Meaning and Structure

Jaroslav Peregrin explores the relationship between meaning and structure, taking as his starting point an introduction to the aspects of the Saussurean legacy that he feels are crucial in this endeavour and can be seen as congenial to the views of language entertained by the "postanalytic" philosophers. To show the compatibility of de Saussure's structuralism to the theses of analytical philosophy, he outlines the similarities between de Saussure's account of "linguistic reality" with Gottlob Frege's account of the nature of abstract entities. Peregrin claims that, as structure is a way in which some parts are organized into a whole, we need a theory of systems of parts and wholes. He considers the theory proposed for this purpose by Stanislaw Lesniewski but concludes that this theory is not exactly what is needed, and he offers a sketch of a more suitable mathematical theory. He then tries to make a mathematical sense of the Saussurean idea of the birth of "the structural" out of oppositions. In the second part of the book, Peregrin turns his attention to the postanalytic philosophers whose views of language he wants to portray as continuous with de Saussure's teaching. He studies the views of Willard Van Orman Quine, whose widely discussed indeterminacy theses can be read as simply pointing out the structural nature of language. Peregrin finds that Quine's holism, with which he replaces the atomism of his analytic predecessors, is nothing other than a form of structuralism. He next considers Donald Davidson's insight that the opposition which is crucial from the viewpoint of meaning is that between truth and falsity. The view of language originally put forward by Wilfrid Sellars and developed by Robert Brandom is scrutinized to reveal that, according to Brandom, language is first and foremost our means of engaging in the practice of giving and asking for reasons. Hence, Peregrin interprets, language's statements are useful only in so far as they are interrelated with other statements, as they can be used as reasons for other statements or be justified by means of other statements. In the third part of the book, Peregrin summarizes the outcome of the previous considerations by claiming that the structure of language that is constitutive of its semantics is the "inferential structure", and that the meaning of an expression is most adequately identified with its inferential role. He goes on to consider the general relationship between the realm of formal structures and models (such as those dealt with by formal semantics) and that of real phenomena (such as our natural language). In the final chapter, Peregrin challenges some common wisdoms regarding "semantic structures" or "logical forms" of expression, and tries to show that from the vantage point presented in his book, both the concept of "logical form" as developed by Chomsky and his followers, and that as developed by the logicians following Russell, are problematic.