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structuralism

Noun

Meaning

A theory of sociology that views elements of society as part of a cohesive, self-supporting structure.

(biology) A school of biological thought that deals with the law-like behaviour of the structure of organisms and how it can change, emphasising that organisms are wholes, and therefore that change in one part must necessarily take into account the inter-connected nature of the entire organism.

(linguistics) The theory that a human language is a self-contained structure related to other elements which make up its existence.

(psychology) A school of thought that focuses on exploring the individual elements of consciousness, how they are organized into more complex experiences, and how these mental phenomena correlate with physical events.

(mathematics) In the philosophy of mathematics, a theory that holds that mathematical theories describe structures, and that mathematical objects are exhaustively defined by their place in such structures.

Source: en.wiktionary.org

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Examples

Structuralism argues that a liberal capitalist world economy tends to preserve or actually increase inequalities between developed and less developed economies. Robert Gilpin

The Abbé Breuil died in 1961, and with him died the all-encompassing hunting magic hypothesis. By this time another French archeologist, André Leroi-Gourhan, had been developing his own interpretation, one based on the emerging ideas on structuralism. Richard Leakey

The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. Claude Lévi-Strauss

By the end of the century structuralism was seen as an historically important school of thought, but the movements that it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, commanded attention. Source: Internet

Along somewhat different lines, a number of other continental thinkers—still largely influenced by Marxism—put new emphases on structuralism and on a "return to Hegel ". Source: Internet

Despite this, many of structuralism's proponents, such as Lacan, continue to assert an influence on continental philosophy and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's post-structuralist critics are a continuation of structuralism. Source: Internet

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