2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A NACLASTIC SUPPLEMENTS
The structural perspective comports, in other words, a jump to a higher logical level,
that of the system in its entirety. The classic definition of language is but a consequence:
“Language is a form and not a substance [because] in language there is nothing but differ-
ences.” 12 Interestingly enough, de Saussure illustrates his position with the help of chess,
an analogy regularly called into play when the fundamental relation among form, substance
and value is at stake. 13
In spite of the common reliance on the same analogy, however, a very different defini-
tion of form is at work in Artificial Intelligence. Instead of being contrasted with substance,
in AI form is opposed to a content which can be assigned to it by an interpretation. The
claim that a (linguistic, logic, etc.) system is formal can be reduced to several distinct as-
sumptions, sometimes called the principle of arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and the
principle of compositionality:
1. single terms can always be properly isolated from the system and successively split
into neatly separated form and content.
2.the system can be properly described at the level of the form (by means of the laws of
composition described in the axioms, i.e. by the rules of the system) and the content
can always be recovered later through an interpretation.
The first consequence of these two principle is that the same formal system can receive
11. Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1961) 54. Louis Hjelmslev’s “algebraic” interpretation of de Saussure has sometimes been contrasted
with Jakobson’s approach, which is easier to integrate with an historic view of language evolution: for
Hjelmslev, so goes the claim, the historical evolution of a (linguistic) system is always subordinated
to the formal possibilities that the a-historic structure embodies, whereas for Jakobson the structure is
the product of the its evolution. Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation of structuralism seems to occupy an intermediate
position, in spite of his close personal relationship with Roman Jakobson, insofar as he insists,
on the one hand, on the logical priority of the structure over its historical evolution while he
stressing, at the same time, the impossibility to abstract from the ”substance of expression.” I will
come back to this latter point below in sec. 4. "Structure and Substance". For a comparison of Louis
Hjelmslev’s and Roman Jakobson’s approaches see Jorgen Dines Johansen, “Il ne faut pas oublier le
pain: Signification and Value in the Structuralist and Glossematic Conceptions of the Sign,” Journal
of Pragmatics, 9, 5 (1985) 567-590; Krystof Pomian, “Struttura,” Enciclopedia Einaudi (Torino: Einaudi,
1981) v. 13, 723-764.
12. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours …, 169; Engl tr. 120.
13. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours..., 43, 153-54 and especially the whole section 4 of chp.III, part.1, 125
ff; Engl. tr. 87 ff. For a discussion of the relevance of the chess image in Saussure, see Tullio de Mauro,
Introduzione alla Semantica (Bari: Laterza, 1965) 165-202; John Hewson, “Saussure's Game of
Chess,” Papers from the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association, A.M.
Kinloch, and A.B. House, eds., (Fredericton, Can.: New Brunswick University Press, 1980) 108-116.