Every perceiver's method of perceiving can be shown to contain an inherent bias which affects what is perceived to a significant degree.
A wholly objective perception of individual entities is therefore not possible: any observer is bound to create something of what he observes.
Accordingly, the relationship between observer and observed achieves a kind of primacy. It becomes the only thing that can be observed ...
In consequence, the true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them.
This new concept, that the world is made up of relationships rather than things, constitutes the first principle of that way of thinking which can properly be called 'structuralist'.
A wholly objective perception of individual entities is therefore not possible: any observer is bound to create something of what he observes.
Accordingly, the relationship between observer and observed achieves a kind of primacy. It becomes the only thing that can be observed ...
In consequence, the true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them.
This new concept, that the world is made up of relationships rather than things, constitutes the first principle of that way of thinking which can properly be called 'structuralist'.
- Terence Hawkes in Structuralism and Semiotics
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