Derrida dispute with John Searle  

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In 1972 Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context", an essay on J. L. Austin's speech act theory; following a critique of this text by John Searle in his 1977 essay Reiterating the Differences, Derrida wrote in the same year Limited Inc abc ..., a long defense of his original argument.

The substance of Searle's criticism of Derrida in relation to topics in the philosophy of language —referenced in Derrida's Signature Event Context—was that Derrida had no apparent familiarity with contemporary philosophy of language nor of contemporary linguistics. Searle explains, "When Derrida writes about the philosophy of language he refers typically to Rousseau and Condillac, not to mention Plato. And his idea of a "modern linguist" is Benveniste or even Saussure." Searle describes Derrida's philosophical knowledge as pre-Wittgensteinian—that is to say, disconnected from the tradition established by Frege and continued through the work of Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, Quine—and consequently naive and misguided, concerned with issues long-since resolved or otherwise found to be non-issues.

Searle argues that the ideas upon which deconstruction is founded are essentially a consequence of a series of conceptual confusions made by Derrida as a result of his outdated knowledge or are merely banalities. For example, Derrida's conception of iterability and its alleged "corrupting" effect on meaning stems from Derrida's ignorance of the type–token distinction that exists in current linguistics and philosophy of language. As Searle explains, "Most importantly, from the fact that different tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions, that is, different speaker meanings, nothing of any significance follows about the original speaker meaning of the original utterance token." According to Searle, the consistent pattern of Derrida's rhetoric is: (a) announce a preposterous thesis, e.g. "nothing exists outside of text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte); (b) when challenged on (a) respond that you have been misunderstood and revise the claim in (a) such that it becomes a truism, e.g. ″"il n'y a pas de hors-texte" means nothing else: there is nothing outside contexts"; (c) when the reformulation from (b) is acknowledged then proceed as if the original formulation from (a) was accepted. The revised idea—for example—that everything exists in some context is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim—nothing exists outside of text—had been established. Searle wrote in The New York Review of Books that he was surprised by "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."

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