The Philosophy Book

223

See also: Plato 50–55 ■ Charles Sanders Peirce 205 ■ Ludwig Wittgenstein

246–51 ■ Roland Barthes 290–91 ■ Julia Kristeva 323

S

aussure was a 19th-century

Swiss philosopher who saw

language as made up of

systems of “signs”, with the signs

acting as the basic units of the

language. His studies formed the

basis of a new theory, known as

semiotics. This new theory of signs

was developed by other philosophers

during the 20th century such as

Russia’s Roman Jakobson, who

summed up the semiotic approach

when he said that “every message

is made of signs.”

Saussure said that a sign is made

up of two things. Firstly, a “signifier”,

which is a sound-image. This is not

the actual sound, but the mental

“image” we have of the sound.

Secondly, the “signified”, or concept.

Here Saussure turns his back on a

long tradition that says language is

about the relationships between

words and things, because he is

saying that both aspects of a sign

are mental (our concept of a “dog”

for example, and a sound-image of

the sound “dog”). Saussure claims

that any message—for example

“my dog is called Fred”—is a system

of signs. This means that it is a

system of relationships between

sound-images and concepts.

However, Saussure states that the

relationship between the signified

and the signifier is arbitrary—so

there is nothing particularly

“doggy” about the sound “dog”,

which is why the word can be

chien in French, or gou in Chinese.

Saussure’s work on language

became the basis of modern

linguistics, and influenced many

philosophers and literary theorists. ■

IN CONTEXT

BRANCH
Philosophy of language

APPROACH
Semiotics

BEFORE
c.400 BCE Plato explores the
relationship between names
and things.

c.250 BCE Stoic philosophers

develop an early theory of
linguistic signs.

1632 Portuguese philosopher
John Poinsot writes his
Treatise on Signs.

AFTER
1950s Saussure’s analysis of
the structures of language
influences Noam Chomsky’s
theory of generative grammar,
which aims to expose the rules
of a language that govern its
possible word combinations.

1960s Roland Barthes explores
the literary implications of
signs and semiotics.

EVERY MESSAGE

IS MADE OF

SIGNS

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE (1857–1913)

THE MODERN WORLD

In the lives of individuals

and of societies, language

is a factor of greater

importance than any other.

Ferdinand de Saussure