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