Page 556 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
baki' (the pseudonym of a group of French math- ematicians); in psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan (1901- 79); and in psychology (where Titchener's concept of structure had long since been replaced, for example by the concept of Gestalt), Jean Piaget (1896-1980). The rejection of structuralism by such figures as Jac- ques Derrida and, to a lesser degree, Michel Foucault (1926-84), became tied up with the French student revoltsof1968,launchingthe'poststructuralist'era, whose very name indicates that the Saussurean tra- dition remains an active force even when shaping the direction of reactions against it. Meanwhile, the soci- ology of Pierre Bourdieu (b.1930) remains a powerful model with arguably as many structuralist as post- structuralist features.
Within linguistics, the effects of poststructuralist thought are only beginning to be felt; the field inwhich structuralism began is the last to let it go. Precisely at midcenturythegreatBritishlinguistJ.R.Firth(1890- 1960) was able to state that 'Nowadays, professional linguists can almost be classified by using the name of de Saussure. There are various possible groupings: Saussureans, anti-Saussureans, post-Saussureans, or non-Saussureans.' As we approach the twentieth cen- tury's end, the only change one is tempted to make to Firth's statement is to remove 'non-Saussureans,' as it is doubtful that any survive. All work on or against language as an autonomous, self-contained system— and this includes work in generative grammar, uni- versal-typological linguistics, discourse pragmatics,
and sociolinguistics—is pursuing some aspects of the Saussurean agenda.
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Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919) was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford from 1968 to 1990. Although associated with what has come to be known as 'linguistic philosophy,' he has done much to stimulate interest in traditional problems, not least through his work on Kant. Nonetheless, it is his contributions to the philosophy of language that are outlined here.
1. Background and Orientation
On the issue of meaning, Strawson discerns two basic types of approach: (a) that of formal semantics, and (b) that of theorists of'communication-intention.' In seeing meaning as arising from what we do with language, he identifies with the second of these
approaches, evincing a longstanding skepticism about the capacity of logical formalisms to capture the nuances of informal reasoning and natural language generally. However, he has shared many of the pre- occupations of the formal semanticists, especially those to do with truth and reference.
2. Reference and Truth
In an early paper (Strawson 1950), Strawson criticized Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and its underlying semantics. Russell assumed singularly referring expressions as a fundamental category. But given that there are instances of proper names in ordi- nary language which lack reference, he was committed to a strategy of dispensing with such problematic
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Strawson, Peter Frederick D. E. B. Pollard