Return to Saussure

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...

Introduction This article critically examines Bertrand Russell's philosophy of language as articulated in An Outline of Philosophy , focusing on his behaviorist perspective. Russell challenges traditional views of language, arguing that it arises from learned, conditioned responses rather than being a direct expression of pre-formed thoughts. He proposes that words are not fixed symbols but physical events, with meaning emerging from habitual actions rather than abstract concepts. The article evaluates Russell’s behaviorist model by engaging with two influential linguistic theories: Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, which emphasizes innate cognitive structures, and Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralism, which posits that meaning arises from the relational system of signs. By comparing these theories, the article explores the tensions between Russell’s empirical approach and the cognitive and structural insights offered by Chomsky and Saussure. Russell’s Phi...