Difference (philosophy) - Difference in Structuralism

Difference in Structuralism

Structural linguistics, and subsequently structuralism proper, are founded on the idea that meaning can only be produced differentially in signifying systems (such as language). This concept first came to prominence in the structuralist writings of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and was developed for the analysis of social and mental structures by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The former was concerned to question the prevailing view of meaning "inhering" in words, or the idea that language is a nomenclature bearing a one-to-one correspondence to the real. Instead, Saussure argues that meaning arises through differentiation of one sign from another, or even of one phoneme from another:

In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.

In his Structural Anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss applied this concept to to the anthropological study of mental structures, kinship and belief systems, examining the way in which social meaning emerges through a series of structural oppositions between paired/opposed kinship groups, for example, or between basic oppositional categories (such as friend and enemy, life and death, or in a later volume, the raw and the cooked).