Quelle méthode pour la linguistique ? Cassirer et la naissance du structuralisme.

Abstract

The following paper introduces the translation of a lecture given by Ernst Cassirer to the New York Linguistic Circle in 1945, entitled “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics”. In this lecture, Cassirer proposes a genealogy of the structural approach in modern linguistics, tracing the problem back to the epistemological debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about the constitution of the life sciences. In our view, Ernst Cassirer’s lecture presents twofold interests. Firstly, it reflects the unity of Cassirer’s work, since the author uses concepts for which he laid the foundations as early as 1910 in Substance and Function. Secondly, it explains the methodological specificity of the cultural sciences, based on a conceptual genealogy of the method that was emerging in the linguistic circles of the time. We will present the different stages of Cassirer’s argument, from the redefinition of the concept of necessity in the linguistic field, through the analogy between science of life and science of language. Finally we will question the place given to the notion of structure in Cassirer’s philosophy.