deconstruction a demonstration of the incompleteness or incoherence of a philosophical position using concepts and principles of argument whose meaning and use is legitimated only by that philosophical position. A deconstruction is thus a kind of internal conceptual critique in which the critic implicitly and provisionally adheres to the position criticized. The early work of Derrida is the source of the term and provides paradigm cases of its referent. That deconstruction remains within the position being discussed follows from a fundamental deconstructive argument about the nature of language and thought. Derrida’s earliest deconstructions argue against the possibility of an interior ‘language’ of thought and intention such that the senses and referents of terms are determined by their very nature. Such terms are ‘meanings’ or logoi. Derrida calls accounts that presuppose such magical thought-terms ‘logocentric.’ He claims, following Heidegger, that the conception of such logoi is basic to the concepts of Western metaphysics, and that Western metaphysics is fundamental to our cultural practices and languages. Thus there is no ‘ordinary language’ uncontaminated by philosophy. Logoi ground all our accounts of intention, meaning, truth, and logical connection. Versions of logoi in the history of philosophy range from Plato’s Forms through the self-interpreting ideas of the empiricists to Husserl’s intentional entities. Thus Derrida’s fullest deconstructions are of texts that give explicit accounts of logoi, especially his discussion of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. There, Derrida argues that meanings that are fully present to consciousness are in principle impossible. The idea of a meaning is the idea of a repeatable ideality. But ‘repeatability’ is not a feature that can be present. So meanings, as such, cannot be fully before the mind. Selfinterpreting logoi are an incoherent supposition.
Without logoi, thought and intention are merely wordlike and have no intrinsic connection to a sense or a referent. Thus ‘meaning’ rests on connections of all kinds among pieces of language and among our linguistic interactions with the world. Without logoi, no special class of connections is specifically ‘logical.’ Roughly speaking, Derrida agrees with Quine both on the nature of meaning and on the related view that ‘our theory’ cannot be abandoned all at once. Thus a philosopher must by and large think about a logocentric philosophical theory that has shaped our language in the very logocentric terms that that theory has shaped. Thus deconstruction is not an excision of criticized doctrines, but a much more complicated, self-referential relationship.
Deconstructive arguments work out the consequences of there being nothing helpfully better than words, i.e., of thoroughgoing nominalism. According to Derrida, without logoi fundamental philosophical contrasts lose their principled foundations, since such contrasts implicitly posit one term as a logos relative to which the other side is defective. Without logos, many contrasts cannot be made to function as principles of the sort of theory philosophy has sought. Thus the contrasts between metaphorical and literal, rhetoric and logic, and other central notions of philosophy are shown not to have the foundation that their use presupposes.
See also HEIDEGGER , HUSSERL , MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAG. S.C.W.