Routledge Revivals: Pandora and Occam (1992)

On the Limits of Language and Literature

Horst Ruthrof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138718883
• eBook ISBN: 9781351721028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1992, this book evokes Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse and in doing so, brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom. The book offers multiple perspectives from which to review traditional theories of meaning, working from a wide variety of theorists, including Peirce, Frege, Husserl, Derrida, Lyotard, Davidson, and Searle. In Ruthrof's analysis, Pandora and Occam illustrate the opposition between the suppressed rich materiality of culturally saturated discourse and the stark ideality of formal sign systems.

This book will be of interest to those studying linguistics, literature and philosophy.

Notes

Preface

1. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978).

2. Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

3. Ν. V. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press, 1973).

Introduction

1. Christopher Norris, The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985) and Reed Way Dasenbrock, Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); on this question see my "The Two Paradigms: Is a Dialogue Possible?" in On Literary Theory and Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Encounter, ed. Richard Freadman and Lloyd Reinhardt (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp 213-34.

2. I arn grateful for this term to John de Reuck who suggests that semantic foundationalism describes the untheorized deep level of assumptions concerning literal meanings.

3. Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 29-45.

4. J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 3.

5. Julia Kristeva, "The System and the Speaking Subject," in The Tell-Tale Sign. A Survey of Semiotics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1975), pp. 47-66, 50.

6. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Horst Ruthrof, "Identity and Differance," Poetics 17 (1988): 99-112; Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (London: Polity Press, 1987), pp. 161-84, 184.

7. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New-Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 162, 203.

8. Jürgen Habermas, "A Reply to My Critics," in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 219-83; and as early as in "Science and Technology as Ideology," in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. J. J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1971), pp. 81-122; esp. pp. 92-94.

9. Harold Bloom, "The Breaking of Form," in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), p. 9.

10. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 91.

11. Michael Devitt, "Dummett's Anti-Realism," Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 73-99; 76.

12. Michael Dummett, "Realism," in Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 145-65; and "Truth," pp. 1-28; 24. I am indebted to David Novitz for part of this section, even if my position differs quite radically from the one he advocates in Knowledge, Fiction and Imagination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

13. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 49.

14. I am grateful to Jeff Malpas for having drawn my attention to the intricacies of the realism debate; see his The Mirror of Meaning: Donald Davidson and Radical Interpretation, esp. chapter 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

15. Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, trans. H. Nagpai (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 183ff.

16. Gottlob Frege, "Thoughts," in Logical Investigations, ed. Peter Geach (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp. 3f.

17. Ibid., p. 4; Donald Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest Lepore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 307-319; 308.

18. Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 33.

19. Putnam, p. 52.

20. Novitz, chapters 1 to 4.

21. For example in Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1989), pp. 124, 125.

22. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense," in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2, ed. Oskar Levy, trans. M. A. Miigge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911), pp. 171-192; 186, 184.

23. Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Wanderer and His Shadow" (1873), in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 7, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), pp. 191f.

24. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Of the Prejudices of Philosophers," (1886) in Beyond Good and Evil: The Complete Works, Aphorism 20,

25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, 2, Aphorism 115, The Complete Works, vol, 9, pp. 119f.

26. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 21.

27. Novitz, p. 56.

28. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 32.

29. Cf. also Richard Rorty, "Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism," in Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 139-59.

30. Steven Lukes, "Relativism in Its Place," in Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 161-305; 302; 304.

31. W. Newton-Smith, "Relativ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• PROLOGUE: PANDORA AND OCCAM: TWO STORIES
• Introduction
• I. The Directionality of Meaning
• II. The Rape of Autumn or the Rich and Fuzzy Life of Meanings
• III. The Modalities of the "Künstlerroman
• IV. Literature and Husserl: A Critique of Noematic Meaning
• V. Meaning as Sense and Derrida's Critique of the Concept
• VI. The Limits of Langue
• VII. Phrases in Dispute: Toward a Semiotic Differend
• VIII. A Striptease of Meaning on the Ladder of Discourse
• IX. Hypocrisis or Reading as Feigning
• X. The Fictions of Political Discourse and the Politics of Reading
• Conclusion: Pandora, Occam, and the Post-Humanist Subject
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX