Incantation

Language has long been treated as a neutral tool of representation, but theorists have shown that it is nothing of the sort. Saussure revealed that meaning arises only in the difference between signs, not from a fixed relation to reality (Saussure, 1916). Wittgenstein emphasised use over essence: words gain their sense within forms of life, not in private correspondence with objects (Wittgenstein, 1953). Derrida extended this by demonstrating that meaning is always deferred, endlessly sliding through différance rather than arriving at a final point of reference (Derrida, 1967). More recent cognitive linguists such as Lakoff have underlined how metaphors structure thought itself, embedding conceptual categories into everyday speech (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Taken together, these interventions dismantle the assumption that language simply reflects the world: it is a system of differences, practices, and displacements that generate their own unstable coherence.

My own philosophy of language builds on this but insists on its systemic recursion. Language is not a window onto reality but a field that sustains itself through the displacement of meanings across networks of use. Communication does not transmit fixed content but stabilises continuity by reproducing difference. Meaning is distributed, entangled, and always co-constituted by the absence it invokes; words stabilise only through relational contrast, never by standing alone. In this view, large language models merely replicate surface coherence, a recursive resonance of text upon text. What is missing is not more data or greater speed, but the recognition that language itself is a dynamic system of uncertainty — one in which the logic of its own incompleteness is precisely what allows it to endure.

References
Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Saussure, F. de (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne and Paris: Payot.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.