Cratylism and the Linguistic Turn again

Pickstock, same article, arguing that the linguistic turn requires Cratylism: “If the signifier is arbitrary, then the stable element of language is excarnated and language is reduced to thought after all, because its essence consists in a series of abstract relations, combined according to a set of rules. Physical words become in consequence no more than instrumental conveniences without any lure of particularity. Meanings and signifiers still require physical codes because we are embodied creatures, but only in a sense which reduces the bodily factor to something mnemonically and calculatively useful, like the matrices of a computer. If the essence of language exists apart from its sounds and the images which sounds conjure up, can one really say that thought is linguistic? In principle, it could dispense with language, for any view that makes language essential for thought would seem to require that the expressing, uttering aspect of thought is indispensable to thought as such. Thought without language might go unexpressed outside the thinker. But thought that has to be in language is always expressed in a public fashion outside the thinker’s own domain. A reserved, private thought is only, on this view, a secondary and temporary act of enclosure of what was originally common territory. Perhaps Wittgenstein was right: the linguist turn implies that there can be no private language. However, the non-Cratylist view of the sign as arbitrary imposition would seem to reinstate the latter position.”

Yet, the notion that the linguistic turn requires “an onomatopoetic theory of signification” seems “absurd and lacking in scholarly warrant.” And Pickstock’s ultimate aim is to show that the linguistic turn requires not so much Cratylism as theology.