Disalienation and Structuralism

Structuralism, post-structuralism, and the library: de Saussure and Foucault

Purpose – Explores the relevance of structuralism and post-structuralism to the field of library and information science (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a literature-based conceptual analysis of the two philosophical movements, structuralism and post-structuralism, as represented by the seminal figures of Ferdinand de Saussure and Michel Foucault. Findings – The principles of ...

Structuralism, Reloaded

The attempt to institute a viable structuralist explanatory project in the social sciences (in particular anthropology and sociology) has been beset, since its inception, with what some have considered to be insurmountable difficulties. Four such roadblocks deserve mention. 1) The first, I refer to as Piaget’s question [Piaget 1970, 113]: “how do [social] forms acquire structural organization?”...

Biogenetic Structuralism

Structuralism is a movement within the sciences of man holding that the order which we are able to observe in the world is isomorphic with the order that obtains in the observing mind. The correspondences that exist between world and mind are not generally apparent from inspection, but require scrutiny into the "deep structure" that underlies phenomena, a concept first propounded by Ferdinand D...

Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Structuralism, Invariance, and Univalence

The recent discovery of an interpretation of constructive type theory into abstract homotopy theory suggests a new approach to the foundations of mathematics with intrinsic geometric content and a computational implementation. Voevodsky has proposed such a program, including a new axiom with both geometric and logical significance: the Univalence Axiom. It captures the familiar aspect of inform...