The ignoring of Raymond Tallis on literary theory, by C*rrie Ichik*w* J*nkins


Author: Terence Rajivan Edward
Abstract. The second edition of Raymond Tallis's book Not Saussure includes a preface which describes how the first edition of his book did not meet with the reaction he expected from the community of literary critics. In this paper, I consider why Tallis's arguments have been ignored, imitating the style of Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins.
Draft version: version 2 (?), 13th September 2026 couple of grammar corrections; initially posted online in 2022 or 2023.
PDF available on academia.edu at:
https://www.academia.edu/76591757/The_ignoring_of_Raymond_Tallis_on_literary_theory_by_C_rrie_Ichik_w_J_nkins


It seems to me that Carrie Jenkins uses slightly different styles for more popular and more "academic" work (often on highly specialized topics), and this paper aims to imitate her more academic work. Perhaps it is easier to deliver some points by means of this approximation.[1]


Raymond Tallis's book Not Saussure is a response to post-structuralist literary theories, such as deconstruction, which suppose that the textual and other evidence under-determines defensible interpretations. He seeks to attack a background linguistic theory derived from Ferdinand de Saussure which is committed to an anti-realist semantics, notably rejecting the proposition that the meaning of a term is fixed by its having been introduced to refer to some independently existing thing and also the proposition that it has this meaning because members of a linguistic community are disposed to refer to that thing with that term.[2] For example, the meaning of the term "the morning star" is not fixed by its having been introduced to refer to an independently existing astronomical body or by speakers' being disposed to refer to that body as "the morning star."


A second edition of Tallis's book appeared in 1995, which contains a preface raising concerns about its reception. Tallis, a former medical professor, says:
"I expected a scandal to result and the post-Saussureans to die of shame or to apply for re-training as useful citizens. I was astonished when the arguments of both books were largely ignored and it was business as usual. Not Saussure received a handful of largely hostile or dismissive reviews. In Defence of Realism went unreviewed and is out of print – though it, too, is shortly to be re-issued – and the deconstruction industry continued to boom." (1995: x-xi)
Tallis also provides an explanation for why he was largely ignored:
"I blame this naivety on my training in science, where competing theories are usually evaluated on their basis of the relevant factual evidence, their internal consistency, their power at predicting new facts and the success or failure of their applications. This training left me ill-prepared for the standards and practices of the intellectual community whose views I criticised." (1995: xi)
Sometimes I write something and upload it onto the Internet and I think to myself "Lots of people are going to engage with this. This will go worldwide!" but reality doesn't fit with my expectations. In the case of Tallis, there are lots of possible reasons for why his objections have been ignored so far, not all of which require judging post-structuralists to be unscientific, such as there is a queue of objectors waiting to be dealt with and some other objections have priority for respondents, e.g. they are more likely to win acceptance. The average literary critic using one of these frameworks may be unsure how best to respond to some objections - much like the average specialist in psychopathology may not know how to respond to the objection that a term they use is ambiguously defined - and so may pass them on to more philosophically-minded critics, who know a lot more about the foundations of literary criticism, and these people may be very busy. I can't say that this is the case with Tallis's objections, but it's a possibility.


        I'm not a post-structuralist; I work in the analytic tradition of philosophy, but for me there's a problem with Tallis's work as it stands. But I'm going to start with something good. Here's a reconstruction Tallis makes of post-structuralist thinking (1995: 18-19):
1. Initial Truism: 'Language has its own rules'
2. Invisible general principle: 'Whatever has its own rules is an autonomous system'
3. Intermediate conclusion 'Therefore, language is an autonomous system'
4. Second invisible general principle 'All autonomous systems are sealed off from whatever is outside of them'
5. Final paradox 'Therefore, language is sealed off from extra-linguistic reality'
I take it an invisible general principle is a general premise which the arguer is relying on but hasn't been stated, or which they're charitably interpreted as relying on. So the most charitable interpretation is that (iii), the intermediate conclusion, is being deduced from (i) and (ii), not just (i), which the texts state. It follows from those premises. And (v) is being deduced from (iii) and (iv). Does (v) follow? If you define extra-linguistic reality as that which is outside language, then I suppose it follows. Let's say it does. By the way, the conclusion seems to be classed as a paradox not in the sense of being a contradiction validly inferred from plausible premises but a highly counterintuitive conclusion, given our commonsensical starting point.


It's a normal feature of texts and conversations that we don't state all of our premises. But when reconstructing an argument, it's a good idea to identify those unstated premises. And it's a good idea not to attribute to someone inferential errors unnecessarily: inferring a conclusion from a set of premises when that conclusion doesn't follow from that set. Tallis meets this requirement. And various people who have the professional status of analytic philosophers don't, especially on the political philosophy side. So that's something good about Tallis here.


        My concerns about his work are about what he says afterwards. Let's assume that (i)-(v) is a good reconstruction of his opponent's thinking not just in terms of avoiding unnecessarily attributing inferential errors to them, but also in terms of the contents of the premises - that is the best way of making sense of the arguments in those texts. If you ask various philosophers in analytic philosophy to assess the argument Tallis has reconstructed, what they're going to say is "I need more clarifications of the terms involved." I think many of them are going to latch onto "sealed off" as a metaphor. How do we cash that out? A worry is: is there a clarification of the relevant terms in which this argument is uninterestingly true - "sealed off" just means distinct say - and another clarification in which it is highly controversial and probably false?


        Tallis sounds like he has some problem with the terms used but no detail is given. Here's his response:
"Not infrequently, both the intermediate statement and the final paradox are literally unthinkable or unimaginable; so the reader has greater difficulty in envisaging counter-arguments and even greater difficulty in thinking up counter-examples. The method can therefore be summarised as a passage from the obvious to the paradoxical via enthymeme and obscurity." (1995: 19)
In light of the first sentence, it's plausible that what Tallis is saying is something different, which is that this argument is something we now understand with sufficient clarity, following his reconstruction, but we can't use the normal method of drawing attention to counterexamples to assess it. It's like a sceptic's argument that my whole life could be a dream or a simulation of experiences by a mad scientist tampering with my brain. I can't say "What about this?" drawing attention to an example, such as injuring my finger, because the sceptic would just insist that that too could be dreamt or simulated.


Tallis does mention obscurity in the next sentence but there are at least two ways of making sense of his commentary:
1. he is objecting to undefined and insufficiently clear terms;
2. he regards the terms of the argument as adequately clarified now, but the argument is not available to usual methods of assessment, such as by counterexamples, or very difficult to assess like this, leaving the reader feeling unsure how to assess it.
Reading (a) is a natural reading of the second sentence quoted, owing to reference to "obscurity," but he doesn't single out terms in need of clarification in the previous sentence. He doesn't say things like "Sealed off is a metaphor. How should we understand that?" Reading (b) fits well with the previous sentence. As stated above, it isn't obviously an objection, but probably he thinks that influential figures in literary criticism shouldn't pressure the average critic into working with unassessable and highly counterintuitive theories.


Some skilled analytic philosophers might ignore work by Tallis as well, despite his appropriating analytic methods and references to canonical figures and concepts, owing to such difficulties of interpretation as this one – what exactly is Tallis's objection? – and that has consequences for whether literary critics pay attention to it: "If these people don't, why would I?" But I can't say that the process is fair; it's very plausible that all sorts of factors play a role. Some of Tallis's objections seem worth considering, but there's a question of which ones were known earlier - the objection to linguistic relativism as inconsistently referring to a mind-independent nature that gets carved up differently probably was (1995: 52-53); the objection he singles out in another book as the most important from Not Saussure sounds more novel, but as stated can be interpreted in quite different ways (1988: 94).


References
Tallis, Raymond. 1988. In Defence of Realism. London: Edward Arnold.
Tallis, Raymond. 1995 (second edition). Not Saussure. A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan.




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[1] Also I have the impression that parts of a nearby university would have preferred Carrie Jenkins to the philosophers they have to deal with instead and, furthermore, a Carrie Jenkins directed onto a topic such as this – a remote controlled version even!
[2] Tallis contests the use of Saussure as a source for it (1995: 58).