They say I got brains but they ain't doing me much good.
They say I got brains but they ain't doing me much good.
or
Why I am still a structuralist
Structuralism is always about something - anthropology, say, or linguistics, with all the compromises implicit in that. For example, a continuum of sounds and mouth positions can never really be fully described by a finite alphabet (however extensive) - phonetics is always implicitly phonemics to some extent; the binary opposition between them is necessarily problematic. Accepting that we deal with models that are always provisional ( spherical horses in a vacuum , as the physicists' celebrated joke and jocular celebration has it) is part of what we mean by science.
When some structuralists aspired to the condition of philosophy post-structuralism was inevitable. Philosophy can be defined as the discourse which refuses to accept itself as provisional. Wittgenstein, for example, not only gave the definitive and final solution to all philosophical problems, he then did it again, only differently. Which is essentially to say that philosophy and Derrida deserve each other.
Besides, as Anthony Gottlieb has pointed out one of the problems with philosophy (although it's not officially a philosophical problem) is that any methodology that shows signs of getting anywhere (as the physical sciences did, for example) by that token becomes something other than philosophy.
By 1921 (but still before Saussure) Sapir had observed that "All
grammars leak." But Sapir was a field linguist - making (descriptive,
necessarily provisional) grammars was his bread and butter. I've
heard it claimed that field linguistics was inhibited by Chomsky as
people waited for the One True Leak-Proof Universal Grammar into which
all observations could subsequently be neatly slotted. They are, of
course, still waiting.