1 - A first look at universals

Summary

Grammatica una et eadem est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur.

Roger Bacon

The debate on language universals

Introduction

For the last several decades we have been living in what has been called, for better or for worse, the postmodern era, a cultural movement or climate of social sensitivity, which, in contrast to the traditional values of the rationalistic, globalizing version of Modernism inherited from the Enlightenment, defends ideological positions based on heterogeneity, dispersion, and difference. Over the past years, contingency and individuality have gradually taken precedence over permanence and universality. As Harvey (1989) so accurately states, the views that are presently most highly valued in the postmodern world are generally those that concede greater importance to particularism and fragmentation, focus on the individual nature and interest of the parts rather than the whole, and are ultimately conducive to the disarticulation or deconstruction of all human sociocultural and economic activities. In the same way that moral values and instruction are not thought to be universally applicable, many well-known scholars of this era, even in the realm of science – especially the social sciences (e.g. the work of Lyotard) and, to a lesser extent, physics and mathematics (in line with Spengler) – affirm that there are no general principles that can be objectively evaluated independently of the spatiotemporal context in which they were initially proposed.