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Chapter 2 Remarks on Hockett's “The Changing Intellectual Context of Linguistic Theory” & Kuhn's the Structure of Sc 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.
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