Absent referent
Encyclopedia
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, and is the condition of a sign
Sign (linguistics)
There are many models of the linguistic sign . A classic model is the one by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. According to him, language is made up of signs and every sign has two sides : the signifier , the "shape" of a word, its phonic component, i.e...
that has an empty, absent, non-existent, paradoxical, hypothetical, supernatural, or undefined referent. The idea is used in a number of disciplines.
Memorials
William Mitchell RamseyWilliam Ramsey
William Ramsey may refer to:*William Marion Ramsey , American politician and judge in Oregon*William of Ramsey, 13th century English Benedictine monk of Croyland Abbey*William Ramsey , 14th century English architect...
said of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a national memorial in Washington, D.C. It honors U.S. service members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War, service members who died in service in Vietnam/South East Asia, and those service members who were unaccounted for during the War.Its...
,"Because each of the 58,022 names points to an absent referent the wall's script remains a half-formed discourse, or signifiers in search of a concept to signify."
Politics
In a variety of political contexts, the "absent referent" is a phrase used to call attention to some group or constituency that the author feels is being unjustly ignored. This usage of the phrase appears to arise out of Frankfurt SchoolFrankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
or deconstructionist terminology, and is usually associated with the political Left. For example, in a paper entitled The Sexual Politics of Sneakers: "Common Ground" and Absent-Referent Stories in the Nike Debate, David M. Boje argues that there is an absent referent in the debate between Nike
Nike, Inc.
Nike, Inc. is a major publicly traded sportswear and equipment supplier based in the United States. The company is headquartered near Beaverton, Oregon, which is part of the Portland metropolitan area...
and its critics, "namely, the workers themselves."
Animal rights
The idea of the absent referent was used by vegan feminist Carol J. Adams to explain a psycho-social detachment that occurs between the consumer and the "OtherOther
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
" when people eat meat. She writes :
Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The "absent referent" is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the "moo" or "cluck" or "baa" away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone.
The sentence as sign
Generally, a written symbol or spoken word is considered the sign, but a cluster of words can also be considered signs with a referent idea. However, not every combination of words has meaning or a referent idea. Some combinations of words are nonsensical and constitute what some call "word saladWord Salad
Word Salad is a 1979 debut album by Fischer-Z. John Watts and Steve Skolnik formed the band in 1976 whilst at Brunel University. John Watts had been travelling up and down the country playing the club circuit. Fischer-Z was playing a crossover of the New Wave, Punk and Reggae genres...
". Linguist Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
is famous for his phrase, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical. The term was originally used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory"...
", which is used to demonstrate the idea between syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
and meaning.
American Sign Language
In American Sign LanguageAmerican Sign Language
American Sign Language, or ASL, for a time also called Ameslan, is the dominant sign language of Deaf Americans, including deaf communities in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico...
, there is a notion of a space present referent and a space absent referent. When the referent of a pronoun is present in the room as the person performing the ASL intrepretation (such as "I" or "she"), it is acceptable practice to gesture to the person or object. However, in the space absent case, a gesture is made into empty space.
Blasphemy
Occurring in some sects of JudaismJudaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
, and in other religions, there is a practice to substitute the symbol "G-d" for the written name of the Divine. This act both recognizes the sin of blasphemy
Blasphemy
Blasphemy is irreverence towards religious or holy persons or things. Some countries have laws to punish blasphemy, while others have laws to give recourse to those who are offended by blasphemy...
, and simultaneously tries to circumvent it. While writing the actual name of God is considered sinful by certain sects, writing "G-d" apparently is permissible, because it is not a direct pointer to the Divine. It is a direct pointer to nothing, and is thus example of the Absent Referent.
The God Concept
In Logical PositivismLogical positivism
Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
, Atheism
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
, Rationalism
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
, Empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
, Epistemology, General Semantics
General Semantics
General semantics is a program begun in the 1920's that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial program launches under the trial names "human engineering" and "humanology," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski fully launched the program as...
, Metalinguistics
Metalinguistics
Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to culture and society. It is the study of dialogue relationships between units of speech communication as manifestations and enactments of co-existence. The neologism 'metalinguistics' emerged between 1950 and...
and related disciplines, there is a suggestion that communicated symbols should represent observable truths. Any symbols which are not pointers to observable truth represent either arbitrary preferences, or meaningless fictions (which the Logical Positivists called metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
).
The written word "God", or the voiced sound of that word, is thus a meaningless symbol, since this allegedly transcendental object cannot be directly observed. Any object which cannot be directly observed is, in fact, hypothetical, conjecture, or perhaps fiction, dream, desire. The symbol "God" is an example of the Absent Referent.
Mathematics and physics
In MathematicsMathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
, the absent referent can be seen by many symbols:
- A numeral or symbol for no quantity, such as "zero", "0"0 (number)0 is both a numberand the numerical digit used to represent that number in numerals.It fulfills a central role in mathematics as the additive identity of the integers, real numbers, and many other algebraic structures. As a digit, 0 is used as a placeholder in place value systems...
, or "nilNilNil is a word commonly used to mean nothing or zero; it is one of several names for the number 0.It may also refer to:- Computer programming :...
", - From set theorySet theorySet theory is the branch of mathematics that studies sets, which are collections of objects. Although any type of object can be collected into a set, set theory is applied most often to objects that are relevant to mathematics...
, the empty setEmpty setIn mathematics, and more specifically set theory, the empty set is the unique set having no elements; its size or cardinality is zero. Some axiomatic set theories assure that the empty set exists by including an axiom of empty set; in other theories, its existence can be deduced...
, or "{}", which refers to a set with no members. - Any symbol which is undefined, such as the number represented by "n/0" (any number divided by zero).
- Any of a number of paradoxParadoxSimilar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
ical objects, such as the "list of all lists" from Russell's ParadoxRussell's paradoxIn the foundations of mathematics, Russell's paradox , discovered by Bertrand Russell in 1901, showed that the naive set theory created by Georg Cantor leads to a contradiction...
.
Physicists have named many hypothetical objects, such as certain subatomic particles, which are predicted by mathematical models but have never been observed.
Implicit vs. Explicit
Any written symbol for the Absent Referent (e.g., {}, "G-D", 0, "null", etc.) is by nature explicit. However, there is also the implicit Absent Referent, where the symbol for the missing thing is also missing. Examples:- "wife" -- A person with self-identity, yet exists relative the "husband" (implicit absent referent)
- "pet" -- Barely a thing of its own right, a "pet" mostly exists in reference to the Owner/Master, implicitly absent referent.
- "bait" -- A mere scrap of flesh of its own right. With "bait", the SelfSelfThe self is an individual person as the object of his or her own reflective consciousness. The self has been studied extensively by philosophers and psychologists and is central to many world religions.-Philosophy:...
of the sacrificed animal is the implicitly absent referent. With the magic of this abstraction away from reality, the symbol "bait", hides many facts: the species of the animal is absent, the gender is absent. Also absent: the game animal the bait is intended to lure, and the fisherman/hunter. - "dog food" -- Scraps of flesh in a can. As with "bait", "dog food", also contains an implicitly absent referent to the Self which was killed, butchered, and its body chopped up and placed into the can. What species? A boy or a girl? How old? How did it live? How was it killed?
See also
- Anaphora (linguistics)Anaphora (linguistics)In linguistics, anaphora is an instance of an expression referring to another. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic--for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent...
- Ferdinand de SaussureFerdinand de SaussureFerdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
- Null subject languageNull subject languageIn linguistic typology, a null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject. Such a clause is then said to have a null subject. Typically, null subject languages express person, number, and/or gender agreement with the referent on the verb,...
- Pro-drop languagePro-drop languageA pro-drop language is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are in some sense pragmatically inferable...
Further reading
- Gaard, Greta. "Vegetarian ecofeminism." Frontiers. Boulder: 2002.Vol.23, Issue 3, p. 117.
- Heinz, Bettina & Lee, Ronald. "Getting down to the meat: The symbolic construction of meat consumption." Communication Studies. West Lafayette: Spring 1998, Vol.49, Issue 1, p. 86.
- Mitchell, Gordon R. "Public Argument Action Resrarch And The Learning Curve Of New Social Movements." Argumentation and Advocacy. River Falls: Spring 2004, Vol.40, Issue 4, p. 209.
- Smith-Harris, Tracey. "There's Not Enough Room to Swing a Cat and There's No Sense Flogging a Dead Horse." ReVision. Washington: Fall 2004, Vol.27, Issue 2, p. 12.