Page 33 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 33
Lecture II
out the form? If you like, but the secretary has typed the form because a
member of the school staff has dictated the text to her. And as for the per-
son who has dictated the text, he or she has not invented the text either: to
draft the text, he or she has followed the general directives set out by the ed-
ucation authorities. So, it is very difficult to say who has actually produced
that utterance. Is it the secretary? a member of the school staff ? myself ?
The identification of the producer here is no simple matter.
I take another example to show how uncertain a notion the producer is.
Sociologists have shown in what seems to me to be an altogether conclusive
way that most of what we say consists merely in repeating things we have
heard before. Personally, I find it extraordinarily striking to see that three
quarters, perhaps even more, of what we say is a mere repetition of what we
have heard others say. For example, when I go on the underground in Par-
is, I enjoy listening to people’s conversations, and I notice that those con-
versations merely reproduce newspaper headlines. Quite naturally, I say to
myself: “This one’s repeating what I read in Le Monde, that one’s repeating
things I saw written in Le Figaro” and so on. So, who really produces the
utterances of people on the underground? In a certain sense, they are; but
in another sense, it is Le Figaro, Le Monde, and very often newspapers far
worse than either Le Monde or Le Figaro.
The last example on this point. I read in a newspaper recently the re-
sults of an inquiry on the theme “What do the French know?” The au-
thor of that inquiry was shocked by the results of his work because they
made out the French to be incredibly ignorant people: especially, it came
out that three quarters of French people did not even know that the Earth
revolves around the Sun. The journalist was shocked by this state of affairs.
Well, what astonishes me in this business is not that three quarters of the
French people do not know that but that a quarter of them should! Be-
cause, if you stop and think, I think that there is no-one here, in this room,
myself included, who really knows that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
To know that would be to have some reasons to believe it. If someone asked
me to prove that the Earth revolves around the Sun, even to give arguments
in favour of that conclusion, for my part, I would not really know what
to say. Besides, one would have to know exactly what “The Earth revolves
around the Sun” means. That is not clear at all. When we say “The Earth re-
volves around the Sun”, we are merely repeating something we have learnt
at school but we have no inkling as to what it means. We cannot therefore
say that intellectually, we really are the producers of that utterance. We are
merely parrots.
out the form? If you like, but the secretary has typed the form because a
member of the school staff has dictated the text to her. And as for the per-
son who has dictated the text, he or she has not invented the text either: to
draft the text, he or she has followed the general directives set out by the ed-
ucation authorities. So, it is very difficult to say who has actually produced
that utterance. Is it the secretary? a member of the school staff ? myself ?
The identification of the producer here is no simple matter.
I take another example to show how uncertain a notion the producer is.
Sociologists have shown in what seems to me to be an altogether conclusive
way that most of what we say consists merely in repeating things we have
heard before. Personally, I find it extraordinarily striking to see that three
quarters, perhaps even more, of what we say is a mere repetition of what we
have heard others say. For example, when I go on the underground in Par-
is, I enjoy listening to people’s conversations, and I notice that those con-
versations merely reproduce newspaper headlines. Quite naturally, I say to
myself: “This one’s repeating what I read in Le Monde, that one’s repeating
things I saw written in Le Figaro” and so on. So, who really produces the
utterances of people on the underground? In a certain sense, they are; but
in another sense, it is Le Figaro, Le Monde, and very often newspapers far
worse than either Le Monde or Le Figaro.
The last example on this point. I read in a newspaper recently the re-
sults of an inquiry on the theme “What do the French know?” The au-
thor of that inquiry was shocked by the results of his work because they
made out the French to be incredibly ignorant people: especially, it came
out that three quarters of French people did not even know that the Earth
revolves around the Sun. The journalist was shocked by this state of affairs.
Well, what astonishes me in this business is not that three quarters of the
French people do not know that but that a quarter of them should! Be-
cause, if you stop and think, I think that there is no-one here, in this room,
myself included, who really knows that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
To know that would be to have some reasons to believe it. If someone asked
me to prove that the Earth revolves around the Sun, even to give arguments
in favour of that conclusion, for my part, I would not really know what
to say. Besides, one would have to know exactly what “The Earth revolves
around the Sun” means. That is not clear at all. When we say “The Earth re-
volves around the Sun”, we are merely repeating something we have learnt
at school but we have no inkling as to what it means. We cannot therefore
say that intellectually, we really are the producers of that utterance. We are
merely parrots.
