2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A NACLASTIC SUPPLEMENTS
proposition has to do not with its ‘sense’ (ideal), but with its ‘reference,’ that
is, in the last resort its capacity to correspond to what is[…] 23
We can consider this text as a simple indication of the larger, and more intricate, framework
surrounding the whole debate: a “Continental” philosopher advocating a hermeneutic un-
derstanding of language like Ricoeur criticizes Structuralism by appealing to a theory of
reference that underlies John Searle’s critique of Artificial Intelligence. I will start to dis-
entangle the various issues involved beginning from the first term of the relationship:
Ricoeur’s critique of Lévi-Strauss.
Ricoeur, a philosopher coming from the phenomenological tradition, is willing to ac-
knowledge the merits of the structural approach but he is ready to underline its shortcom-
ings. The most important limitations, he points out, concern the meaning of the structure
governing a given myth or group of myths. The structural organization of thought may be
interesting, in itself, as a study of the different possibilities of mediation of the meaning in-
tentions. But he claims that the true problem that a structural approach will leave unsolved
is the following: how can “structural comprehension instruct a comprehension directed to-
ward the recovery of the signifying intention?” 24 This is a problem only philosophy can
solve, according to Ricoeur, because
while the structuralist explanation seems to encompass almost everything
when synchrony takes place over diachrony, it provides us only a kind of
skeleton, whose abstract character is apparent, when we are faced with an
overdetermined content, a content which does not cease to set us thinking
and which is made explicit only through the series of recoveries by which it
is both interpreted and renewed. (51, my emphasis)
23. Paul Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy (New York: Holmes and Meers, 1979) 265. First edition published
in 1970.
24. Paul Ricoeur, “Structure et herméneutique,” Esprit, 31, 322, nov. 63, 606, previously published as Paul
Ricoeur, “Symbolique et temporalité,” Ermeneutica e tradizione (Atti del Congresso Internazionale,
Roma, gennaio 1963) Archivio di Filosofia, 3, 1963, 12-31 and now in Paul Ricoeur, Le conflit des
interprétations (Paris: Seuil, 1969) 53; Engl. tr.The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
UP, 1974) 39. The quoted issue of Esprit was dedicated to a discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s La
pensée savage and contained also articles by the anthropologist Jean Cuisinier, the linguist Nicolas Ruwet,
and the historian Marc Gaboriau followed by a round table between Lévi-Strauss and the editors
of Esprit (among whom is Ricoeur).