46 3. The Code Model Decoded
linguistic inquiry, which is characteristic of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evolution in question tends toward seeing language not as a gratuitous social bonus for
purposes of communication, but as a sine qua non for the articulation of any analytic structure of ideas whatsoever.
Harris 1987 :209; bracketed references refer to Saussure’s Cours
Figure 3.5. Three views of the relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic referents: a
nomenclaturistsurrogationalist, b Lockean, c Saussurean
3.2.2.2.2. Saussure’s “pure form” and Locke’s “substance”
The manner in which Saussure envisioned the structure of langue seems to have been influenced by Locke as well, although more subtly than with the speech circuit.
Locke’s philosophy was shaped by his adoption of the corpuscularian view of science espoused by Robert Boyle. While in line with that position, Locke asserted that
sensations weren’t just assemblages of properties generated by random bunches of miniscule components corpuscles. Rather the components were composed, held
together into structures via their substance. Scott-Kakures, Castegnetto, Benson, Taschek, and Hurley comment:
3. The Code Model Decoded 47
On the corpuscularian view, the ultimate things in the world are corpuscles—bits of matter, or material substance, with properties. The substance is what the properties “subsist”
in. Properties do not just float about; they are properties of some “thing.” But what is this thing, or substance? And how can we know it? Can we have an idea of it?
Locke’s answer to these questions is that, “… not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do
subsist, and from which they do result, which therefore we call substance.” … So, the tomato is not just roundness plus redness. It is a substance in which roundness and redness “subsist.”
Scott-Kakures, Castegnetto, Benson, Taschek, and Hurley 1993 :175; embedded quotation
from Locke, Essay, II, xxiii, 1
In contemporary usage, substance is equated with matter. For Locke, however, substance does not equate with matter; in developing the term substance he is not
necessarily referring to a tangible thing which may be measured or poured. For Locke, matter is, in a sense, a type of substance together with its respective solid corpuscles and
“power” that is, its qualities in regard to affects. Substance, then, is the “stuff” of which the corpuscles are made, and by which they are held together into meaningful bodies.
Locke’s general reference to corpuscles includes solid atomic units, as occur in matter, but it also includes spiritual, and ideal i.e., mental atomic units. Accordingly, substance
may be non-material in nature. Substance, then, refers to a vague, indefinable “unknown something that holds qualities together—a substratum in which qualities ‘inhere’”
Scott- Kakures, Castegnetto, Benson, Taschek, and Hurley 1993
:176.
28
Locke also writes of particular
substances, which are particular collections of properties, or “ideas,” that are united together
Scott-Kakures, Castegnetto, Benson, Taschek, and Hurley 1993 :177.
As contemporary readers might anticipate, this idea of substance was problematic for Locke’s theory. His explanation of the concept was weak, at least, and perhaps even
evasive. Scott-Kakures, Castegnetto, Benson, Taschek, and Hurley write:
The idea of substance is itself not very clear. Indeed, it is not, to use the traditional termi- nology, “clear and distinct” but is rather “relative and confused,” insofar as we have no direct
experience of substance and can know it only in relation to the qualities of which we do have direct experience. If pressed on what this thing is in which qualities inhere, Locke answers that
it is the “solid, extended parts”—corpuscles. But as he points out, the question may be continued: What do solidity and extension inhere in? And to that question, Locke says it is a
“something, I know not what.”
Scott-Kakures, Castegnetto, Benson, Taschek, and Hurley 1993
:175–176
The notion of substance was subject to severe criticism by later philosophers, notably George Berkeley, who was very antagonistic to Boyle’s corpuscularian science and
Locke’s corpuscularian philosophy Scott-Kakures, Castegnetto, Benson, Taschek, and
Hurley 1993 :187ff.. Nineteenth century developments in atomic theory would eventually
answer some of Locke’s questions in regard to matter and solid “corpuscles,” but similar questions concerning nonmaterial substance were not to be so blessed.
28
For a discussion of the distinctions between Locke’s substance and Descartes’ notion of the “cogito” and “wax,” see Scott-Kakures, Castegnetto, Benson, Taschek, and Hurley
1993 :176.
48 3. The Code Model Decoded
This problem is in itself an important clue to interpreting Saussure. While recog- nizing Locke’s views regarding substance as flawed, Saussure nevertheless identified the
benefit such a theory of composition would prove for his own purposes. The evolutionist view in historical comparative studies had identified and treated cognates and their sound
change via the methodological equivalent of an historical tunnel.
29
The result was to regard these sound changes as being relatively unconnected, independent from a system
or structure. Cast in Lockean terms, this approach to language involved a regard for the “qualities,” with no sense of the “substance” in which those qualities “inhere.” While
Saussure was not a corpuscularian nor particularly concerned with epistemology, he agreed with Locke regarding the necessity of a structure in which “qualities” exist. He
writes:
The notion of value … shows us that it is a great mistake to consider a sign as nothing more than the combination of a certain sound and a certain concept. To think of a sign as
nothing more would be to isolate it from the system to which it belongs. It would be to suppose that a start could be made with individual signs, and a system constructed by putting
them together. On the contrary, the system as a united whole is the starting point, from which it becomes possible, by a process of analysis, to identify its constituent elements.
Saussure 1983
:[157]
How, then, was Saussure to posit such a structure without evoking criticism similar to that received by Locke? Whereas Locke had expounded a nonmaterial substance
composed of a nonmaterial “stuff,” Saussure proposed a structural form composed purely of differences between nodes, with no “substance.” Saussure writes:
In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact
that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are only difference, and no positive terms. Whether we take the
signification or the signal, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system. In a
sign, what matters more than any idea or sound associated with it is what other signs surround it.
Saussure 1983 :[166]
In other words, there is no “stuff,” neither between the signs, nor in the signs themselves. As Saussure himself puts it, “Linguistics, then, operates along this margin,
where sound and thought meet. The contact between them gives rise to a form, not a substance
” Saussure 1983
:[157], and elsewhere, “… the language itself is a form, not a substance.
The importance of this truth cannot be overemphasised. For all our mistakes of terminology, all our incorrect ways of designating things belonging to the language
originate in our unwittingly supposing that we are dealing with a substance when we deal with linguistic phenomena”
Saussure 1983 :[169].
29
J. H. Hexter writes of this methodological flaw in historical studies, describing it as a tunneling phenomenon, writing that certain historians “split the past into a series of tunnels, each continuous from the remote past to the present, but
practically self-contained at every point and sealed off from contact with or contamination by anything that was going on in any other tunnel”
Hexter 1961 :194, also see
Rutman 1970 .
3. The Code Model Decoded 49
3.2.2.2.3. The nature of concepts: Locke vs. Saussure
