1Even when it pays little attention to its conceptual and methodological foundations, science remains essentially shaped in its results by them. Intent on letting experience speak for itself, the scientist who strives not to distort the facts with preconceived or subjective ideas nonetheless follows a priori tendencies, often unconsciously. These tendencies may prove fruitful, but they risk becoming sterile once they are consciously elevated into immutable principles.
2The development of linguistics—and of the phonetic sciences in particular—seems to illustrate this point. The spirit of the nineteenth century is clearly reflected in the outlook of the linguists of that period. Hermann Paul, for example, was both a historicist and a psychologist. Phonetics, above all, was dominated by nominalism. By nominalism is meant a certain conception of knowledge that presupposes a corresponding conception of reality: it upholds the ideal of a form of knowledge that must approach an infinitely diverse reality composed entirely of individual facts, each distinct from the others. Such a view of reality entails a constant critique of knowledge, which is always too abstract and too general to meet the demands imposed by reality itself.
3It was this nominalism that underpinned the boundless empiricism of the linguistics that preceded our own. In embracing it, science overstepped the limits within which it had confined itself up to the nineteenth century. Concepts grounded in a restricted field of experience had all proven insufficient to encompass the infinity of facts that open up to experience and that must prescribe its orientation for the scientific mind, which is always inclined toward premature conclusions. The discovery of an unlimited field of experience both captivated and dazzled scholars, who came to regard any form of synthesis with suspicion and sought, as far as possible, to eliminate all conceptual presuppositions. Phonetics, in particular, was dominated by this nominalism. It aspired to record everything. It refused to confine itself to the study of sounds “authorized” by usage, since in its thirst for the real it could admit no preference for one fact over another. The sounds produced by all speaking subjects, without exception, were taken to constitute the material of phonetic research; the guiding principle was to exclude no data. Resemblances among individual data were then to serve as the basis for establishing generalities, understood as mere averages. Such was the watchword of empiricism.
4The work of Trubetzkoy and his collaborators brought about a decisive upheaval in these earlier presuppositions. With structuralism replacing the old nominalism, entirely new perspectives were opened up. Let us briefly indicate the principal ones here, before turning to emphasize the binary opposition that characterizes phonic systems.
5First, structuralism argues against nominalism for the reality of the general, which the latter failed to acknowledge. Applied to the domain of sounds, this means that the supposedly absolute reality of sounds in their unlimited variety is not, in fact, absolute, but represents only an aspect that emerges when generality is excluded in advance as something subjective and secondary. Where nominalism assumes that individual realities can be grasped prior to their subsumption under general concepts, it errs in perspective, since the individual is never without the general. What makes sounds into a collection of individual data is precisely the general property they share: that they are all sounds. The search for the individual as such thus rests on the decision to let only the individual count; it does not grasp reality as it is, where the general is present in the individual and the individual in the general. Yet this logical observation alone cannot account for all the fruitfulness of structuralism. Phonetic empiricism had already imposed limits on itself by identifying regularities and averages in the domain of sounds—phenomena that are inconceivable without some notion of generality. In this sense, nominalist empiricism corrects itself as soon as it succeeds in establishing laws. Inductive generalities have never been absent from phonetic research: despite its extreme distrust of general concepts, it inevitably arrived at them. Nor is it necessary to invoke structuralism to demonstrate that both the individual and the general are indispensable to scientific inquiry. The specific merit of structuralism lies elsewhere. Thanks to it, generality is no longer a surprising outcome or an inexplicable property within a world of discrete data, but rather the very foundation for understanding those phenomena themselves. It is here that the true merit of structuralism resides.
6The inductive nominalism of the phoneticians was content simply to register the unlimited plurality of sounds. It did not reject the postulation of inductive generalities; it accepted them, but without attempting to understand either the sounds themselves or the regularities they display. It thus investigated an isolated world of phenomena that presented itself only in the form of inductive generality. This empiricism, which demanded nothing more, could align itself with the empiricism of the natural sciences, which likewise confined themselves to the observation of facts and to inductive generalisation. In this sense, the nominalism of the phonetic sciences was naturalistic: because it did not believe in genuine understanding, it admitted only a secondary, purely formal mode of understanding.
7Structuralism has now gone beyond the naturalistic limitations of earlier phonetics. Traditional phonetics had equated sounds with noises: it observed acoustic phenomena—produced, to be sure, by human organs—but without taking into account the speaking subjects who produced them. It assumed that research would gain in rigor by isolating sounds from the speaker. Indeed, minute observation of sounds, freed from all psychological considerations, does reveal certain particularities that escape those who consider sounds in relation to the speaking subject and its intentions. Yet this knowledge is gained at the cost of an unnoticed shift in the object of inquiry: the observer who detaches sound from its psychological foundations in order to grasp it more precisely ultimately retains only a noise. Thus, in its aspiration to be a precise and exclusive science of sounds, phonetics in fact became a science of noises. Structuralism, by contrast, restored to the sounds of language their proper character as the true object of phonetics. In doing so, it overcame both nominalist and naturalist prejudices.
8In truth, these two merits are inseparable and ultimately amount to a single one. Generality, which empirical nominalism admitted but failed to legitimate, fully reveals its meaning as soon as sounds are reconnected to their psychological bases. The sound produced by a speaking subject is not an ever-variable, individual noise; it is a means of mutual understanding, whose very essence lies in its generality. Structuralism does not deny that the sounds emitted by a given speaker and recorded objectively may be described as noises; but it denies that they are such either for the speaking subject or for the listening subject—and it is precisely in these two subjects that sounds originate. The external observer, who considers the sound in isolation, observes both more and less than what the sound is in linguistic reality: more, insofar as the sound is grasped in its apparent individuality, in its minute differences from other sounds; less, insofar as the observer misses the intended and purposive unity of sounds which, when treated as noises, appear distinct. This unity reveals itself only to an observer who places himself not outside the speaking subjects but within them—who undertakes the same effort of linguistic activity and understanding. Structuralism thus restored introspection to its rightful place. It showed that the linguistic reality of sound is not constituted by what external observation perceives, but by its intimate connection with the consciousness of speaking subjects. The analysis of this consciousness—which is inaccessible to external observation—brings to light the intentional character of spoken sound: linguistic activity produces sounds in accordance with the types prescribed by the system to which it belongs. The recognition of this fact is particularly fruitful, for it eliminates the kind of phonetic behaviorism that underpinned earlier research. Introspection also resolves the problem posed by the undeniable existence of regularities in the flow of sounds. These regularities are the expression of the regulated activity of speaking subjects, which does not consist in the habitual, quasi-automatic reproduction of more or less similar sounds, but in the production of sounds shaped by the system of phonemes shared by all speakers of the same language. In this system, speaking subjects possess a means of mutual understanding toward which all the speaking and listening activities of the members of a given linguistic community are directed.
9It is in this sense that phonology has preserved the general character of phonic phenomena: this character derives directly from the activity of the speaking subject. Since this activity is always oriented toward mutual understanding, it is never a matter of the immediate expression of thoughts and feelings through speech; rather, it must take the form of expression by means of an instrument common to all. The phonic aspect of this instrument is the system of phonemes. Introspection is not confined to individual consciousness. By delving into what is given, it uncovers elements that transcend it, in the sense that these elements belong no more to the speaking subject than to the listening subject. The latter recognizes sounds according to ideal types, just as the former produces them in accordance with those same types. Understanding is merely the reverse side of expression in speech; expression itself is nothing if it is not oriented toward the possibility of being understood. The introspection that brings to light the common and identical system through which subjects understand one another thus reveals a reality that transcends the isolated world of the individual subject and cannot be grasped by situating oneself within that subject alone. From this perspective, phonology has an important contribution to make to the science of intersubjective reality. Through the discovery of the ideal system of phonemes, one can glimpse the possibility of expanding the domain of a reality that precedes any separation between individuals. The phonic system thus leads to the recognition of a shared reality, sustained by the use of common means of expression and from which those very means in turn derive.
10Since intersubjective data are not confined to the phonic aspect of speech, an instructive analogy can be drawn between the shared use of phonemes and that of words and expressions. The nominalism so effectively refuted in phonetics nonetheless persists in semantics, which still tends to approach the realities of meaning from an atomistic and external standpoint. In other words, semantics too often fails to acknowledge the essentially general character of every expression, believing that it can establish—by induction—the general meaning of a word, or at least its “average” meaning. From this perspective, the phonological movement appears destined to enrich other domains of linguistics in which nineteenth-century presuppositions remain at work.
11A deeper analysis of intersubjective understanding would show how language—alongside other social, moral, and cultural values—serves as the vehicle and expression of a spiritual reality that encompasses individuals and provides them with a source of communion and enrichment, without in any way diminishing their individuality. Here, however, we wish to emphasize another property of phonemes: their systematic interrelation, which binds the elements together into a whole whose parts are interconnected as if the whole itself were the product of a single act of thought. It is well known that opposition characterizes the relations between phonemes. This is an empirical fact that cannot be justified by any a priori deduction. That every speaking subject within a linguistic community employs a certain number of sound-types which together constitute the language as a whole, and that these types are identical for all speakers—this alone is a striking fact. It evokes the idea of an unconscious purposiveness that does not end with the human individual but transcends him, providing means of understanding whose simplicity and effectiveness no artificial construction devised by human beings has ever equaled. That an internal order is superadded to this, making the phonemes of a language something more than a chance assemblage, may persuade any reflective thinker that the same unconscious purposiveness governing the human organism is also at work in the natural reality of a given language. It thus becomes legitimate to conceive of language itself as an organ within the larger organism of human society.
12The oppositional character we discover in phonemes—whose origin we do not know, but whose felicitous simplicity and coherence within the totality of a language’s sounds we can observe—leads us from linguistic experience to logic. Once logic has clarified the nature of opposition, it will be useful to return to the particular, material opposition revealed by phonological experience. Opposition as such, abstracted from any material factor, is of an eminently logical nature: it is a relation that is not observed but thought. Opposites come in pairs, but in a distinctive sense. Their duality is not the indeterminate or contingent pairing of two objects arbitrarily brought together by thought. What defines it, rather, is that once one term is given, thought necessarily infers the other—something that does not occur in contingent forms of duality. In a contingent duality, enumeration merely connects the elements, while the content remains entirely external to the synthesis. The first element therefore gives no indication of what the second will be. In the duality of opposition, by contrast, once one term is given, the other—though not given—is evoked by thought, and it could be no other. To the idea of white, only that of black is opposed; to the idea of beauty, that of ugliness. Opposites are thus distinct in content, yet so intimately bound together that the presentation of one immediately calls forth the other. From the standpoint of content, nothing is more distinct—white is more distinct from black than from yellow. From the standpoint of thought, however, nothing is more closely linked, more inseparable: one implies the other; one cannot exist without the other. Opposition thus displays two aspects, themselves opposed in turn: the contents are sharply distinct, yet their distinction is enveloped within a unity that is the very reason for that distinction. The intimate bond between black and white, opposed as they are, derives from the unity of the concept of color, which contains within itself the entire range of variations and differentiates itself to the extremes of black and white. When one considers opposites and the specific variations that accompany them, it becomes clear that it is the unity of the concept that makes the duality possible. This duality is therefore not arbitrary, but oppositional. The distinction between pairs of opposites arises from the way in which the unity of the concept differentiates itself, as a genus divides into species. Yet what allows the concept to maintain its unity even as it differentiates is that the species or variations are not heterogeneous objects arbitrarily set apart from one another. Rather, the unity of the concept is preserved within the diversity of species by the very intimacy of the connection between opposites. What we have so far called an intimate connection could more properly—and more logically—be called the unity of opposites. It is just as accurate to say that opposites manifest the unity of the concept to which they belong as it is to say that they are one when considered from the standpoint of the concept that gives them existence. They are different, even opposed; yet from another point of view, they are one. This difference in perspective must be specified. It rests on the distinction between intuition (the German Anschauung) and thought. So long as one remains at the level of sensible intuition, black and white are simply distinct—merely different. When one passes from intuition to thought, however, one says not only that black and white are different, but that they are opposed. Opposition is difference at its extreme, a difference that cannot be surpassed.
13To stop at this point is to become aware of the conceptual nature of the difference between opposites. A closer examination of the relation between the concept and its specifications shows that the concept is the source of the latter, which are neither contingent nor external to it. Rather, the concept itself differentiates into its specifications, and these are nothing other than modes of the concept, accessible to intuition.
14One might suspect that speculation overreaches in its attempt to derive sensible specifications from conceptual unity. It could be objected that, since the concept contains less content than the specifications it is supposed to ground, it cannot serve as their foundation, and that any deduction from the former to the latter is therefore illusory. Setting aside, however, the question of whether classificatory concepts genuinely enable us to understand their specifications, or merely to order them—on the assumption that these are given in advance and provide the content guiding the ascent toward more general concepts—we may note that phonological discussions raise a closely related problem: the priority of opposition with respect to the opposites themselves.
15The phonologist’s experience leads him to discover the phonemes of a language one after another. Then, among certain of the units thus found, he discovers relations of opposition. Thus experience acquaints him with the elements before the relations. But thought, once it has grasped the relations, cannot accept these as secondary without denying its own nature: for thought perceives the possibility of a form of understanding that, starting from the relations, would deduce—or at least elucidate—the elements between which those relations exist. The relation of opposition is particularly conducive to the idea of understanding elements by a deductive route: it is a highly intelligible relation, one that can seem capable of generating the elements, of bringing them forth from itself. It is in this sense that certain phonologists have been able to say that the phonological system is not a set of phonetic elements linked together by relations of opposition, but that these oppositions or distinctions themselves constitute the reality of the system: the phoneme would not be recognized in itself when used; it is recognized only in relation to its opposite. Thus the listening subject recognizes phonemes only insofar as they are distinguished from one another, and by means of this distinction, and not in themselves.
16It seems to us that such phonologists carry a good idea to the point where it comes into conflict with experience. The recognition of intelligible relations should not lead one to forget the material character—the intrinsic content—that distinguishes phonological elements and does not coincide with those relations. If the elements were nothing more than the relations themselves, taken in isolation, it would be impossible to distinguish within a phonological system between two phonemes that stand in a relation of opposition and two others that stand in the same relation: all oppositions within the system would collapse into one. That experience shows several phonemes within a single phonological system to stand in the same relation to one another demonstrates that the elements, as elements, play an essential role, and that the notion of opposition does not exhaust what is opposed. Opposition is a form, but in language it never appears on its own; it always depends upon a content. Without endorsing the extreme and speculative conclusion of those who would identify opposition with the opposites themselves, we may nonetheless recognize that elements bound together by relations of opposition display a high degree of coherence—one that invites reflection on the unconscious thought that seems to preside over phonological systems. This thought appears to have apprehended, within each phonological system, an original vocal material which it distributes among opposed elements. Without this material, neither the elements of the system nor the distinctions between systems could exist.
17The fruitfulness of phonology manifests itself in several respects. It opens the path to a realism of generality capable of satisfying philosophical inquiry; to a form of introspection that reintegrates phonetics within linguistics; and to a metaphysics of human understanding indispensable to the moral sciences. Finally, it directs reflection toward the intelligible structure of the phonological system itself—a structure that seems to be traced by thought, yet is not the product of any individual act of reflection.