The Duality of Speech-Writing: A Philosophical Analysis

Abstract

Language, the most important tool for communication among human beings is generally used in spoken and written form. Speech and writing have different features to convey a meaning; we intend to define these features and find out, generally in philosophy, what kind of priority speech and writing might have had. we are going to review the status of speech-writing and their characteristics in conveying meaning, in certain modern and contemporary thinkers. since Plato was the initiator of Logocentrism, firstly we are going to discuss the characteristics of speech and writing from his point of view. Then we discuss the matter in Rousseau, Saussure and Halliday; they, assigned a higher status to speech. After that we will discuss Derrida’s point of view; by his theory the metaphysics of presence, Derrida criticized logocentrism and by his deconstruction method he took step into the decentralization path. He disproved priority in dualities like speech-writing.