200 – Analytical language 2: rhetorical strategies
particularly in the natural sciences when a technical term is predefined by the rules of a formal system. In the humanities and social
sciences the propensity of a word to equivocate, for its boundaries to
be ‘fuzzy’, is increasingly being conceded.
What does one do, for example, with a word like ‘sanction’?
Used as a noun it often (not always) refers to a prohibition:
The United Nations has imposed economic sanctions on country X.
Used as a verb, it usually means quite the opposite – a permission:
The United Nations sanctions the use of military force under certain
circumstances.
It is therefore quite easy to get in a mental whirl if we combine
elements of these two sentences:
The United Nations sanctions the use of economic sanctions against
country X.
Many post-structuralist writers have followed the example of the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida in thus ‘deconstructing’ the definitions of terms used in the humanities and social sciences, demonstrating how the opposite meaning of a word is often implicit in its
ordinarily accepted meaning. He does this with words as ordinary
and hitherto uncontroversial to many humanities and social science
disciplines as ‘speech’, ‘structure’, ‘centre’ (remember this one from
our example in chapter 6 on Fredric Jameson’s views concerning late
capitalism and postmodernism, pp. 140–1) and ‘context’. More conventionally, Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976, 1983) gives an excellent
insight into the shifting sands of meaning in many of those words
with which you will constantly have to deal.
particularly in the natural sciences when a technical term is predefined by the rules of a formal system. In the humanities and social
sciences the propensity of a word to equivocate, for its boundaries to
be ‘fuzzy’, is increasingly being conceded.
What does one do, for example, with a word like ‘sanction’?
Used as a noun it often (not always) refers to a prohibition:
The United Nations has imposed economic sanctions on country X.
Used as a verb, it usually means quite the opposite – a permission:
The United Nations sanctions the use of military force under certain
circumstances.
It is therefore quite easy to get in a mental whirl if we combine
elements of these two sentences:
The United Nations sanctions the use of economic sanctions against
country X.
Many post-structuralist writers have followed the example of the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida in thus ‘deconstructing’ the definitions of terms used in the humanities and social sciences, demonstrating how the opposite meaning of a word is often implicit in its
ordinarily accepted meaning. He does this with words as ordinary
and hitherto uncontroversial to many humanities and social science
disciplines as ‘speech’, ‘structure’, ‘centre’ (remember this one from
our example in chapter 6 on Fredric Jameson’s views concerning late
capitalism and postmodernism, pp. 140–1) and ‘context’. More conventionally, Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976, 1983) gives an excellent
insight into the shifting sands of meaning in many of those words
with which you will constantly have to deal.