Topical Guide 855
Mark Dorset
Philosophical Concepts: Noumenon and Phenomenon
Language: Linguistic Concepts: Langue and Parole
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 35:
“I became obsessed with a small but pregnant notion: that every representation is a misrepresentation—an inadequate attempt to replicate an ideal residing in a collective consciousness.”
“Gosh.”
“There’s an equivalent of this idea in linguistics,” he said […]. “It’s the notion that every articulation of a speech sound is an imperfect actualization of an ideal sound that all the speakers of a language hold in their collective understanding of the language, and there’s proof that this ideal actually exists, even though it’s never uttered, because it’s always imperfectly uttered. Can you guess what that is?”
“Hmm,” I said, as if the answer had been lost, along with most of my knowledge of linguistics, during the time I’d spent locked in the studio, breathing turpentine fumes.
“It’s the fact that people who speak the language can understand one another,” he said triumphantly. “Their imperfect articulations are good enough to allow their listeners to find the corresponding ideal speech sound in their unconscious understanding of the language, and since there’s a meaning associated with each ideal sound, there you have it—understanding, even though the utterance is imperfect.”
In philosophy, a noumenon […] is knowledge posited as an object that exists independently of human sense. The term noumenon is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses. Immanuel Kant first developed the notion of the noumenon as part of his transcendental idealism, suggesting that while we know the noumenal world to exist because human sensibility is merely receptive, it is not itself sensible and must therefore remain otherwise unknowable to us. In Kantian philosophy, the noumenon is often associated with the unknowable “thing-in-itself” (German: Ding an sich). However, the nature of the relationship between the two is not made explicit in Kant’s work, and remains a subject of debate among Kant scholars as a result.
Wikipedia, “Langue and Parole”:
Langue and parole is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics.
The French term langue (‘[an individual] language’) encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system; it is independent of, and pre-exists, the individual user. It involves the principles of language, without which no meaningful utterance, or parole, would be possible. […]
Parole, in typical translation, means ‘speech.’ Saussure, on the other hand, intended for it to mean both the written and spoken language as experienced in everyday life; it is the precise utterances and use of langue. Therefore, parole, unlike langue, is as diverse and varied as the number of people who share a language and the number of utterances and attempts to use that language.
See also:
Philosophical Concepts: The Harmony of the Spheres TG 92; Das Ding an Sich TG 570
Language TG 11; Dialect, Slang, Idiolect, Shibboleths, Jargon TG 137, TG 659, TG 754, TG 832; Slang, Insults, Terms of Abuse TG 140; Slang TG 169; Languages: Learning and Translating TG 393; Idiolect, Private Meanings and References, Code Words TG 373; Idioms: Tug the (One’s) Forelock TG 459; Technical TG 652, Academic, Gibberish TG 492; Language in Translation: Russian to English TG 495; Idioms: English: “It’s Greek to me.” TG 595; Transformations Attendant to the Assimilation of Non-English “Loan Words” in American English, e.g., From Bologna to Baloney TG 624
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