Derrida has some interesting thoughts about how language takes meaning, and language’s inability to directly access or reflect the “natural world,” which it is meant to define as something beyond language itself. (Contradicting the structuralist point of view that language, although arbitrary, directly accesses and communicates something that itself transcends language by reflecting it via a natural and empirical system).
He posits that due to the ways human thoughts are formed and a network of meaning works, we can never use language to get to something more real "behind " the language (and if you think you have, that’s just more language).
It ultimately destabilizes the relationship between any “signifier” (word) and “signified” (the thing that that word is supposed to represent or refer to) and has a ton of other social and cultural implications as well, but that’s why “Of Grammatology” is a lot longer than a comment chain haha.
I feel like we’ve had a hint about that in database design for years - no matter how closely we think we have modeled the underlying reality to be tracked, we always eventually discover that we have not.
![When someone explains to you how "baby" is their pet name for their significant other [captioned screencap] [animated]](https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/4c155762-0b93-4885-bd84-90fb3816b4a0.webp){kind=link}
Derrida has some interesting thoughts about how language takes meaning, and language’s inability to directly access or reflect the “natural world,” which it is meant to define as something beyond language itself. (Contradicting the structuralist point of view that language, although arbitrary, directly accesses and communicates something that itself transcends language by reflecting it via a natural and empirical system).
He posits that due to the ways human thoughts are formed and a network of meaning works, we can never use language to get to something more real "behind " the language (and if you think you have, that’s just more language).
It ultimately destabilizes the relationship between any “signifier” (word) and “signified” (the thing that that word is supposed to represent or refer to) and has a ton of other social and cultural implications as well, but that’s why “Of Grammatology” is a lot longer than a comment chain haha.
That’s interesting. I think Derrida had it right.
I feel like we’ve had a hint about that in database design for years - no matter how closely we think we have modeled the underlying reality to be tracked, we always eventually discover that we have not.
Agreed! Which ultimately means the more confident you are that the system tracks, the farther you are from seeing the whole thing…