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The Descriptivists

Descriptivist theory of names is a view of the nature of the meaning and reference of proper names generally attributed to Gottob Frege and Bertrand russell. The theory consists essentially in the idea that the meanings (semantic contents) of names are identical to the descriptions associated with them by speakers, while their referents are determined to be the objects that satisfy these descriptions.

In the 1970s, this theory came under strong attack from Causaul theorists such as Saul Kripke, Hilary putnam and others. However, it has seen something of a revival in recent years, especially under the form of what are called two-dimensional semantic theories. This latter trend is exemplified by the theories of David chalmers, among others

A theory is by definition something which concentrates on the relatively constant factors in the range of phenomena which it it concerned, while ignoring the many features that are peculiar to single individual instances. descriptivist successors emphasized the diversity found in human languages.

In other words for the descriptivist the true theory of language was true was no theory of language which as I say makes it difficult to write at length about their theory.

Descriptivist linguistis tended to react in one of two ways. some of them took the tack that linguistic analysis was a matter not of discovering structure that existed independently of linguistics researches but rather of inventing structure which the linguistics imposed on the language under study. they saw linguistics as concerned with hocus pocus rather than god truth.

the descriptivist would not have made to move of rejectiving phoneme theory, because he did not think of linguistics as emboying a set of theories about human language in general which might be right or wrong and it was therefore difficultfor him to recogniza what had happened when he met counter-example toone of the beliefs which were tacitly implied by to his analytic practice.

Behaviorism Skinner

Behaviorism

Behaviorism (or behaviourism), also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a phicology of philosofy based on the proposition that all things that organisms do including acting, thinking and feeling can and should be regarded as behaviors , and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior patterns.

Is  a principle of scientific method: a rule which says that the only things that may be used to confirm or refute a scientific theory are interpersonally observable phenomena rather than say,people's introspections or intitutions.

Is primarily concerned with observable behaviour, as opposed to internal events.


Behaviourims in this methodological sense is wholly desirable. Although I have poited out,above, that logical positivism is no longer the regning pholosophy of science, the arguments for behaviorist method are unaffected by the fall of positivism.


Many behaviourist pschologist, however, consufed the methodological issue with a matter of substantive belief. this attitude on the part of some behaviourist is illogical and laughable when as sometimes it leads to the spectacle of the psychologist heroically trying to convince himself that he really is the mindless zombie which he thinks he ought to be.

Social Fact by Émile Durkheim

A social fact is every was of acting,fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independet of its invididual manifestations.

—Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method

Durkheim's work revolved around the study of social facts, a term he coined to describe phenomena that have an existance in and of themselves, are not bound to the actions of individuals, but have a coercive influence upon them. Durkheim argued that social facts have, sui generis, an indepdent existence greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that compose society. Only coercive power on the various poeple composing society, as it can sometimes be observed in the case of formal laws ang religulations, but also in situations implying the presence of informal rules, such as religious, rituals or famliy norms.

Durkheim's discovery of social facts was seen as significant because it  promised to make it possible to study the behaviour of entire societies, rather that just of particular individuals. modern sociologist refer to Durkheim's studies for two quite different purposes.

 

Durkheim made two main distintions between social facts- material and nonmaterial social, facts.

Material facts, he explained, have to do with the physical social structures which exerts influence on the indiviual, it is something that can be touched emerging because of society's shared belief that it serves a purpose. 

Nonmaterial socual facts are the values, norms and the other conceptually held beliefs.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Émile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim  is considered by many to be the father of sociology.  He is credited with making sociology a science, and having made it part of the French academic curriculum as "Science Sociale". During his lifetime, Emile Durkheim gave many lectures, and published an impressive number of sociological studies on subjects such as religion, suicide, and all aspects of society.

Our website covers the life of this great thinker, and also includes a complete online version of his "De la division du travail social" (The Division of Labor in Society), in its original French language form,  in which he introduced  the concept of "anomie". The Division of Labor in Society is one of the four most important of Durkheim's works which also include, "Les Règles de la méthode sociologique" (The Rules of Sociological Method), Le Suicide: étude de sociologie" (Suicide : A Study in Sociology), and  "Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse" (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life).

We hope our website will be helpful in providing you with some insight as to who this great thinker really was, and how his scientific approach would forever change the way we would study human society.

In addition, we have included a complete Emile Durkheim Bibliography, a list of online resources, and a selection of quotes from his works.  We plan on adding more study materials in the near future, as they become available.

Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913 was born in Geneva into a family of well-known scientists. He studied Sanskrit and comparative linguistics in Geneva, Paris, and Leipzig, where he fell in with the circle of young scholars known as the Neogrammarians.

The study of languages as system existing at given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics.

Saussure lectured at the École Pratique des Hautes in Paris from 1881 to 1891, before returning to a chair at Geneva; all his publications, and almost all his teaching, throughout his career dealt with historical rather than with synchronic linguistics, and indeed with detailed analysis of theorical discourse for which he is now famous.

In 1913, he died, without having published any of this theorical material. Two of his colleagues, however, Charles Bally andAlbert Sechehave, who had been prevented by their own teaching duties from hearing Saussure's lectures on general linguistics, decided to reconstruct them from notes takes by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1916), was the vehicle by which Saussure's thought became known to the scholary world, and it is in virtue of his one document that Saussure is recognized as the father of twentieth-century linguistics.

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The study of language

1. Why   were 19th   century linguists so interested in historical linguistics?

The 19th century concern with reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, and making hypotheses about the way it split into the various modern languages.   was encouraged by the general intellectual climate of the times. Darwin published his famous “Origin of Species “ theory of the evolution , natural attempt the evolution of language.

 2. Why is  de  Saussure  an  important figure in linguistics?

 Ferdinand de Saussure  “the father of modern linguistics“ “Course in  General Linguistics “. His contribution  “all  language items are essentially interlinked“

3.    What  are  discovery  procedures?

Ultimate goal of linguistics  was the perfection of discovery procedures

A set of principles which would enable a linguist to “ discover “  in a foolproof

way the linguist  units of an unwritten language. Linguistics called

“structuralists “. 

4. What  is  a  generative  grammar,  and  how  does it  differ from a  descriptive  grammar ?

  

Generative grammar = set of statements or rules which specify which sequences  of a language are  possible and which are imposible.

Descriptive  grammar =  linguistics concentrated on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten  languages.