guistic units in a neat row, but “continually plan ahead, modifying the
immediate movements of our speech-producing organs... to take
account of what we’re goingto say.” To illustrate this, he proposes the
following experiment:... say the word tie. If you carefully watch your face, you’ll see that you
don’t round your lips at the start of the word. Now say too, which contains
the vowel [u]. If your speech producing system is working correctly, you
will round your lips at the start of the word when you are articulating the
initial [t], anticipating the [u] that is produced “after” the initial [t]. Your
speech production has been encoded. The rounding of the initial [t] of too
makes its acoustic properties different from the “same” sound, the [t] of tie.
Other researchers undermine Derrida’s second premise, that “signifying
forms” like words and letters possess an absolute “self-identity,” which
they retain, like things, even when removed from a given context. In his
seminal essay “Signature Event Context,” Derrida asserts:... a certain self-identity of this element (mark, sign, etc.) is required to per-
mit its recognition and repetition. Through empirical variations of tone,
voice, etc., possibly of a certain accent for example, we must be able to rec-
ognize the identity, roughly speaking, of a signifying form.
Derrida suggests we can recognize words and their elements despite
variations in tones and accents because they possess an immutable self-
identity.
Douglas Hofstadter, a pioneering thinker in artificial intelligence,
has also considered the problem of “signifying forms.” In Metamagical
Themas,he notes the curious fact that we can recognize variations of the
letter “A,” for instance, in different—and sometimes bizarre—fonts. He
suggests we can do this because inside each letter “lurks a concept, a
Platonic entity, a spirit.” But unlike Derrida, Hofstadter argues that this
Platonic entity is not an immutable form, but a mental abstraction com-
posed of modular “roles” it shares with other letters, like the crossbar in
“A” and “H.” Letters don’t exist in isolation, he writes, but “mutually
define each others’ essences,” and so any attempt to find an “isolated
structure supposedly representing a single letter in all its glory is
doomed to failure.”
Pioneers in the new field of “fuzzy logic” share Hofstadter’s belief
that words are mental abstractions. In their view, words don’t possess
immutable identities, but rather exist as “fuzzy sets” in the minds of
those sharing a language. Even a concrete noun like “chair” signifies a146 Paul Lake