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BENJAMIN LEE WHORF Grammatical Categories Language and the World Essays New and Old ____________________________ Richard L. Epstein editor DRAFT April 2020 Advanced Reasoning Forum COPYRIGHT © 2021 by Richard L. Epstein. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution, information storage and retrieval systems, or in any other manner—without the written permission of the authors. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. Names, characters, and incidents relating to any of the characters in this text are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Honi soit qui mal y pense. For more information contact: Advanced Reasoning Forum P. O. Box 635 Socorro, NM 87801 USA www.ARFbooks.org paperback ISBN 978-1-938421-56-3 e-book ISBN 978-1-938421-57-0 Less certainty, more wonder. When people search for something, the likely outcome is that either they find it or, not finding it, they accept that it cannot be found, or they continue to search. So also in the case of what is sought in philosophy, I think, some people have claimed to have found the truth, others have asserted that it cannot be apprehended, and others are still searching. Those who think that they have found it are the Dogmatists, properly so called—for example, the followers of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics, and certain others. The followers of Clitomachus and Carneades, as well as other Academics, have asserted that it cannot be apprehended. The Skeptics continue to search. Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.1 translated by Benson Mates in The Skeptic Way Even a great magician cannot pull a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat. from the film The Red Shoes, 1948 Language and the World Essays New and Old Preface Contributors History of the Essays ESSAYS NEW RICHARD L. EPSTEIN The World as Process . 1 Language-Thought-Meaning . 11 Nouns and Verbs . 37 Why Event-Talk Is a Problem . 102 The Metaphysical Basis of Logic: Things and Masses . 105 Formal Semantics for Natural Languages? . 115 On the Genesis of the Concept of Object in Children . 121 A New Turing Test . 126 ESSAYS OLD DOROTHY DEMETRACOPOULOU LEE Conceptual Implications of an Indian Language . 130 Categories of the Generic and the Particular in Wintu.‘ 147 Linguistic Reflections of Wintu Thought . 156 Codifications of Reality: Lineal and Nonlineal . 166 Symbolization and Value . 183 Commentary on the papers of Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee 195 BENJAMIN LEE WHORF Grammatical Categories . 204 Science and Linguistics . 218 The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language . 231 Languages and Logic . 256 Commentary on the papers of Benjamin Lee Whorf . 268 M. DALE KINKADE Salish Evidence Against the Universality of ‘Noun’ and ‘Verb’ . 278 Commentary on Kinkade’s “Salish Evidence” . 294 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE “Reason” in Philosophy . 296 BENSON MATES Metaphysics and Linguistic Relativity Extract from The Philosophy of Leibniz . 302 Index (in preparation) . 307 Preface Language and the world. A big subject. The structure of languages, metaphysics, knowing and wondering, things and mass and process, how to reason well, thought, ethics. All these and more are involved in understanding how we understand the world with our languages. The first three essays, “The World as Process”, “Language- Thought-Meaning”, and “Nouns and Verbs”, set out the overall per- spective. The other essays, which can be read in any order, extend, or contradict, or support the ideas in these first three, leading to a large view of how we talk and understand and how that affects how we live. That is extended by my analysis of how to reason in accord with the view that the world is process-mass in Reasoning about the World as Process. In part, this work is an exploration of the idea that language shapes how we encounter the world. I do not attempt to trace the history of “Whorf’s Thesis”, the use and misuse of that term, and the many ideas of what it’s thought to be, for that is ably done by John Leavitt in Linguistic Relativities (Cambridge, 2011) and Penny Lee in The Whorf Theory Complex (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1996). This book is an exploration, in essays by me and others, as we try to understand, and understand how we understand, an exploration leading, I hope, to less certainty and more wonder. Contributors Richard L. Epstein (1947–) received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California Berkeley in 1973. He began studies in philosophy as a postdoctoral fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zeland (1976–1978). His mentors in philosophy were George Hughes and Benson Mates. He has written books on mathematical logic (Degrees of Unsolva- bility; Computability with Walter Carnielli, Classical Mathematical Logic) and formal logic (Propositional Logics; Predicate Logic; An Introduction to Formal Logic; The Internal Structure of Predicates and Names; Time and Space in Formal Logic). His other work in logic includes the series of books Essays on the Logic as the Art of Reasoning Well. His work in linguistics includes Conventional Gestures: Meaning and Methodology and An American Gestuary with Alex Raffi. He is also the editor and translator of the stories in The BARK of DOG. Currently he is the Head of the Advanced Reasoning Forum in Socorro, New Mexico. Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee (1905–1975) was born in Constan- tinople and attended the American School run by missionaries there. She won a scholarship at Vassar College, and later went to the Univer- sity of California, Berkeley where she studied cultural anthropology under Alfred Kroeber. She did fieldwork with the Wintu Indians. She earned her Ph. D. from Berkeley in 1931. (For a full biography by Jeffrey Ehrenreich see the epilogue to her book Freedom and Culture, Waveland Press, 1987.) In 1959 Clark Moustakas and David Smillie brought together in Freedom and Culture some of her published essays that they and Dorothy Lee felt would appeal to undergraduates, three of which are reprinted here: “Symbolization and Value”, “Codifications of Reality: Lineal and Non-Lineal”, and “Linguistic Reflections on Wintu Thought”. Those differ sometimes considerably from the essays of the same title published earlier in journals. In particular, the phonetic spellings of non-English words were simplified. Two earlier essays of hers “Conceptual Implications of an Indian Language” and “Categories of the Generic and Particular in Wintu.‘” that have not previously been reprinted are included here. These are some of the earliest and best analyses of how language shapes thought. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) [From the Editor’s Foreword to the reprint of “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” in ETC.: a review of general semantics, 1944, p. 197.] “Born in 1897 in Winthrop, Mass., he was a graduate of M.I.T., and served as a private in the engineering corps during World War I. In 1919 he joined the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, and was assistant secretary of the company at the time of his death, July 26, 1941. He began his study of Aztec and Mayan cultures, as a hobby, in 1925. Within a few years he had become one of the nation’s leading Americanists. Many of his articles, the results of field work in Mexico and the Southwest as well as of private study, were published in Technology Review.” John B. Carroll has written a full biography as the Introduction to the volume of Whorf papers he edited, Language, Thought, and Reality (M.I.T. Press, 1956). M. Dale Kinkade (1933–2004) received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Indiana in 1963. He taught at Central Washington University, the University of Kansas, and the University of British Columbia. Between 1960 and 1976 he conducted fieldwork on Salishan languages. He was a member of the board of trustees of the Jacobs Research Fund, which supports fieldwork on Northwest American Indian languages and cultures. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was born in Germany and studied philology at Bonn University. Appointed professor of classical philology in 1869 at the University of Basel, Switzerland, he taught and wrote, though not on philology, while living mostly in Switzerland and Italy, until he became insane in 1888. Benson Mates (1919–2009) received his B.A. at the University of Oregon in 1941. His graduate study in philosophy at Cornell was interrupted by the Second World War, and he completed his Ph.D. studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1948. Among the books he published are Stoic Logic, Elementary Logic, The Philosophy of Leibniz,and The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism History of the Essays ESSAYS NEW Richard L. Epstein (1947–) “The World as Process” An earlier version of the essay appeared in Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, vol. 73, no. 3, 213–232, 2016 (published 2018). Note on the composition of this essay This essay grew out of my trying to explain to friends the ideas from a preprint The Internal Structure of Predicates and Names with an Analysis of Reasoning about Process (2010). The many discussions I had with Don Brown, Fred Kroon, Melissa Axelrod, Arnold Mazotti, and Esperanza Buitrago-Díaz helped shape what I have said, and I am grateful to them. I’m grateful also to João Marcos, who at the Universidade do Natal, Brazil, in February 2011 gave me my first opportunity to give a talk, in Portuguese, about this work, and to Petrucio Viana and Renata de Freitas who invited me to give a talk in English about this work at the XVI Encontro Brasileiro de Logica in Petropolis, Rio de Janiero, Brazil, in May, 2011, and to Ivan da Costa Marques who arranged for me to give the “same” talk in Portuguese there.
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