What is meant by signifier and signified in structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy?
I have a whole life philosophy based on structuralism. Thanks for the question. An organic connection became evident in what Saussure took to be the linguistic principles at work in all languages. The purpose of language study was in fact to reveal these principles. Saussure argued that language was a collective, orderly, and coherent phenomenon. Language, therefore, could be studied as if it were a social system that was susceptible to understanding and explanation as a whole. Saussure thought of individual linguistic units as a patterned wholeness. Words, he argued, were devoid of content when studied in isolation. Their meaningful content arose only when they were studied in relation to one another. He based his conception of the linguistic unit on the assumption that where there was meaning – in a word or sentence – there would also be structure. This idea was in conflict with the nominalist view of language that took words to be mere “names” of things. For instance: “Some people r
