Becoming A Dominant Misinterpreted Source: The Case of Ferdinand De Saussure in Cultural Sociology

Abstract

Cultural analysts in sociology typically cite the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to motivate a narrow theory of meaning. In so doing, sociologists incorrectly attribute to Saussure: (1) the postulate that meaning is arbitrary (2) the idea that signs gain meaning only through relations of opposition to other signs, and (3) the view that there is an isomorphic correspondence between linguistic signs and all cultural units of analysis, ergo culture is fundamentally arbitrary, and finally (4) he offers a Durkheimian theory of culture (i.e. Saussure was follower of Durkheim). Saussure's project, rather, was specific to linguistics, and mainly one of theoretical and methodological clarification regarding phonology. Saussure never intended his analytical model of phonology to apply to the real operation of meaning in general, as done by contemporary interpreters and, furthermore, never argued that meaning is arbitrary.

Cultural Cartography with Word Embeddings

“…As a result of this wide-spread theoretical commensurability, social scientists are beginning to use word embeddings (Boutyline, Arseniev-Koehler, and Cornell 2020; e.g., Hofstra et al 2020;Jones et al 2020;Kozlowski, Taddy, and Evans 2019;Linzhuo, 17 It is important to emphasize that words' meanings can be inferred from their linguistic contexts, and thus "difference of meaning correlates with difference of distribution" (Harris 1954:156 emphasis added) . This is contrary to problematic neo-Saussurean formulations in sociology (Stoltz 2019) , wherein words' meanings are said to be entirely constituted by their linguistic context alone. See Bender and Koller (2020:7) for a similar critique of Wittgensteinian formulations: "the slogan 'meaning is use'... refers not to 'use' as 'distribution in a text corpus' but rather that language is used in the real world to convey communicative intents to real people."…”

“…15 Saussure is often ritualistically cited to motivate such a "relational" approach to language. While his view was relational, he largely ignored semantics to focus on phonology (Norris 1985:62;Stoltz 2019) .…”