The whole notion of “Consilience [with]in …” a specific
field is skew to the Wilsonian/vertical-reductionist conception of
the grand principle. Instead we are noticing similarities in various
regions of a field, which may have no analogues outside that field, nor follow
synthetically as consequences of other principles outside that field.
Accordingly, the various discipline-specific mini-essays may have little in
common, let alone contribute to a grand TOE of the sciences. They are
more in the spirit of the various volumes of the “Bobbsey Twins”. I
do plan to stop, though, somewhere short of “Consilience in Stamp-Collecting”
and “So! You Want 2 B a Consilientist ”.
~
First: Where
does linguistics stand in the disciplinary matrix of the sciences? Its status has often been fragile:
Finck and Wundt tried to rob
linguistics of its autonomy by
incorporating it into psychology … Croce and Vossler tried to incorporate it
into aesthetics.
-- Jan Romein, The Watershed of
Two Eras: Europe in 1900
(1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. 443
Later, much of the thrust of linguistics, over the past nigh-on one hundred years, especially in
America, has been an assertion of its disciplinary
autonomy -- not a branch of sociology, or history, or language studies --
even with respect to its ancestor philology,
and further with regard to various components of linguistics itself, which one
hoped neatly to delineate.
Cf.
… the need felt by many to
keep linguistics an autonomous discipline, to prevent it from slopping
over into psychology, sociology, neurophysiology, etc.
-- Roger Lass, On explaining
language change (1980), p. 121
This depreciatory rhetoric of “slopping over” is diametrically
at variance with Wilson’s utopian holistic vision for Unified Science.
Indeed, over the past close-on to a century, or at any
rate over a good fifty years during the heyday of the growing prestige of
the field, other disciplines have looked to linguistics more than it to
them. As:
The appeal of linguistics methodologically to anthropology
is in part because of its achievement of units at once concrete and universal.
-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American
Structuralism (1975), p. 153.
In terms of the sociology
of science, this influence is reminiscent of the Physics Mesmerism earlier
spawned by the pizazz of the field that invented The Bomb.
That, in fact, may explain a lot. For the study
of syntactic and semantics structures plainly finds nothing of ready use for it
from current physics (“The Propositional Island Condition: a
String-Theoretic Approach”), whereas the neighboring scholarly fields of
psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc., have been -- not to put it too
unkindly -- not especially successful of late. They do not, so to speak,
have The Bomb; so linguistics has been free to go its own way.
~
The linguistic scene in Europe during the nineteenth
century, and up to about Weimar, had a decidedly less isolated or self-sufficient
feel, with the same Grimm brothers who wrote straight sound-law Germanistik and
who launched the massive Wörterbuch,
likewise collecting their equally-celebrated work of folklore, Kinder- und Hausmärchen.
Saussure, with his penchant for dichotomies and abstractions, culminating in
his purely cerebral reconstruction of the Indo-European laryngeals not
visible in the extant texts (a ghostly forerunner of the key notion of “empty
categories” in the Chomskyan school), were atypical (notice that he published
precious little in his own lifetime, his main influence being posthumous, his
penchants more to the liking of a later time). There were, to
be sure, occasional Declarations of Linguistic Independence similar to those
which later characterized American structuralism and its progeny --
Linguistics must be regarded as an
independent science, not to be confused with either physiology or psychology.
-- Baudouin de Courtenay (1871)
but more characteristic were the plumbing of ancient
literatures, the quasi-folkloristic dialectological spelunkings in the hills
and hamlets of the hinterland, and so concrete, sleeves-rolled-up a tendency as
that of Wörter und Sachen.
As a Romance philologist once put it, emphasizing the Unentbehrlichkeit of the
sister-disciplines for linguistics,
Man komme also nicht mit dem
beliebten « ne supra crepidam »;
das gilt wirklich nur für Schuster.
-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo
Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2nd edn. 1928),
p. 105
These humanistic traditions were carried on at
Berkeley by my Doktorvater Yakov
Malkiel, a White Russian refugee and time-capsule of Mitteleuropäische Kultur, whose journal Romance Philology
(and it really was as deeply his, as The Rambler was Doctor Johnson’s)
featured both linguistic and literary articles side by side. It was this tradition I relished,
and which informed my dissertation (later published as The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages). It is a Kulturgut deeply to be savored, in centuries to come, long after
the squabbles of Amerian Vietnam-era linguistics shall have faded into the
mists of history.
~
The fiercest assertion of linguistic independence --
what we might dub the thesis of the Idiosyncrasy
of Human Language (it obeys principles peculiar to itself, not generally
shared among other features of animate beings) -- has come from the Chomsky
camp (that bastion of the intellectually fierce and rhetorically
ferocious)
The proper perspective of linguistic independence is given a
trenchant formulation by Chomsky:
How can a system such as human
language arise in the mind/brain, or for that matter in the organic world, in
which one seems not to find anything like the basic properties of human
language? That problem has sometimes been posed as a crisit for the cognitive
sciences. The concerns are
appropriate, but their locus is misplaced: they are primarily a problem for biology and the brain sciencies, which, as
currently understood, do not provide any basis for what appear to be fairly
well-established conclusions about language.
-- Noam Chomsky, The Minimalist Program (1995),
p. 2
[Sidenote: This
stance exactly parallels our own with respect to the (possibly not entirely
unrelated) question of Free Will, in our diatribes against the eliminative materialists, who, failing to discover Free Will in a test-tube, declare
that it must therefore not exist.
Morality they seem to have discerned cringing at the bottom of an Erlenmeyer flask, and identify it
with oxytocin, or oxycontin, or some damn thing. Our retort: Free Will (and with it, possible prolegomena to morality)
stands unspattered; good luck with
whatever it is you’re doing, and ever saying anything useful about these.]
Similar American declarations
of disciplinary independence go back a ways:
The history of structural linguistics in the United
States can be readily interpreted
in terms of three successive (and overlapping) movements:
(1) the movement for autonomous study of language,
i.e., for a profession of linguistics;
(2) the
movement for autonomous study of linguistic structure;
(3) the movement for autonomous study of grammar
(syntactic structure)
Chomsky’s classification of linguistics as a branch of
cognitive psychology, like Hockett’s classification of linguistics as a branch
of cultural anthropology, does not imply any less of autonomy.
-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American Structuralism
(1975), p. 227-8
Back when I began at university, linguistics as a discipline was still largely at stage (1). At Harvard College, they didn’t allow you
to major in Linguistics simpliciter
-- that was apparently perceived as being too narrow, like majoring in sausages
or non-Abelian groups. It had to
be a combined major, say, Linguistics and Math. (That is not necessarily a bad thing: such disciplinary spread virtually
forces you to think ‘consiliently’.)
I actually did briefly consider doing that, owing to the personal
magnetism of two visiting luminaries:
George Lakoff and Noam Chomsky.
And while this-all takes us right off the topic of Consilience, and back to the sociology of the wacky
Sixties, perhaps the anecdotes may be worth retailing for their own sake.
It was my sophomore year (in many ways, my sophomoric
year). The campus was in turmoil,
partially and fitfully shut-down. The
center had not held, and we were
whirling.
Into
this maelstrom stepped Noam Chomsky, meeting with Harvard
undergraduates, not to lecture,
but to hear us out. Already
he was better known as a political commentator than as a linguist (I had eagerly
read his foresightful American Power and the New Mandarins); a small but respectful student
audience gathered at his feet --
or rather, he at ours: for the
students had occupied the available sofas and chairs, and he himself sat down on the floor with the rest of the
overflow. He spoke softly, when he
spoke at all; listening, thinking,
listening …
What he said that day, I don’t remember (how often are
our memories wordless, alas!) but his sense or essence of
open-mindedness, yet centeredness (most of us were neither)
powerfully remains. I left the meeting feeling that we student activists were truly juvenile, even if largely right on the central issue of
the Vietnam War; and have him to
thank that, thenceforward, I may have been marginally less of an imbecile than would otherwise have been the case.
Where Chomsky was all calm -- Jovian -- Lakoff was all
energy -- Mercurial -- and tended to create a fevered atmosphere wherever he
bustled -- not unlike that at campus protests and SDS meetings. It was attractive, in a way, to an
undergraduate whose veins flowed full with the sap of the Zeitgeist.
However, I had, before my freshman year, renounced my
original intention of majoring and English with a view to becoming a writer,
penitentially donning the sackclothlike labcoat of a chemistry major, in part because I knew myself to be
subject to the Siren-calls of pride and cliqueishness that went with the literary life. And in Lakoff and his entourage (for there is no other word
for the cloud of virtual particles that surrounded him), that factor was much
in evidence. So I drew back. (Years later, at Berkeley, our paths
would once again anastomose.)
What really settled it, though, was the practical
reality of what it would mean to take courses from the permanent Harvard
faculty (Lakoff was just passing through, and Chomsky taught over at
M.I.T.) I lasted just two meetings
of the introductory course taught by droning Professor Undertaker (as I thought
of him; the real surname lies not
too distant in phonological space).
Senior year, I applied to graduate school in math at
Stanford and Berkeley. When
both accepted, I asked Lynn Loomis which he would recommend. He was very practical: no finicky attempts at comparing this
professor with that, just:
Berkeley is bigger. That
proved wise advice, for exactly the same meta-reason for which I turned down
Yale (whose English department had been making beckoning advances) and chose
Harvard because, well, what the hell.
Once again, I wound up pursuing a course of studies entirely different
from that in which I had applied.
After dropping out of math from impecunity, I stumbled upon a much more
inviting introductory lecture-series by Charles Fillmore of Berkeley
linguistics, and there was a thriving department ready to take me on; whereas Stanford, at that time, didn’t
even have a full-fledged Linguistics Department, just a Program within
English. So it looked as
though, providentially, I had landed in the right place.
Yet how often have I dwelt in retrospect, how
different my intellectual life (and with it, life tout court) might have been, had I instead found myself across the
bay at Stanford. For, despite its
shoestring beginnings, by the time I received the doctorate (1981), Stanford
had burgeoned into the M.I.T. of the West, whereas the Berkely department --
like the surrounding town -- was falling victim to centrifugal forces, partly
political, and partly personality-driven, but more particularly, in the case of
Linguistics, because the Rota Fortunae had made another half-turn, resurrecting
MIT-style linguistics to a second run of pre-eminence, and sending the fortunes
of Berkeley-style Generative Semantics down, down, down… Fuit Ilium!
~ ~ ~
Below, a miscellany of consilient influences.
~
The syntactic cycle (cyclic ordering of rules in syntax) has
been called “analogous” to the phonological cycle (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Language
and Mind (1968), p. 39).
This, however, is from a
disciplinary standpoint quite a
domestic affair, and need not be ‘consilient’ with anything outside
linguistics. And indeed, as
Chomsky remarks later in the same pamphlet (p. 66), “One cannot expect
structuralist phonology, in itself, to provide a useful model for investigation
of other cultural and social systems.
A word of caution. By saying that a theory of sense
‘breaks down’ the complex ability of linguistic productivity, I do not mean to suggest that the explanation must be reductive, but only that the theory of
sense must articulate [unpack, make
plain] the structure of complex ability.
If the ability is best explained
by reducing it to other abilities,
the theory of sense says what these are … If the ability is best explained holistically, … then it explains how
the ability functions holistically …
-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as
Grammar (1984), p. 127
~
The whole thrust of modularity is that, while tout might more or less se tenir , within a given module,
the modules themselves are connected, in some cases, only the way the wheels
and the engine and the windshield of a car are connected, in subserving a larger
whole.
Ctr. a sort of ideological purity:
By strongly syntactic, I mean
not only that the theory is developed using syntactic notions, but also that the principles invoked,
and the distinctions advocated, have no natural semantic analogues.
… In fact, a stronger point can be
made: the natural distinctions and
generalizations that a natural semantic theory of interpretation would
[consiliently] make available lead
us to expect configurations of data that are simply not attested.
-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as
Grammar (1984), p. 102, 4
And, more
polemically, emphatically rejecting any extradisciplinary aid:
An extreme position was taken by
Kurylowicz: “One must explain
linguistic facts by other linguistic facts, not by heterogeneous facts. … Explanation by means of social facts is a
methodological derailment.” (1948).
For Kurylowicz, even the influence of other languages was
irrelevant: “the substratum theory
has no importance for the linguist”.
-- U. Weinreich et al. in W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, Directions
for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 177
All of this -- taken as a program rather than a description -- is strictly
unexceptionable, apart from the final “the” in front of the word
“linguist”. With that restrictive
article, the passus passes over into
the overweening; as who should
say, “The wearyingly
multifarious and mostly insensate
behaviors of non-penguin
species is of no concern to The
Zoologist.”
Contrast, indeed, in the very same volume, the opinion of
one of its editors (Y. Malkiel, p. 28):
In languages where “progressive”
and “conservative”, “aristocratic” and “rustic” variants are suggested by
differences in form, no truly satisfactory interpretation is conceivable without an equal share of attention
granted to the social matrix.”
Along with many other stances that could be cited. (“Pike’s
tagmemics expressly linked to an
analysis of cultural behavior as a whole”).
~
In post-Chomskyan linguistics, hardcore practitioners
have usually been at pains to distinguish concepts
and processes peculiar to the human language faculty, from those obtaining
elsewhere, be it in bee-langue, or the “language of flowers” or “the Brain’s Inner Language” (this, from an article in this morning’s New York Times),
or neuranatomy or chemistry or physics or -- horrendo referens -- Psychology with its “general learning
strategies.” By contrast,
generativists revel in any apparent structural or procedural harmony within
their discipline -- striving, for example, to see how much material can be
gleichgeschaltet under the sway of the Empty Category Principle -- the
awe-inspiring ECP (the Great and Powerful).
~
Rules relating S-Structure to LF are of the same kind
that operate in the Syntax: Move
alpha.
-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984)
Outsiders are unlikely to gasp at this last, nor to marvel
about the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Move-alpha. (“alpha” here stands for: anything at all.
A slightly more general formulation would be Stephenson’s Rule: Do Stuff.)
~
It is desireable for the overall theory to be
articulated into strata, and for certain general notions or procedures to recur
at different strata, at least masking their differences in basic material, and
perhaps providing a genuine generalization. Thus:
segmentation; compositionality;
and projection. E.g. (Hornstein): The Projection Principle: the Theta Criterion applies at
D-structure, ((S-structure)), and LF
(these being the antiseptic rechristening of the old deep structure, surface structure, and logical
form, which proved too exciting for the peasantry and had to be withdrawn
from general circulation).
~
The technical tools for dealing with “rule-governed
creativity” [basically, a synchronic system of limitless productivity] as
distinct from “rule-changing creativity” [diachronic evolution] have only
become readily available during the past few decades, in the course of work in
logic and foundations of mathematics.
-- Noam Chomsky, “Current Issues in Linguistic Theory”, repr.
in Jerry Fodor & Jerrold Katz, eds., The Structure of Language
(1964), p. 59
~
There are books and papers that
speculate about the evolution of human language while studiously ignoring all
of linguistic research
-- Paul Bloom, reviewing LINGUA EX
MACHINA:
Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky With
the Human Brain.
By William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton.
~
Appendix: Historical
references to collaboration or lack of it, between linguistics and neighboring
fields:
Summing up the wide-ranging work of the philologist and
etymologist Hugo Schuchardt (floruit
1864 - 1927, magnum jubilaeum), Leo
Spitzer writes:
Schuchardt hat nicht nur über fast
alle allgemeinen Probleme der Sprachwissenschaft nachgedacht, sondern alle irgendwie zur Linguistik
peripherisch gelegenen Gebiete des Lebens
abgesucht, von der Sprachwissenschaft als Zentrum aus seinen Beitrag der Lösung der
drängenden Lebensprobleme gegeben.
-- Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo
Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2nd edn. 1928), p.
Schuchardt himself, however, in places posits the wisdom of
keeping linguistics sauber getrennt:
Hamitische Sprachen sind solche die
von Hamiten gesprochen werden, oder Hamiten sind die welche hamitische Sprachen reden. Jenes ist die anthropologische Erklärung, dieses die
linguistische … Mißverständnissen kann nur dadurch vorgebeugt werden, daß
Linguistisches und Anthropologisches strengstens auseinandergehalten werde.
-- review (1912) of C. Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten;
repr. Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2nd
edn. 1928), p. 334
~
Referring to the theoretical-semantic efforts of the
pre-eminent 19th-century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt:
Wundt’s failure seems to have
discouraged others from taking up the matter in earnest, for during the last 30
years, no one has made public any system of semasiology worthy of serious
consideration. Semantic work from
1900 to 1930 has been
characterized by an astonishing and
highly regrettable lack of contact and collaboration between psychologists and
philologists.
-- Gustav Stern, Meaning and
Change of Meaning (1931)
~
Contra sociological-anthropological structuralisme:
… eager souls who think they can easily
borrow and fruitfully adapt a formal model from simpler and perhaps more fortunate
fields such as linguistics or even
phonetics.
-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary
Thought and Politics (1978), p. 122
(Here he means rather phonology; it is phonology, and not phonetics,
that is structuralist.)
~
Where does linguistics fit in -- among the humanties,
or the sciences?
Um die Sprachwissenschaft haben sich bekanntlich die Natur- und die Geistes- (order
Geschichts-)wissenschaften gerissen,
wie in der mittelalterlichen Legende die Teufel und die Engle um die Seele des Menschen. Jetzt pflegt man sie
ihrem Inhalt nach zu den
Geisteswissenschaften, ihrer
Methode nach zu den
Naturwissenschaften zu zählen; mit
fast dem gleichen Rechte könnte
man das Umgekehrte tun.
Ich halte an der Einheit der
Wissenschaft fest, und vermag beispiesweise zwischen
Biologie und
Sprachwissenschaft keine tiefere
Kluft wahrzunehmen als zwischen
Chemie und Biologie.
-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo
Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2nd edn. 1928),
p. 105
.
