The structuralism is the name that designates the scientific system and the method that deals with the study of data in the context to which they belong, groups for example, and also contemplates and analyzes the relationships that are established between them in order to later draw their conclusions; It is an eminently descriptive method of study and approach.
Scientific method that is based on the description from the study of the information of the components of the analyzed context
The importance of structuralism is such that it turns out to be one of the most used options for analyze the culture, language and even society of a given community.
Origin and its application in a variety of human sciences
It is associated especially with philosophy but it does not arise in this field but in linguistics, at the request of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure as we will see later, but it is applied in a lot of sciences that have man as their object of study, so it will soon be it became a method adopted by other sciences to understand psychological, economic, anthropological phenomena, and of course to analyze philosophical questions.
In a culture, meaning is produced and transmitted from various phenomena, practices and activities, which at that time act as vehicles of meaning.
The basic idea of this doctrine is based on the concept of structure, considered as responsible for organizing and ordering a series of phenomena, more precisely for classifying them.
It maintains that there are a set of rules established in the community, in the political, social, among other fields, that will influence any assessment that is made, as this situation leads to the events being understood and making sense in that system current structure and shared by the members of the community in question and that serves as a parameter to understand these phenomena that occur.
In some way it could be said that structuralism gives us a series of patterns that most know in terms of their structure, components, functions, among other aspects, regardless of the time in which they occur to be analyzed accordingly.
Saussure's structuralist contribution to linguistics
On the other hand, and at the request of the Linguistics, structuralism is a highly innovative movement that arises at the beginning of the 20th century and who has it at Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure as its founder and maximum reference.
The great novelty that Saussure proposed was a new conception of language-related events, conceiving it as a system in which the different elements that compose it present an interrelation that becomes a structure.
In addition, Saussure, introduced two certainly important concepts, on the one hand, the diachrony which deals with the linguistic changes that have occurred over time, instead, the synchronyFor his part, he is interested in the situation of a language at a certain time, leaving aside the time factor for analysis.
Meanwhile, regarding the sign, Saussure proposes the study of it through the combination of two elements: the meaning, which is the representation of reality, the concept itself and the significant, which is the mental image of the sounds that make up a certain sign.
Application in economics, psychology, informatics
At the behest of the economy, structuralism, turns out to be a theory linked to economic development, which proposes the impairment of international trade following this scheme: industrial center and agricultural periphery, the distance between underdeveloped countries and developed countries increases.
Psychology was also influenced by structuralism through what became known as structural psychology, a theory developed by Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener, precisely in the 20th century, at the height of this current.
The objective of this psychological approach is to be able to analyze the experience from the birth of the person to adult life, that is, the total sum of experiences lived in this period of time, finding in that sum of experience the elements that are linked to each other to shape more complex experiences; and does not forget the environment, also studying the connection of experience with it.
The method that Wundt used was introspection from the inquiry into feelings, emotions, among other data that provide internal information about someone.
And in Computing structuralism is called branch that deals with studying the conformation of databases of structural cut.
