Page 29 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 29
Lecture I
by the but. To give a certain orientation to an utterance does not necessari-
ly mean to make a conclusion acceptable.
That brief analysis of a passage from Proust was designed, on the one
hand, to illustrate the general definition which I give for but, a definition
which I will use a lot in the following lectures and, on the other hand, to il-
lustrate the idea that words change their value according to their argumen-
tative orientation. The quiff, the smile of the second segment are not like
the quiff, the smile of the first. I believe that even the eyeglass is not exactly
the same eyeglass: even if it is materially the same, it is not seen in at all the
same way. So that there again we have grounds for criticizing the truth-con-
ditional or informative conception of meaning, according to which a part
at least of meaning could be described in purely descriptive or representa-
tional terms. Without being afraid of giving a more radical twist to my ide-
as, I am going to try in the lectures that follow to develop that theme, that
is that the notions of true and false, like the notion of information, are no-
tions which do not enable one to describe semantic reality, even if they are
notions which belong to the way the word meaning and its equivalents are
used in ordinary language. I think that indeed in ordinary language, that
is to say in the representation that language gives of itself, the word mean-
ing is viewed as referring to a certain description of reality; but I think that
language, here, gives a false image of itself and that the linguist should not
fall into that snare. We have four lectures to try and not to. To avoid doing
so, I am going to develop two theories: on the one hand, the theory of po-
lyphony, which we will be concerned with next time and on the other, topoi
and argumentation theory, which we will be concerned with until the end
of this series of lectures.
by the but. To give a certain orientation to an utterance does not necessari-
ly mean to make a conclusion acceptable.
That brief analysis of a passage from Proust was designed, on the one
hand, to illustrate the general definition which I give for but, a definition
which I will use a lot in the following lectures and, on the other hand, to il-
lustrate the idea that words change their value according to their argumen-
tative orientation. The quiff, the smile of the second segment are not like
the quiff, the smile of the first. I believe that even the eyeglass is not exactly
the same eyeglass: even if it is materially the same, it is not seen in at all the
same way. So that there again we have grounds for criticizing the truth-con-
ditional or informative conception of meaning, according to which a part
at least of meaning could be described in purely descriptive or representa-
tional terms. Without being afraid of giving a more radical twist to my ide-
as, I am going to try in the lectures that follow to develop that theme, that
is that the notions of true and false, like the notion of information, are no-
tions which do not enable one to describe semantic reality, even if they are
notions which belong to the way the word meaning and its equivalents are
used in ordinary language. I think that indeed in ordinary language, that
is to say in the representation that language gives of itself, the word mean-
ing is viewed as referring to a certain description of reality; but I think that
language, here, gives a false image of itself and that the linguist should not
fall into that snare. We have four lectures to try and not to. To avoid doing
so, I am going to develop two theories: on the one hand, the theory of po-
lyphony, which we will be concerned with next time and on the other, topoi
and argumentation theory, which we will be concerned with until the end
of this series of lectures.
