Its adherents include, among others, Claude Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky , as well as poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida . While structuralism does not deny the existence of an external, universal reality, it does deny the possibility of humans having access to this reality. In 1960s, studied kinship patterns, grammar, etc. Key tenets of structualism - systematicity, totalization, scientificity. Semiotics is a form of structuralism, for it argues that that we cannot know the world on its own terms, but only through the conceptual and linguistic structures of our culture.
Empiricism argues exactly the opposite.