Naming Things

In language, words are just a linguistic unit that we cannot see or touch, but we use them to refer to something (name things). The words in a language are particles that we tend to use to call concrete stuff in the world, which is a mistake as the majority of these particles are abstracts, and we don’t have a physical unit to refer to (excepting the proper nouns); we also have some of the words that help in a language to fill or to complete the meaning of a sentence, but they don’t refer to objects, for that reason they are just function words. How things are named is kind of complicated because language does not refer only to material objects, or it does not refer only to abstract things, but it refers to both.

For Pierce, giving a name to things goes beyond identifying the ones that we can see or touch, but it is also for the ones that are in our minds, and we cannot touch; those things receive a linguistic unit in order to name it and to don’t lose our purpose of communication.

For Saussure, the objects will always be there despite having a specific name to call them; because what matters for him is the concept that each of the objects represents, and of course their purpose. We are reducing the function and the reason to be of language if we think that it exists just to name things and ideas or concepts.