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Structural Linguistics and the Philosophy of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Emmon Bach

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In 1957 American linguistics seemed to have reached a plateau of achievement and acceptance on which its practitioners could pause in retrospective pride. That year saw the publication, under the aegis of the American Council of Learned Societies, of a sampling of papers, edited by Martin Joos (Readings in Linguistics) and documenting, according to its subtitle, “The development of descriptive linguistics in America since 1925.” In a period of about five years around that date H. A. Gleason, Jr., Charles F. Hockett and Archibald A. Hill published textbooks which summarized and extended current views on linguistics, while another leading linguist, Kenneth L. Pike, summed up his considerable experience in a preliminary version of a major work on Language. In the same year there appeared a slim volume which was to have a startling impact on linguistics. Its author, Noam Chomsky, was a student of Zellig S. Harris who himself had codified the methods of structural linguistics in 1951 and was one of the leading proponents of the assumptions and goals of American linguistics attacked so sharply by its new critic. Truly a paradigm of the Hegelian myth of history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 13 , Issue 51 , September 1965 , pp. 111 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 H. A. Gleason, Jr., An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (New York, 1955, a revised edition appeared in 1961); Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1958); Archibald A. Hill, Introduction to Linguistic Structures (New York, 1958); Kenneth L. Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, I, II, III (Glendale, 1954, 1955, 1960).

2 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (in Janua Linguarum, IV, The Hague, 1957, additional bibliography in the second printing, 1962); see also the important review by Robert B. Lees in Language, 33.375-408 (1957). Harris's book Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago, 1951; reprinted as Structural Linguistics) will be mentioned below. Chomsky has always been careful to point out his debt to Harris.

3 Two recent papers dealing in part with the subject of this survey should be mentioned: Karl V. Teeter, "Descriptive Linguistics in America: Triviality vs. Irrelevance," Word 20.197-206 (1964); and Jerrold J. Katz, "Mentalism in Linguistics," Language 40.124-137 (1964).

4 Quoted from Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill (New York, 1939). The debate about scientific method has a long history; compare for instance the arguments between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell in the nineteenth century.

5 P.A.M. Dirac, "The Physicist's Picture of Nature," Scientific American, Vol. 208, No. 5 (May 1963), pp. 45-53. I am indebted to Gary Prideaux for pointing out the relevance of this article to the present discussion.

6 Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Diacovery (New York, 1959, ttanslated and expanded from Logik der Forschung, Vienna, 1935).

7 Martin Joos, ed., Readings in Linguistics, Second Edition (New York, 1958), p. 96, cf. also 228, in both places Joos identifies this view with the "Boas tradition."

8 At several points in his comments on papers in Readings in Linguistics, Joos seems to be subscribing to the criterion of falsifiability, e.g. "a scientific statement is a vulnerable statement" (p. 31).

9 Harris, p. 366.

10 See especially Carl G. Hempel, Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science (in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, II, No. 7, Chicago, 1952). Bloomfield cites the assumptions of physicalism with approval in "Language or Ideas," Language 12.89-95 (1936).

11 Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers 3, Third Printing, (Washington, 1957).

12 James H. Sledd, "Notes on English Stress," First Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English (Austin, Texas, 1962), pp. 33-44, also in succeeding discussion.

13 Charles F. Hockett, A Manual of Phonology, Indiana University Publi cations in Anthropology and Linguistics, Memoir 11 (1955), p. 155, see also the section "Phonetic Realism" pp. 156-158.

14 In Joos, op. cit., pp. 381 and 380.

15 Yuen-Ren Chao, "The Non-Uniqueness of Phonemic Solutions of Phonetic Systems," Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology Academia Sinica, IV, Part 4, 363-397. Both this paper and Twaddell's monograph (in part) are reprinted in Joos' Readings in Linguistics.

16 Because of recursive formulas like AN = N (p. 265).

17 F. S. C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities (New York, 1947).

18 A good survey of this work is Noam Chomsky, "Formal Properties of Grammars," Chapter 12 in R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter, eds., Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, II (New York and London, 1963).

19 "Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammars," to appear in T. A. Sebeok, ed., Current Trends in Linguistics, III.