La Théorie du signe d'Hippolyte Taine

The emergence of an energetic movement of criticism oriented towards the status of language brought Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) to publish De l'Intelligence (1870), his philosophical treatise. In his philosophy of language, Taine adopted Condillac's concept of sign. Images, which are a specific type of signs, permit us to imagine things that are not immediately available for experience. Those images, produced by our imagination, help us to understand what Taine called names. Taine defined common names as being twofold. They are general in that they are suited for all the types of objects they refer to (i.e., the name "wheel" stands for all possible wheels). Common names are also in that they designate something universal and, thus, common to all the types of objects they refer to. Is it possible, asked Taine, to experience that universal something, which he defines as being the idea of a thing ? No, argued Taine, since the general idea of a thing comes from the very definition of this thing. (In French) (MG)