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Does One Need to Taste Cheese to Understand What It Means? A Saussurean Response to Bertrand Russell

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Introduction Roman Jakobson opens his essay On Linguistic Aspects of Translation by quoting Bertrand Russell: "No one can understand the word 'cheese' unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese." The remark is taken from Russell's essay "Logical Positivism" (1950), but Jakobson adopts it as the starting point for a discussion of meaning and translation. At first sight, Russell's claim seems almost impossible to dispute. How could anyone genuinely understand the word cheese without ever having encountered cheese? Surely language must ultimately rest upon experience. Yet several decades before Jakobson quoted Russell, Ferdinand de Saussure had already developed a conception of language that invites us to reconsider this intuition. His famous rejection of the idea that language is merely a nomenclature suggests that the issue is more complex than it first appears. Is Language a List of Names? In Course in General Linguistic...
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Derrida's Babel: When a Name Refuses to Stay a Proper Name

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Babel, in Braque 's style. AI image A Word We Think We Already Know Everyone knows the story of Babel. It tells of humanity's attempt to build a tower reaching the heavens, only to have God interrupt the project by multiplying languages and scattering peoples across the earth: Genesis 11:7-9 7  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. 8  So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.   9  That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world . For Jacques Derrida, however, the story is not primarily about the origin of linguistic diversity. It is about a single word: Babel . Everything that follows in Des Tours de Babel unfolds from the peculiar behavior of that one term. Rather than using the biblical narrative to illustrate philosophical ideas, Derrida turns the word Babel itself into the place where fundamental ques...
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Understanding Derrida's Dissemination through Babel

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Dissemination. AI image YHWH says: "Yes! A single people, a single lip for all: that is what they begin to do! ... Come! Let us descend! Let us confound their lips, man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbor." Then he disseminates the Sem, and dissemination is here deconstruction: YHWH disperses them from here over the face of all the earth. — JACQUES DERRIDA, Des Tours de Babel   A Story We Think We Already Know The Tower of Babel is usually treated as the biblical explanation for linguistic diversity. Humanity speaks one language and decides to build a city with a tower reaching toward heaven. Seeing this, God intervenes, confounds their speech, and scatters them across the earth. The tower remains unfinished, and Babel becomes associated with linguistic confusion. For Jacques Derrida, however, the story is about much more than the origin of different languages. In Des Tours de Babel , he recasts the biblical narrative as a reflection on lan...
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