structuralism sought to clarify systems of signs through analysing the discourses they both limit and make possible.Saussure conceived of the sign as being delimited by all the other signs in the system,and ideas as being incapable of existence prior to linguistic structure, which articulates thought.This led continental thought away from humanism,and toward what was termed the decentering of man;language is no longer spoken by man to express a true inner self,but language speaks man.
Structuralism sought the province of a hard science, but its positivism soon came under fire by post structuralism,a wide field of thinkers, some of whom were once themselves structuralists,but later came to criticize it. Structuralists believed they could analyse systems from an external, objective standing,but the poststructuralists argued that this is incorrect,that one cannot transcend structures and thus analysis is itself determined by what it examines,that systems are ultimately self-referential.