ABSTRACT
There might seem little chance of any fruitful exchange between Anglo-American philosophy of language and those developments in the wake of Saussure which currently go under the name of post-structuralism. Certainly the two traditions are worlds apart in terms of philosophical descent and governing conventions. Saussure’s thinking about language can be seen as the upshot of a rationalist epistemology which-in a properly Cartesian spirit-suspends all the notions of empirical self-evidence and sets out to construct an alternative system possessed of its own internal logic.1 This bracketing of common sense assumptions is taken as the minimal starting-point for any form of knowledge which hopes to advance beyond naïve certitude or unreflecting positivism. Such is Saussure’s insistence that linguistic science be founded on a clean disciplinary break between parole, or the speech-stuff of everyday experience, and langue as the network of articulated contrasts and resemblances existing outside and beyond the speaker’s immediate grasp. This act of divorce is further ratified by the ‘arbitrary’ nature of the sign, the fact-as Saussure argued-that there cannot exist any natural or proper relation between signifier and signified, the word as material token of meaning and the concept it conveys.
