Structuralism is a research program begun in linguistics and extended through anthropology, mathematics, logic, philosophy of science, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, and cognitive psychology. Its orienting claim is that any model of reality must take relations rather than objects as fundamental; if we want to describe something it is both necessary and sufficient to account for the set of relations that constitute it.
Beginning with Saussure’s semantic holism, in which the meaning of any sign can be understood only in relation to language taken as a whole, the human and formal sciences were revolutionized by similar attempts to decompose their objects of study into densely interconnected networks of universalizable relations. This conceptual shift unearthed similarities between previously disparate domains of knowledge, propelling interdisciplinarity in the study of complex and critical issues such as the relation of social structure to political agency, the nature of scientific investigation, the transformations of myth and its function within cultural narratives, the social and developmental basis of rationality, the transformations of grammar as a basis for language, cognitive dimensions of normativity, cybernetics, simulation, and the relationship between models and the phenomena they describe.
What Is Structuralism? seeks to recapture the radical potential of structuralism through both foundational texts and later developments, from Badiou and the post-Althusserian Cercle d’Épistémologie to structuralist methodologies in analytic epistemology, logic, and philosophy of science.
The discussion is open to everyone and no prior familiarity with the subject matter is expected. We’re interested in collaboratively piecing together an understanding of these texts, not dictating an interpretation. We welcome participant input and suggestions for readings.
Future readings could include selections from:
Claude Lévi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth; History and Dialectic
Gilles Deleuze – How Do We Recognize Structuralism?
John Worrall – Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?
Alain Badiou – Theory of the Subject
David Chalmers – Structuralism as a Response to Skepticism
Jacques Lacan – On Structure as an Inmixing Prior to Any Subject Whatsoever
James Ladyman and Don Ross – Every Thing Must Go
Luciano Floridi – Against Digital Ontology
Anthony Wilden – System and Structure
Anna Longo – Gaston Bachelard: From Mathematical Structures to Reality
Noam Chomsky – Syntactic Structures
Stewart Shapiro – Structure and Ontology