The persistent habit of denouncing a superstition and look to its polar opposite

Take, for example, the series of words used in English for the temperature of water. The full spectrum of temperature goes from 0 degrees to 100 degrees Celsius, but the number of different temperature readings is infinite; our choice of one hundred points on the scale is already a simplification for our convenience, and an arbitrary one, in that we could choose ten or twenty or any other number. But when we then use the words cold, warm, hot, and scalding, we are simplifying even further. Warm water is, then, in one sense not a fact of nature; it represents instead a decision of the English language to cut up the spectrum in a particular, arbitrary way. There is no concept warmness outside of the language, and the meaning of that word derives not primarily from its reflecting reality but rather from its place in the system of terms, its differentiating warm from hot. Interestingly, the arbitrariness (in Saussure’s defined case) is further hightlighted if we look at the closely related cognates in German. For while the words may look the same, they are not; the transition from the German word warm to heiss occurs very much further up the scale than is the case in the transition from warm to hot. The transition marks the upper end of the comfort zone in German (heisses Wasser is almost too hot) while it marks the lower end in English (hot water is hot enough). An English speaker who learns the similar German words without realizing that the two systems are different is likely to get hurt. A German speaker, on the other hand, going at the matter from the other direction, is likely to end up with a bath he will think rather too cold. What, then, is the concept warmness of water? It is a creation of the English language, a decision on its speakers’ part to group together and regard as equivalent for a certain purpose everything from roughly 90 degrees to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Water itself does not dictate such a choice, but only the arbitrary system of a given language; and it is the transition point, to cold and to hot, and thus the differences between the three terms, that determine meaning.
It is easy to draw completely false conclusions from Saussure’s argument. For example: the fact that warmness as a concept is a creation of the English language does not mean that warmness has nothing to do with reality or that statements that include reference to warmness are only statements about the English language, not about the world. On the contrary, variations in temperature must exist and be perceptible to allow the contrast between warm and hot to mean anything. If the words only told us something about English without also telling us what the actual conditions were that made the use of one rather than the other an appropriate and correct use of English, then they could not tell us anything about English either: English would not exist. It works both ways: the word warm gives us information about our language only given our recognizing temperature variations. And the word warm gives us information about the world only given our ability to understand and use English. It is just as wrong to say that warmth is simply a fact of nature as it is to say that warmth is simply a fact of nature as it is to say that warmth is simply a fact about language; and the greatest error of all would be to assume that the falsity of the first of these alternatives required us to turn to the second. But as we shall see, this is a typical deconstructive error – one engendered by the persistent habit of denouncing a superstition and look to its polar opposite in order to complete the denunciation. Unfortunately, these two positions are not opposites, in the sense that one must be right if the other is wrong, but instead equivalents, being two different versions of the same logical error.
An equally false conclusion, only possible if Saussure’s point is completely misunderstood, is that the arbitrariness of the sign makes meaning arbitrary in the sense of indeterminate. To the contrary: it is precisely the fact that the conceptual system of English is the common property of it speakers (i.e., that all in a sense agree to make the same arbitrary decision) that gives its words any meaning at all. As Saussure himself puts it, “The word arbitrary … should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker (we shall see below that the individual does not have the power to change a sign in any way once it has been established in the linguistic community),” and “The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence today solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself, the individual is incapable of fixing a single value.” Arbitrariness in this sense, then refers not to randomness but to the reverse, to the fact that there is a definite agreement on the particular system of terms to be used and on how they are to be used. It does not mean that the meaning of a given word is arbitrary, for unless that word has a place in a system of terms, there is no system, no agreement, no meaning, and thus no language and no communication.
This brief exposition has been designed to give a sense of what Saussure means when he says that in language there are no positive terms (i.e., terms with inherent meaning outside the system) but only differences – like the difference between warm and hot – with meaning established by those differences.

Deconstruction and language [fragment]
uit: Against deconstruction - John M. Ellis