I don’t know if this is necessarily the done thing to address someone directly on ILP, so my apologies in advance if this is considered poor form (and moderators please feel free to delete or move as you see fit), but there is (I hope) a subtantive philosophical query at stake that may well be of interest to others, hence not simply taking this directly to PM.
Mastriani, I wanted to pick up on an observation you made in the “final answers” thread, but which I didn’t feel was appropriate to raise there, to wit:
I wonder if you would mind elaborating this as it is an issue of great interest to me (partly as a result of my concern for Derrida, but also given work I have done on social science in fin-de-siecle France). It especially interests me given what I read in the following article:
revue-texto.net/Saussure/Saussure.html
(Etudes → Bouquet, Après un siècle, les manuscrits de Saussure reviennent bouleverser la linguistique)
Now, accepting that this text is in French, allow me to offer a swift precis. Basically, the author discusses the limited perspective on Saussure which we have from the Course in General Linguistics (which was not written by Saussure himself, of course), but which has been thrown into a crisis of sorts by the discovery of a manuscript for a text of Saussure’s by the title Of the Double Essence of Language (translating roughly), which reveals a hitherto largely ignored “philosophical” bent to Saussure’s theories. As a consequence, the article suggests two conclusions that need to be drawn here: 1) that Saussure opposed the “scientific ideality” adhered to by most linguists; 2) that the best methodological strategy was for linguistics to open semiology to the insights of the other social and human sciences.
Given your referencing of the publication which contains this “undiscovered” Saussurian text - the Writings on General Linguistics - I would be intrigued to hear more with respect to your earlier assertion.