Jack Kausch
Nov 5 · 3 min read

Against CHAIRS:

When does a chair become a stool?

It happens in every semantics seminar. The conversation can only go on so long before, either: (1) "Does the set of all sets contain itself?" or (2) "The only way to define the meaning of a word is to define the set of all properties the word entails, such as the set of all objects that obtain for the properties of [chair]."

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an open secret that there is no such set of properties that is sufficient. What is less clear is what quirk of the collective unconscious has caused everyone to illustrate this principle with the word 'chair.'

My own Semantics professor at University would always take this opportunity to illustrate the fundamental vagueness of any proposition. "We can define a chair as 'something you sit on with four legs' and yet there are stools that you sit on with four legs. So we could say 'four legs and has a back' but what about couches, and so on." I am quite literally paraphrasing my dear friend Ronnie as he used to waffle on in Lexical Semantics. (Which contrary to his impression it seems I did take something from)

Why chairs? I don't know. Ronnie seemed to think it had something to do with the term's ambiguity, that you could also say "The Chair of X", and that it had something to do with the imagery of a throne - but this is probably because he was head of the department, and had his anxieties wrapped up in that kind of chairing all the time.

Whatever it is, anyone who is dealing with the inherent vagueness of De Sausurre's signified encounters the chair at some point or another. Which leaves us to deal with what the chair actually is.

The most basic thing about Sausurre is that the signifier and the signified do not touch what we commonly refer to in everyday experience as "objective reality." This is what the philosophers tell us at least. We are supposed to understand the signifier and signified as existing in an entirely ideal landscape, where the signifier is a word and the signified is a concept.

Which tells us absolutely nothing seeing as there is no such thing as an unmediated concept any more than there is "a thing in itself." So what is the concept? Most people admit that it's a representation. How do you depict a representation? By drawing it, stupid.

Which should underline the very subtle point that there is something visual about concepts themselves. That's another matter.

Then we have the word 'chair' which is a set of phones. How do they combine? From an underlying semantic logic that is obscured to us now, but that by necessity has a harmonious link to the conceptual representation. If you can understand that, you can understand what a name actually is.

The implication is, historically this link was transparent rather than opaque. Quite a few people have thought so. Your task then becomes excavating, or revealing the earlier harmony inherent in the word-meaning pair. At least, this is what Owen Barfield thought.

Why chairs though? What is the perverse logic here? Psychology would teach us of some sublimation of a libidinous quirk, but I am content to ascribe it to the angels and leave it at that.

For the remainder of this assault on CHAIRS we have only three questions left to answer:

  1. What are [chairs]?

2. What are 'chairs’?

3. What are C-H-A-I-R-S?

  1. The Archetype of Chair [chairs]:

A throne. A seat. A place of reclining. Purchase of royal power. The symbol of authority. Position within the community. Place from which one speaks in negotiation. Confers rights and responsibilities.

2. The Word Chair, 'chairs’:

A word which refers to all objects which embody a place where one sits under certain conditions.

3. The sounds Ch, Air, S; C-H-A-I-R-S:

The energy type is palatal approximant, followed by diphthong of vowels [a] and [i] ending in rhoticity, followed by a sibilant. Energy of sibilant in English: plural. Energy of dipthong: atmospheric. Energy of approximant: lion. (Colours: pink, white, gray)

In (3) we find that the lion energy in 'Ch' is the reason why we are associating 'chair' with [chair] because lions are symbols of authority, and chairs are thrones. This also tells us about our bizarre semantic obsession with the word 'chair' in the English language. To understand the connection of lion with throne, and authority and its consequences, we can understand quite easily, WHEN A CHAIR IS NOT A CHAIR, AND WHEN IT IS SIMPLY, A STOOL.

I rest my case, everyone.