On the ontology of language: A critique of trait theory

The question of language in trait theory

Discussions of the ontology of language are sparse in contemporary trait theory. They evolve almost exclusively around the cross-lingual and cross-cultural validity of their proposed constructs (Church, 2017; McCrae & Allik, 2002). However, trait theory’s dependence on language is fundamental, as a basic assumption is that the structure of personality can be extracted from natural language (Allport & Odbert, 1936). Trait-names are not merely signs. They “are significant, for their common usage establishes a presupposition that some human beings possess actual dispositions or traits roughly corresponding to these symbols” (Allport & Odbert, 1936, p. 20). A premise later employed by modern theorists is that “important personality differences should be encoded in language” (Ashton & Lee, 2005, p. 8) and therefore that the study of personality and its structure should take this as its point of departure. Through the division of natural language into factors, “an analysis of trait language should yield the structure of personality itself” (McCrae & Costa, 1997, p. 509). However, at the birth of lexical studies, Allport and Odbert (1936) were hesitant to make any definitive conclusions about the nature of traits and were especially critical of the conclusions offered by “statistical psychologists” (p. 11). They cautioned that a concept “established by factor-analysis as an ‘independent trait’ might in fact represent no genuine component of any single personality; it will be an artefact derived from the average [person]” (p. 16). A certain schism between Allport and Odbert’s foundational lexical studies and modern analyses and conclusions about traits thus becomes clear. Allport and Odbert (1936) never intended their vast list of trait-names to undergo such a reduction: “it seems . . . unreasonable to factor out a handful of independent units in the excessively complex equations of human nature” (p. 34). It is therefore important to note that the lexical hypothesis is radicalized in modern conceptualizations, where the premise of finding the “hierarchical model of trait structure” (Mondak, 2010, p. 24) in language through an immense reduction of the trait-glossary to “a handful of independent units” roams the theorical field.

It is however clear that Allport and Odbert and modern trait theorists share the belief that personality can fruitfully be studied under the lexical hypothesis. Advocates of both Big Five trait theory (Goldberg, 1993; McCrae & Costa, 1997) and the HEXACO-model (Ashton & Lee, 2020; Zettler et al., 2020), despite their disagreement on the number of traits, take their epistemological starting point in the trait-glossary of natural language. They concur that the structure of personality is to be derived from this glossary and that one should utilize the unearthed traits, established by extensive reduction of the enormous range of trait-descriptive adjectives through factor analysis, in various practical applications like those mentioned below.

Various critiques have been raised against this understanding of natural language and its properties. One argument is that the language of the lay person, the object of study in trait theory, is inadequately simple to describe complex traits. Another argument is that the ambiguity of the adjectives studied weakens the definitive descriptive value or that the traits do not adequately apply at the individual level (Ashton & Lee, 2005). McAdams (1996) goes as far to say, that “no description of the person is adequate without trait attributions, but trait attributions themselves yield little beyond a psychology of the stranger” (p. 301). As a solution, McAdams and Pals (2006) draw on narrative theory in a layered ontology, where evolutionary perspectives, characteristic adaptations, and life narratives couch in the traits of the Big Five. “If dispositional traits sketch the outline and characteristic adaptations fill in the details of human individuality, then narrative identities give individual lives their unique and culturally anchored meanings,” they argue (McAdams & Pals, 2006, p. 210). McAdams and Pals do not show how the eclectic constructs of “evolutionary demands,” traits, narrative, and culture interact ontologically, or whether genes or traits possess a determinative role in the individual’s creation of meaning and narrative. But their integration of cultural forces and the narrative in trait theory should be read as a critique of this “psychology of the stranger.” Specifically, they show that the complexity of the phenomenon demands other levels of analysis, or, more specifically, other uses of language. In McAdams and Pals’ critique, what is needed is narrative self-referential speech. In spite of their critiques of trait theory, however, the Big Five-model and the lexical hypothesis is still a deeply integral part of their model of personality. The foundations are genes and the traits discovered by factor analysis of the trait-names, working under the lexical hypothesis. In this sense, these uses of The Big Five, the HEXACO-model or other methodologically similar trait theories take the lexical hypothesis as their epistemological foundation. Dumont (2010) concludes: “despite the problematic assumptions associated with the lexical hypothesis, most contemporary researchers have based their work on the everyday language that individuals use to describe themselves (as well as others)” (p. 155). It should be noted that theorists differ in the strength they attribute to the models. While some (McCrae & Costa, 1997; Sheldon et al., 1997) make the realist claim that the models express the actual structure and traits of personality, others employ a form of pragmatism accentuating the practical value of traits in specific aims (Hilbig & Moshagen, 2020). This disagreement, however, is a more common epistemological discussion of the relations between model and entity, rather than a reflection on language as presupposed in trait theory. In other words, the methodological dependence upon language in trait theory is foundational, and the undertaking of an analysis of its ontology of language is pertinent.

Language as object

Ferdinand de Saussure (1916/2015), the founder of structural linguistics, had the ambition to study language in itself. He wanted to study a manifestation of language static enough to be examined as a system of signs; a form freed from the diverse deviations of content and pronunciation across speakers. In short, he wanted to study language as a form unresponsive to the incidental impulse and idiosyncrasy of the speaking subject. Already, his distinction between language as living discourse (parole) and language as system (langue) reveals that his object was to study language separately from the actual act of speaking (pp. 9–13). A curious observation makes this possible. His proposition of the arbitrary link between signified and signifier purports that the content of the signifier and its connection with the signified is conventional (pp. 67–68). In other words, what he argues is that a given signifier is not intrinsically connected to a correlative signified: “language never exists apart from the social fact, for it is a semiological phenomenon” (p. 77). The actuality of the sign is grounded in a social contract, not in an essential, necessary link between the sign and the entity it signifies. The umbilical cord from the entity in question (the signified) to the sign (the signifier) is, as it were, cut by de Saussure, which then allows for a new array of analyses and systematizations of language. Such acts lead to the question of reference. The system has a comprehensive, though finite, number of signs. The singular sign gains its significance not from its concrete relation to the entity it signifies, but from its place among the other signs. As de Saussure (1916/2015) says, “in language there are only differences” and continues, “Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms” (p. 120). It is not through a positive, distinctive attribute that a sign differentiates itself from another sign. Rather, the sign attains its positive significance through the negation of the significance of other signs. As philosopher Ricoeur (1969/1989a) comments, “The collection of signs must be maintained as a closed system in order to submit it to analysis” (p. 82). Here the concept of reference is quite homeless. To describe signs according to what they refer to is fruitless when the system of signs is construed as “a self-contained whole” (de Saussure, 1916/2015, p. 9). Understood this way, language closes around itself. The entire system of signs is immanent in itself in the sense that the signs receive their meaning from the system itself. It is a system of discrepancies, opposites, and similarities. All signs are fundamentally delimited by the other signs and the laws of the system. Therefore, the sign is but a delimitation; a delimitation of what a sign can signify until it trespasses upon the grounds of a neighboring sign. The reference of the sign to the entity in the world is unimportant for its analysis. In the structural conceptualization, it is “reference-less.”

In his thorough analysis of structural linguistics, Ricoeur (1969/1989a, 1969/1989b) wanted to show both its necessity and utility, but also its boundaries. He asked, how can the structural workings of language be accepted, whilst at the same time be mindful of its negligence of the subject? According to Ricoeur (1969/1989a), language as developed by structural linguistics is a combinatoric, an immanent system of potentialities, a highly detailed net of lacunae available to the speaking subject. It is also “a corpus already constituted, finished, closed and, in that sense, dead” (p. 79). By positing this structure and its internal laws, the subject as the locus of change is unthinkable: “by himself [sic] the individual is incapable of fixing a single value” (de Saussure, 1916/2015, p. 113). The subject is passive, both in the acquisition and development of language. De Saussure (1916/2015) talks about “a dictionary of which identical copies have been distributed to each individual” (p. 19). In other words, the uniform use of the signs across subjects and its passive acquisition.

Within this view of development, what space does the speaking subject occupy? As mentioned, de Saussure’s purposeful distinction between langue and parole denotes a clear role of the subject or the lack thereof within the structural analysis. This is noteworthy not only because of the passivity of the subject or the univocal meaning of the sign, but because of the purposeful separation of structure and subject. The proposed forces that shape the development of language delineate a minimal role for it. Both the subject’s passive acquisition of language and the univocality of the sign express a passive subject.

Ricoeur (1969/1989a) saw this clearly: “By constituting the linguistic object as an autonomous object, linguistics constitutes itself as a science. But at what cost?” (p. 83). In order to establish language as a structure where the content of the signs is immanent in the structure itself, de Saussure had to reduce, if not eliminate completely, the importance of the speaking subject. The space for the speaking subject in structural linguistics is one of passivity, a compliant recipient of language. De Saussure’s structural linguistics is a movement away from the subject towards structure, a recentering of language and how it should be studied. It involves a conceptualization of language devoid of the unruly complications of subjectivity and lived speech. In the Saussurean structural analysis of language, the individual subject is simply unimportant.

De Saussure’s (1916/2015) object is wholly congruent with the ontology of language he proposed. He was interested in the synchronic state and the diachronic evolution of language, both structural phenomena (p. 81). He is concerned with the word or sign as convention, a complex contract established between speakers of a given tongue; that minimal, delimiting figure that holds the boundaries between what a sign can signify and what it cannot, which restricts its use. De Saussure’s object is that aspect of language that lies outside of the subject (p. 14).

Based on the above interpretation, several important points of continuity between the basic premises of structural linguistics and trait theory can be elaborated. It is not a concrete, historical continuity, but rather a certain congeniality between the ontology of language of the two theories. Three fundamental points outline this congeniality:

To say “I”

For Ricoeur, de Saussure’s structuralism is a precise description of the sign as lacuna or potential, but the sign de Saussure proposes does not reach into the real world or lived speech in its facticity. Ricoeur (1969/1989a) argues that in an act of speech, “language aims at something, or more exactly it has a double direction: an ideal direction (to say something) and a real reference (to say about something)” (p. 84). Herein lies both that the utterance establishes a connection between the entity of description and the speaker and that the speaker has an intention. The speaker has a desire to verbalize themself and their world, originating from a “corporeal intentionality,” the will or impulse to endow things in the world, including oneself, with significance and meaning. This “significative intention” manifests itself in speech and “gives itself a body and knows itself by looking for an equivalent in the system of available significations represented by the language I speak and the whole of the writings and culture I inherit” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960/1978b, pp. 89–90). For this act, one needs language, the structure of signs, a continuous internalization of words and of their boundaries, for then to break them, reshape them, and stretch them to fit one’s corporeally intended, idiosyncratic use. This allows the words to be both shared and mine when I establish connections between things through language, extending verbal threads from my being to the world.

The sentence is an event that happens in the concrete world in which the speaking subject is (Ricoeur, 1969/1989a), through this corporeal intention (Merleau-Ponty, 1960/1978a). It establishes a connection between speaker and entity, bestowing upon this entity a significance, whether this is oneself, another person, an external thing, or an abstract entity. It verbalizes my openness to the world and utilizes the structure, but bends, reconfigures, and personifies the signs toward how they relate to me. The sentence resonates with me, my body, my world, my being. It is a verbalization of my corporeal being-in-the-world: “Signification arouses speech as the world arouses my body – by a mute presence which awakens my intentions without deploying itself before them” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960/1978b, p. 89).

Feeble attempts to make a universal language in which a sign has an unequivocal, singular meaning, and where its users cannot possibly disagree on the content of a sign in their living discourse, have been tried but abandoned. How is it, then, that the ontology of language proposed in trait theory has to assume that all words are assigned a singular, univocal meaning? To describe a specific person in a way where the person sees it as valid or applicable in the modern methods of trait theory, the living subject being described has to not only accept a given set of questions’ relevance to the description, they also have to at least implicitly accept the univocal meanings ascribed to every word in these questions. When I refer to myself in terms of description, for example by using one of the 17,953 aforementioned words, I am not simply attaching an abstract, univocal predicate, a definitive sign to my person. Rather, I am organizing and altering internalized signs to verbalize my corporeal intentionality in a net of references: “the subject, in fact, is what refers to itself in referring to the real; retroreference and reference to the real are symmetrically constituted” (Ricoeur, 1969/1989b, p. 257). But in an ontology of language in which the sign is preconstituted and univocal, like that of structural linguistics and trait theory, how can the reference to myself be upheld? How can the reference to “the real” be real?

To say “I” means very little within the ontology of language of trait theory, for the words to use are not mine. They remain untouched, uninscribed with personal meaning. In this sense, they are foreign to me. The double reference of the event, that is the utterance, is lost; no real connection is established between the words and myself. The speaking subject that can stem from this ontology is this inconceivable “worldless subject,” that Heidegger (1927/2007, §43) so criticizes. It is utterance without reference, description without intention, it is describing myself with words that are not mine; a language devoid of subjectivity.

To force a description of a person, or rather, the structure of their personality from this ontology of language is to disfigure the reference to the world that is the intention of speech, and the subject itself. It is to deprive language of its corporeal intentionality, its world, body, and being. Should an uncontextual sign and an uncontextual subject mediate the study of the living being, the structure of this being’s personality? This is not merely an epistemological problem; it is an ontological one since one finds its basis in the explicit and implicit ontology of language of trait theory. The personality trait is an ontological proposition about subjectivity, as Sheldon et al. (1997) note: “more often than not, one’s true self and one’s trait self are one and the same” (p. 1392), which is seconded by McCrae and Costa (2008, p. 150). It is an ontology of language in which, like that of structural linguistics, living discourse has no place. It is simply impossible to find the speech of the living, speaking subject in the ontology of language presented by trait theory. An incongruence of aim and ontology is now clear: the objective to study the person through language with an ontology of language does not allow for speech. It entails an ontology that alienates the subject it is trying to describe.

Language, structure, and the disappearance of subjectivity

The three points outlined above—the synchronic state of language as epistemological basis, the univocality of the sign, the strenuous reference—demonstrate a convergence between structuralist linguistics and trait theory at the level of their ontological and epistemological premises. They also reveal, on the part of trait theory, a fundamental inconsistency between its object of description and its premises of interpretation: the function language is purported to play does not fulfill the needs of its subject. The ontology of language as an analytical strategy facilitated this account and conclusion. It can guide others as well.

In the analysis of trait theory, we brought forth the silent assumptions about language that prevent its theorists from taking its point of departure in the basic capacities of language: a net of references between the listener, the object, the world, and the speaker themself, an intention and a meaning of a subject that deploys itself in a living utterance, the exteriorization of a meaning that is mine. As Derrida (1967/2011) notes, exteriorization as a wanting to say towards the Other is not an accidental or polluting part of language; it is constituting of meaning and of the sign as such.

Trait theorists neglect to observe the living discourse of the speaking subject in its most empirical mundanity. Its assumptions produce its failure to see living discourse as event; an event in time in which a concrete, empirical person with corporeal intentions transcends the language of structuralism and the dictionary by relying on body, intention, and world in idiosyncratic meaning.

Trait theory’s ontology of language is irreconcilable with the living speech of the empirical subject. By the theory’s inattentiveness to this, they ground their generic subject (their ontological claim about the structure of personality) in a mode of thought that is irresponsive to its own ambition and puts forth an analysis that is restricted by a net of assumptions which seems unable to internalize the concept of subjectivity in its mundanity. This worldless subject is abstract, anonymous, and impossible, or, at least in ontological conflict with the subject as time, body, meaning, and intention. Consequently, the claim by proponents of trait theory that these traits, whether there are five (McCrae & Costa, 2008) or six (Ashton et al., 2014), should uncover the structure or nature of personality is an epistemological and ontological extrapolation that cannot be justified. A dislocation of the subject from that in which they are and that to which their language refers, with which it resonates and on which it relies, is a suspension of essential modi of being and the alienation of subjectivity from its speech:

What meaning is at the moment, can be gleaned only from the living utterance and from the intuitive circumstances that surround it. If we read the word (“I”) without knowing who wrote it, it is perhaps not meaningless, but is at least estranged from its normal sense. (Husserl, 1900/2001, p. 218)

The utterances possible within trait theoretical analyses are as generic and impossible as the structure of personality it proposes. Within these theoretical boundaries, it means nothing to say “I.” It is a mere grammatical function, a formal nonact: unspoken sign unbound by body, intention, world, and therefore by the subject itself. The removal of the body, or more precisely, the suspension of speech as a corporeal desire to speak, involves the dissolution of subjectivity into a formalization of language. The “I” of trait theory is not the living subject. “It is not the case that man [sic] ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the ‘world’—a world with which he provides himself occasionally,” Heidegger noted (1927/2007, §12). “Being-in” is the very possibility of speech. The subject “is” body, intention, and time in a world, a Being-in-the-world. De Saussure purposefully excluded the speaking subject from his enquiry to establish, as an essential potentiality of language, the sign, a system of empty lacunae, that facilitated an analysis and a formalization of that which allows us to speak. Heidegger established the subject as an eternal interpretation, a hermeneutic being in time and world, which opened a space for a person who speaks towards something, establishing this net of references that stretch out from the subject in every direction. These seminal yet opposing grapplings with subject and meaning are archetypical in that their divergence restates a recurring question in the social sciences: “interpretation or formalization” (Foucault, 1966/2000, p. 265), subject or structure. They manifest the question of whether to conceptualize meaning and the sign as an ever-changing, unfixable act or to fixate it by the laws governing its expression; through the uncovering of its structure, a formalization, or an endless interpretation of expression. It marks an oscillation between the micro- and the macrolevel that sociology has struggled with since its inception (Archer, 2010).

We have argued that trait theory tends towards formalization rather than interpretation in its attempt to formulate personality in terms of signs unbound by body, world, and time. Its persons attain existence insofar as they abide by the strict, univocal system of signs and its laws, or rather, insofar as its subject could be dissolved into the signs of the dictionary without residue. It is an analysis in which “things attain to existence only in so far as they are able to form the elements of a signifying system” (Foucault, 1966/1994, p. 382). In this sense, one can say that trait theory paradoxically constitutes a psychology without subjectivity.

The analysis concluding the incongruent aim of description and ontological assumptions within trait theory, demonstrates both the utility of the ontology of language as an analytical term, but also the delimiting function of theoretical assumptions. Theory guides research by opening up methodologies to study an object or a phenomenon, and by this advance it proposes the phenomenon of interest (and, importantly, a certain specification of it) and rejects others. It highlights aspects of a phenomenon, whilst it obscures others. It is a delimitation of what is to be studied and how to study it.

Our analysis of trait theory shows an important theoretical delimitation at the level of language and presents the curious example of a psychology that has expelled its subject. This in its paradoxical existence, highlights the difficulty of thinking language and subjectivity as a coherent form. As noted by Foucault, there is a recurring tendency in the social sciences, that imperceptibly sneaks into its theories, to counterpose subject and structure. A tendency that establishes them as a dichotomy and allows one the primacy over the other: “that where there is a sign, there man [sic] cannot be, and that where one makes signs speak, there man must fall silent” (Foucault, 1966/2000, p. 266). The question of formalization of structure or the interpretation of exteriorization marks a fundamental problem about the sign, meaning, and subjectivity.

To understand the nexus of language and subjectivity, one must understand the speaking subject as bodily and as always already in a structure that facilitates and guides its speech. One must understand the very desire to speak, which lies before its concrete formulations, and how this desire is permeated by the structure always already there. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) has formulated this eloquently:

Our view of man [sic] will remain superficial so long as we do not return to this origin, so long as we do not rediscover the primordial silence, beneath the noise of words, and so long as we do not describe the gesture that breaks the silence. Speech is a gesture, and its signification a world. (p. 190)

What Merleau-Ponty directs us to is not simply a problematization of the dichotomy between language as structure and living expression, nor that the integrative reading of structural linguistics and phenomenology of speech is the resolution to the problem. We cannot just cut a hole in structure so the speaking subject can breathe, nor formalize the freedom of the speaking subject in structure. Rather, what Merleau-Ponty directs us towards is an attention to the moving equilibrium of language that is at the same time broken and stretched, reproduced and changed by acts of speech. By corporal intentions, the bringing to life of the entities of the world, reference to one’s own being-in-the-world, and reaching towards others, we move from the simple personalizing of language of all speaking subjects to the “coherent deformation” of language. Language is at all times dying and being born. It is static enough to be, but developing enough to not be what it was. Language is an elusive object about which countless ontological considerations must be taken. But this strenuous task of thinking of language as both static and developing, changed and reproduced, also implies the more general question of thinking of both structure and subject, formalization and interpretation, the being of language and the being of subjectivity. As observed by Foucault (1966/1994): “Their [language and subjectivity] incompatibility has been one of the fundamental features of our thought” (p. 339). To this effect, careful attention to the ontology of language can be an entrance into this question which includes the effort to rethink structure and subjectivity not as dichotomous, but as a coherent whole.

Coda

This article has presented a critique of trait theorists’ ambitions to expound the structure of personality. We have analyzed the role of language within this theoretical complex and uncovered an incongruence between ontology and subject of investigation. We have shown that the desire to speak, a concept external to trait theory, and the utterance’s ontological dependence upon the lived world are essential for these analyses. However, Ricoeur’s and Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives on language provide further possibilities for answering these questions. Additionally, the perspectives of Heidegger and Husserl concerning the relation between the lifeworld and language would also be productive strategy to expand upon the themes we have touched upon in this article. In order to further this psychology—in order to pursue a psychology that takes lived language seriously—a stubborn attention to the very idea of phenomenology (Husserl, 1907/1999), the primacy of human experience, is constructive. The experience of speaking and further, what lies before speaking, a speech lived, is indispensable for the establishment of subjectivity and language as a coherent form. It demands careful attention to the speaking, living, interpreting views on subjectivity posited, among others, by Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty, that accept, but transcend, the language of structuralism. This is a language that is at the same time a historic continuation and absolutely novel. It stretches across time and space, but breaks the dead combinatoric to manifest itself as a concrete event in time by the wanting to say of a Being-in-the-world. This language sustains itself exactly by its own rupture and deformation. Its being is that it permits itself to speech and that it is spoken. Perhaps a consideration of how the world arouses the bodily desire to speak; how an abstract syntax shapes, guides, and opens this desire; and how mute perception is turned into exteriorization, in other words, this primordial silence, that Merleau-Ponty speaks of, can be a preliminary entrance into the question of how to think subject and structure as a coherent form.