Chapter 2

Remarks on Hockett’s “The Changing Intellectual Context of Linguistic Theory” & Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

1. Introduction Hockett and Kuhn are both interested in the history of science. Comparison of the two approaches provides some insight into our own interest in linguistics and language.

2. Hockett Hockett (1983) finds several themes which allow one to follow the flow of intellectual activity in the nineteenth century. Two of these themes, which he introduces with Pierre-Simon Laplace, are the notions of progress and determinism. The latter forms the primary criterion for the distinction between two allocations of phenomena. “There are two categories of science because there are two fundamentally different kinds of things to be scientific about” (Hockett 1983:14). The two categories of science are termed

Naturwissenschaft Geisteswissenschaft

Precise characterization of the opposition between the two changed during the nineteenth century as more data became available (more discoveries were made, aided in part by improving technology), and as conceptions of the data were altered. Hockett (1983:20-21) identifies several oppositions as forming the basis of the two kinds of science:

Physical Mental Determinate Indeterminate Synchronic Diachronic 2 HALT

Nomothetic Idiographic

It is only in Naturwissenschaft (or la philosophie naturelle or natural science) that one can exercise the scientific ideal, and the history of science in the nineteenth century is one in which the range of Geisteswissenschaft is reduced and that of Naturwissenschaft is augmented. Geisteswissenschaft (or les sciences morales) does not permit one to use the methods of Naturwissen- schaft because the data do not exhibit pattern. They are not determinate, and therefore they are not predictable (Hockett 1983:14 & 16):

In the realm of nature one can make timeless assertions: the valence of oxygen is two, always has been, and always will be, whether the oxygen is on someone’s bloodstream or in an interstellar cloud. But in Geisteswissenschaft there can be no such generalizations. The way things are in the human world is constantly changed by the willful actions of people. Therefore only a particularistic approach is possible — whereupon the Geisteswissenchaften were also called the historical sciences, or just history ... Perhaps it was not so foolish, after all, to propose that plants, animals, and languages, all as then conceived, are sufficiently alike to merit assignment to a single larger category.

But the boundary of this division shifts throughout the nineteenth century and the character of the boundary is changed as well. In the initial state of affairs, Geisteswissenschaft appears to have included all the life sciences, and the contrast was nearly one of organic (Geisteswissenschaft) versus inorganic (Naturwissenschaft). Geisteswissenschaft was guided the doctrine of by vitalism (Hockett 1983:13):

The vitalist view had held that “organic” compounds, meaning those found characteristically and exclusively in organisms, could not be built up out of raw- materials except under the direction of the posited vital energy.

The first realignment followed from the discovery that organic results can originate from inorganic sources. The synthesis of urea demonstrated that such a vitalist view was incorrect, and then “it was demonstrated that the laws of thermodynamics hold in organisms just as they do in nonliving organisms” (Hockett 1983:13). The effect was not to change the way of working within the Geisteswissenchaften; it simply resulted in the establishment of physiology as a Naturwissenschaft and the removal of some phenomena from one category to the other, leaving minds and the phenomena associated with Hocket & Kuhn 3 them (humans) subject to vitalism (Hockett 1983:14):

... the gulf between living and nonliving seemed narrower, [but] that [gulf] between human and nonhuman yawned as unbridgeable as ever. It did not matter that human physiology is much like other physiology. Obviously human beings have bodies, which behave like matter because that is what they are ... But we also have minds, and mind is a different sort of substance, obedient perhaps to different laws.

The place of language in the division depended upon whether one saw the phenomenon as subject to individual will or whether the relevant phenomenon was beyond the reach of that will. If we look at the data then emerging from comparative study, it may appear that there are a succession of stages which — because they seem to show a progression — are determinate in their behavior. In particularistic observations on the behavior of individuals, the conclusion must be that there is no determined shape to the data and it is indeterminate; but in the aggregate and over time, there is determinate behavior. Hockett (1983:16-17) cites William Dwight Whitney as exemplifying the first view, and August Schleicher as maintaining the second ... with his proposed diachronic progression of languages from isolating to agglutinative to inflecting. Ultimately, they represent two complementary and noncompeting views of the same phenomenon; one does not have to choose between them. However, it is the viewpoint represented by Schleicher which first carries linguistics from the domain of Geisteswissenschaft to Naturwissenschaft with the establishment of laws, which “showed a pervasive regularity”, and which “seemed not to have any connection with the human will”, and which were “in a sense, a mass phenomenon, affecting many people at once” (Hockett 1983:22). The viewpoint which Whitney represented remained subject to Geistes- wissenschaft until two additional notions were made prominent and finally united into one perspective: granularity (Hockett 1983:24-26) and pattern- ing/arrangement (Hockett 1983:26-29). In the Naturwissenschaften, granu- larity appeared in the form of molecules in chemistry, as cells in physiology, and finally as the quanta of light in physics. The granular mode of thinking was in the air and in linguistics as well; the grammatical tradition spanning two millennia in which sentences were seen as composed of their parts, and the longer experience with alphabetic writing systems made the extension of particles to phonetics a natural one. Patterning in Naturwissenschaften is identified with “the arrangement of parts” (Hockett 1983:26), and not with the substance which implements that pattern. Such substance may in this view be 4 HALT replaced completely without damage to the pattern; “in the course of time every constituent atom of a person’s body is replaced, but the pattern persists and continuity of identity is unbroken” (Hockett 1983:26-27). Within linguistics, we can now see such pattern in syntax — if viewed as an arrangement of words into hierarchical forms — and in the concept of the phoneme. Patterns such as these may stand beyond the behavior and will of individuals forming a constant identity, which the will and vagaries of the individual may not touch. Pattern in this view is exclusively equated with ‘arrangement’ and ‘structure’, and ‘Gestalt’. Structuralism replaces vitalism. The possibility of there being another mode in which pattern may be present is no longer possible (Hockett 1983:29 and 32):

In syntax, Gestalt plays such a crucial role that if one takes it away there is nothing left –– and this has been so from the very beginnings of the discipline in classical antiquity ... the structure [pattern, PWD] of a thing, event, or system, if I understand it aright, is nothing other than the pattern [structure, PWD] it manifests.

In this way, the second viewpoint maintained by Whitney is also transferred from the realm of Geisteswissenschaft into Naturwissenschaft. Language can now be interpreted as physical, determinate, synchronic, and nomothetic.

3. Kuhn Kuhn (1970) proposes a different and more general scenario intended to allow us to understand the ways in which scientific study is pursued. He distinguishes several states of such activity:

(i) “Prehistory as a science” or “pre-paradigm period” (Kuhn 1970:21 & 163) (ii) Paradigmatic science (iii) Normal science (iv) Crisis science (v) Crisis resolution or the return to normal science

As an example of the prescientific condition Kuhn (1970:13) cites the example of “physical optics”:

... anyone examining a survey of physical optics before Newton may well conclude that, although the field’s practitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity was something less than science. Being able to take no common body of belief for Hocket & Kuhn 5

granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from its foundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation and experiment was relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or of phenomena that every optical writer felt forced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other schools as it was to nature. That pattern is not unfamiliar in a number of creative [i.e. not scientific, PWD] fields today, nor is it incompatible with significant discovery and invention.

Recognizing these practitioners in the pre-paradigmatic condition to be scientists, Kuhn also allows their work the status of ‘theory’. A movement away from this condition occurs when (Kuhn 1970:10 & 17):

[there is an achievement] ... sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended [emph. mine, PWD] to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve ... To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors ...

One of the conditions for normal science, then, is a successful evaluation of one of the competing modes of thought, which becomes thereby the paradigm for that science. “In its established usage, a paradigm is an accepted model or pattern, and that aspect of its meaning has enabled me, lacking a better word, to appropriate ‘paradigm’ here” (Kuhn 1970:23). The others will lose adherents and fall into disuse. Kuhn (1970:17) sees this weeding out process as irreversible in that such a field will not revert to the condition in which many theories are again competing with no one of them in the ascendancy (Kuhn 1970:17 & 19):

[initial divergences] ... do disappear to a very considerable extent and then apparently once and for all ... There are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work.

Sociologically, the practitioners are transformed from “a group ... interested merely in the study of nature into a profession or, at least, a discipline” (Kuhn 1970:19), recognized by the presence of journals, societies, and a place in the curriculum. Because there are fewer (or no) competing views, the practitioner can now “take a paradigm for granted, [and] he need no longer, in 6 HALT his major works, attempt to build his field anew, starting from first principles and justifying the use of each concept introduced” (Kuhn 1970:19-20). Textbooks come into existence. At the paradigmatic stage, the subject matter becomes more textured; the perspective provided by the paradigm brings certain questions to the fore and places others in the background (Kuhn 1970:15):

In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar.

The emergence of a paradigm does not require that the victorious view be comprehensive (Kuhn 1970:23 & 24):

Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute ... Normal science [emph. mine, PWD] consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself ... Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers.

The experimental activity of normal science (opposed to theoretical activity) centers on three areas:

(i) “that class of facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things” (Kuhn 1970:25) (ii) “those facts that, though often without much intrinsic interest, can be compared directly with predictions from the paradigm theory” (Kuhn 1970:26) (iii) “work undertaken to articulate the paradigm theory, resolving some of its residual ambiguities and permitting the solution of problems to which it had previously only drawn attention. This class proves to be the most important of all ... More than any other sort of normal research, the problems of paradigm articulation are simultaneously theoretical and Hocket & Kuhn 7

experimental ...” (Kuhn 1970:27)

Normal science consists in the incorporation of additional information and the ordered elaboration of the paradigm. Puzzles are solved; anomalies are discovered and made integral (Kuhn 1970:79):

... the puzzles that constitute normal science exist only because no paradigm that provides a basis for scientific research ever completely resolves all its problems ... every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another viewpoint, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis.

Some residual problems may resist incorporation and produce “a period of pronounced professional insecurity. As one might expect, that insecurity is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones” (Kuhn 1970:67-68). And this creates a crisis. The response has never yet been the abandonment of the paradigm and a return to the pre- paradigmatic condition (Kuhn 1970:77 & 79):1

... once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place. No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature ... The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other ... To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself. That act reflects not on the paradigm but on the man. Inevitably he will be seen by his colleagues as ‘the carpenter who blames his tools’.

When a crisis condition comes to exist, it may be resolved in three ways (Kuhn 1970:84): it may eventually be reduced within the old paradigm, it may be set aside for future generations, or it may prompt the emergence of a new candidate paradigm (Kuhn 1970:80):

1 “Though history is unlikely to record their names, some men have undoubtedly been driven to desert science because of their inability to tolerate crisis. Like artists, creative scientists must occasionally be able to live in a world out of joint — elsewhere I have described that necessity as ‘the essential tension’” (Kuhn 1970:78-79). 8 HALT

... by proliferating versions of the paradigm, crisis loosens the rules of normal puzzle-solving in ways that ultimately permit a new paradigm to emerge.

By a process similar to the emergence of the original paradigm, it may be replaced as the dominant one. ‘Has your illness progressed?’ Does science progress?

To a very great extent the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways ... we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked ... But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution towards anything. (Kuhn 1970:160,162 & 170)

Pre-paradigmatic science cannot progress since there is no replacement, only simultaneous competition. When one paradigm becomes dominant, inevitably to be replaced by another, then there may be a sense of ‘progress’.2 Since one never returns to a displaced paradigm, the impression is that progression-as- replacement is also progression-as-improvement. Why, after all, would the alteration occur if not as a (perceived) improvement? But since the new paradigm will itself inevitably be replaced (they have always have been), the ‘progress’ is only a local one. The impression of progress is, in this way, a redundant epiphenomenon.3 There is, however, a gradation in the “confidence in their paradigms” which appears to differentiate (i) the arts from (ii) “history, philosophy, and

2 Kuhn (1970:161) sees the return (retrogression) of “art” to “primitive models” as the source of the cleavage between “art” and “science”: For many centuries, both in antiquity and again in early modern Europe, painting was regarded as the cumulative discipline. During those years the artist’s goal was assumed to be representation. Critics and historians, like Pliny and Vasari, then recorded with veneration the series of inventions from foreshortening through chiaroscuro that had made possible successively more perfect representations of nature ... even after that steady exchange [between arts and science as illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci] had ceased, the term ‘art’ continued to apply as much to technology and the crafts, which were also seen as progressive, as to painting and sculpture. Only when the latter unequivocally renounced representation as their goal and began to learn again from primitive models did the cleavage we now take for granted assume anything like its present depth.

3 This returns us to Laplace and his two characteristics of science: progression and determinism. And now it is the former which appears the more important as a criterion of science, but that ‘progress’ is now different. Hockett (1983:10) portrays it as a conscious “collective march” having begun at least with the Enlightenment in the 18th century. This is not the same as the revolutionary, eclipsing progress which Kuhn proposes. Hocket & Kuhn 9 the social sciences” and from (iii) the “natural sciences”. Education in these three fields from (i) to (iii) relies increasingly upon the use of textbooks until the last stages of instruction because the essential content is confidently encapsulated in texts. In arts, “the practitioner gains his education by exposure to the works of other artists”. In the mid-range areas of social science, textbooks are employed, but “even in these fields the elementary college course employs parallel readings in the original sources, some of them ‘classics’ of the field, others the contemporary research reports that practitioners write for each other” (Kuhn 1970:165). In the natural sciences, “the few [curricula] that do assign supplementary reading in research papers and monographs restrict such assignments to the most advanced course and to materials that take up more or less where the available texts leave off” (Kuhn 1970:165). The strength of this “confidence” in or “commitment” (Kuhn 1970:100) to one’s paradigm is evident when it has to be abandoned (Kuhn 1970:151-52):

The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced. Lifelong resistance, particularly from those whose productive careers have committed them to an older tradition of normal science, is not a violation of scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself. The source of resistance is the assurance that the older paradigm will ultimately solve all its problems, that nature can be shoved into the box that the paradigm provides. Inevitably, at times of revolution, that assurance seems stubborn and pigheaded as indeed it sometimes becomes. But it is also something more. That same assurance is what makes normal or puzzle-solving science possible. And it is only through normal science that the professional community of scientists succeeds, first, in exploiting the potential scope and precision of the older paradigm and, then in isolating the difficulty through the study of which a new paradigm may emerge.

4. Conclusion Using Kuhn’s paradigm for the history of science, linguistics has not just recently become a science in the twentieth century.4 It has had a long history with its own paradigms (sometimes shared with other fields). This blending, in which several distinct scientific interests can have a common notion, e.g. the breadth/use of vitalism or structuralism, recurs within linguistics and

4 But consider the age of our own journals, societies, and curricula/departments. Hockett (1948:566) asserts that “Linguistics is only in its beginnings”, whereas Whorf (1940:232) describes linguistics as “a very old science” although in “its modern experimental phase ... [it} could be called one of the newest”. 10 HALT permits a wide range of activities ... all the while sharing a single paradigm. Cf. Figure 1 from Southworth & Daswani (1974:8). Returning to Hockett’s themes in this light, the transition from nineteenth century to twentieth century science in the fields identified as Geisteswissenschaft is the transition from the paradigm of vitalism to that of structuralism (Hockett 1983:33):

...in the middle of the present century there was –– and perhaps still is –– a whole complicated ‘structuralist’ movement, in fields as diverse as ethnology, literary criticism, and mathematics some of whose participants proclaim their methodological indebtedness to Prague.

Figure 1: Linguistics in the 20th century.

This paradigm, for the moment at least, behaves as normal science (Hockett 1983:34):

... I am convinced that the full impact of the Gestalt view has not yet been felt. If we can learn to take that approach in a consistent way, I believe many of the problems that beleaguered us in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (and that have been largely neglected between then and now) will turn out either to be spurious or to have simple and satisfying solutions. Hocket & Kuhn 11

This shift of paradigms from vitalism to structuralism, then, prompts us to see language in a different way and in different places than before. Hockett (1983:40) summarizes his view of the reconceptualization of language:

Linguistics Linguistics as as Naturwissenschaft Geisteswissenschaft

Action Thought Social Individual Practice/Communicative Theory/Rehearsal

And he finally insists upon a physicalism (Hockett 1983:42):

I do mean that, in my view, there have been no developments either in linguistics or in the scientific world as a whole demanding any major revision of the Bloomfieldian physicalistic orientation ...

There is no crisis ...