:27, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] A new introduction and 19th century structuralism
I added a more informative introduction, and removed the information on 19th century psychology, since it has nothing to do with the movement commonly considered structuralism, except for the name (the same goes for mathematics). --Le vin blanc (talk) 18:43, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
- CAN the sign signified& signifier be related to Clade LEVI-STRAUSS's myth theories?```` —Preceding unsigned comment added by DSKING (talk • contribs) 11:08, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
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- Lévi-Strauss's work on totemism and the activity of human taxonomy in The Savage Mind and Totemism is certainly dependent on the lexicon of Saussure. Lévi-Strauss argues that there are an infinite number of ways of interpreting what a symbol stands for, in other words, what it the signifier signifies. And that therefore we mustn't interpret each symbol of a society in isolation, but study them in relation to one another, so that through the similarities and contrasts, what the signifiers stand for comes into view. This is nothing other than Saussure's idea that a sign is determined by all the other signs in a system. For this reason, and this reason alone, Lévi-Strauss can be considered a structuralist.
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- In what I have read of his popular work on mythology, The Structural Analysis of Myth, though, he makes use again of Saussure in a similar manner, which is all the more reason to consider him a structuralist. For he argues that myths can be divided into units, and that the meaning of these units is determined by the other units in the system. So although he may not make use of the terms sign, signifier, and signified, he certainly makes use of the ideas of synchrony and value.
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- --Le vin blanc (talk) 12:12, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
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