ABSTRACT
There are many approaches to language. From a common-sense standpoint, language might be taken as a vehicle for the communication of thoughts. Hence, meaning and its ‘transmission’ is essential to a definition of what language is. This view would conceive of a subject having thoughts, and in turn expressing them through language in the form of speech. Taken in this way, particular languages might be produced by particular cultures, but it would not necessarily be the case that thoughts are culturally specific (the issue of meaning, in other words, might turn on questions of human nature, on psychology, physiology, etc.). In turn, meaning, on this conception, would be primarily a matter of the intentions of speakers. This view is open to question from a number of perspectives, for example, approaches associated with post-modernism, structuralism and post-structuralism. On such accounts as these, language produces meaning not through the assertion by a language-inde pendent speaker of a proposition which expresses an intention independently of the language used, but it is only in virtue of the existence of language (understood as a system of signs, or as a semantic process which is ontologically independent of the constitution of subjectivity) that there are such things as ‘speakers’ and ‘intentions’. In turn, speakers are regarded as being constituted within language, and hence are not taken as ontologically prior to it. The tradition of analytic philosophy has offered a number of accounts of language and meaning which simply do not rely upon a self-conscious model of subjectivity as constituting their foundation, but point towards the logical and structural preconditions of languages as being of importance in our understanding of such issues; while Lacan’s model of psychoanalysis envisages a structural link between the constitution of the unconscious and language (i.e. he claims the unconscious is structured like a language).
