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Universität Duisburg-Essen John E. Joseph Two Strands in Whorfian Thought and their Neo-Whorfian Implications Series A: General & Theoretical Papers ISSN 1435-6473 Essen: LAUD 1998 (2nd ed. with divergent page numbering 2007) Paper No. 440 Universität Duisburg-Essen John E. Joseph University of Edinburgh (U.K.) Two Strands in Whorfian Thought and their Neo-Whorfian Implications Copyright by the author Reproduced by LAUD 1998 (2nd ed. with divergent page numbering 2007) Linguistic Agency Series A University of Duisburg-Essen General and Theoretical FB Geisteswissenschaften Paper No. 440 Universitätsstr. 12 D- 45117 Essen Order LAUD-papers online: http://www.linse.uni-due.de/linse/laud/index.html Or contact: [email protected] John E. Joseph Two Strands in Whorfian Thought and their Neo-Whorfian Implications Introduction By simultaneously revisiting Humboldt and Whorf, this symposium forms part of what is now a long tradition of linking the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis' to a spectrum of 17th and 18th-century thinkers, with Humboldt as the knot binding the various threads (see Koerner 1992, Joseph 1996, Lee 1996). In a 1996 paper I have attempted to complexify this genealogy, to take account of a second strand of thought feeding into Sapir's and Whorf s ideas about how language shapes thought, perception, and culture. The present paper will first lay out what these two strands are, then will consider how the second, previously ignored strand might usefully be brought back into play in order to expand the range of neo-Whorfian approaches to language. Language as a 'magic key' to Thought and Culture In Humboldt, as in Herder before him, language is treated as the embodiment of a national worldview, a kind of spiritual essence without which a culture cannot be adequately understood. Language is thus what we might call a 'magic key', for the claim or implication is that studying the language of a people is the secret to comprehending their minds or souls. As Humboldt declares, [...] there resides in every language a characteristic world-view. As the individual sound stands between man and the object, so the entire language steps in between him and the nature that operates, both inwardly and outwardly, upon him. He surrounds himself with a world of sounds so as to assimilate and process within himself the world of objects. (Humboldt 1836 [1988:60]) In certain regards the basic approach to language, thought and culture taken by Sapir in his 1921 book Language is related to this magic key view, with numerous provisos which I discuss in Joseph (1996: 367-370). At least we can say that Sapir in 1921 may be a 'closet' semi-Humboldtian to the extent that he believes in a significant attachment between language and culture. He has no time for the sort of causal correlation between language structure and the intellectual power of cultures which is at the heart of Humboldt (1836). "Rightly understood", writes Sapir (1921:219), "such correlations are rubbish". Nevertheless, he rejects any notion that language might be a mere 'garment' in which thought is clothed (Sapir 1921: 15). Sapir 1921 does not describe language as the kind of shaping force on culture it will become in some of his later writings, most famously in his paper "The Status of Linguistics as a Science", delivered in December 1928 and published 1 the following year. But by then his overall approach to the relationship of language and thought has changed markedly. Language as Source of 'metaphysical garbage' As to precisely when between 1921 and 1928 Sapir "changed his mind" (Sampson 1980:82) or at least his rhetoric, we can pinpoint it to the summer of 1923, when, laid up with a broken leg, he read and reviewed Charles Kay Ogden's (1889 - 1957) and Ivor Armstrong Richards' (1893-1979) newly published book The Meaning of Meaning, subtitled A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism. It was this book that gave him entree into a conception of language and thought which had developed in analytic philosophy with no counterpart in linguistics or anthropology. Most linguists down to Sapir's time would have accepted the premise that languages, or some languages, serve human beings well as instruments of thought, or at least are neutral vehicles for thought.1 But the tradition of analytic philosophy that arose in the nineteenth century with George Boole (1815-1864), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), Ernst Schröder (1841-1902), Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), and Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932, on whose involvement in the international language movement see Falk 1995) began from a very different premise: that ordinary languages are grounded in metaphysical presumptions which present an obstacle to rational understanding. We thus need to get through existing languages in order to understand the universal logic that only a 'pure' artificial language like that of mathematicians can adequately capture. This idea has a long historical pedigree (discussed below), but in the wake especially of Frege it took off in the later nineteenth century with a force that would propel it to the forefront of philosophy with the work of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Ludwig Wittgenstein's (1889-1951) Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921, translated into English and published by Ogden, with a foreword by Russell), and the logical positivists, including Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), one of whose best known works (to judge from the number of its later anthologizations), entitled precisely "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache" (Carnap 1931), appeared shortly before he left Prague for the University of Chicago, at about the same time Sapir left Chicago for Yale. We might call this the 'metaphysical garbage' view of how language influences thought, for it sees all such influence as a problem to be overcome, garbage to be taken out. Russell lays it out at length in a 1924 article, though already by then it had been informing his philosophical work for at least two decades: 1 They disagreed about whether some did so better than others, with the most 'progressive' linguists following liberal anthropologists in adopting a doctrine that all races and languages represent an equal endpoint to the evolutionary process, hence that every language is perfectly adapted to the needs of the culture that uses it. 2 The influence of language on philosophy has, I believe, been profound and almost unrecognized. If we are not to be misled by this influence, it is necessary to become conscious of it, and to ask ourselves deliberately how far it is legitimate. The subject-predicate logic, with the substance-attribute metaphysic, are a case in point. It is doubtful whether either would have been invented by people speaking a non-Aryan language; certainly they do not seem to have arisen in China, except in connection with Buddhism, which brought Indian philosophy with it [...] In these respects language misleads us both by its vocabulary and by its syntax. We must be on our guard in both respects if our logic is not to lead to a false metaphysic. Syntax and vocabulary have had different kinds of effects on philosophy. Vocabulary has most influence on common sense. It might be urged, conversely, that common sense produces our vocabulary. This is only partially true. A word is applied at first to things which are more or less similar, without any reflection as to whether they have any point of identity. But when once usage has fixed the objects to which the word is to be applied, common sense is influenced by the existence of the word, and tends to suppose that one word must stand for one object, which will be a universal in the case of an adjective or an abstract word. Thus the influence of vocabulary is towards a kind of platonic pluralism of things and ideas. The influence of syntax, in the case of the Indo-European languages, is quite different. Almost any proposition can be put into a form in which it has a subject and a predicate, united by a copula. It is natural to infer that every fact has a corresponding form, and consists in the possession of a quality by a substance. This leads, of course, to monism, since the fact that there were several substances (if it were a fact) would not have the requisite form. Philosophers, as a rule, believe themselves free from this sort of influence of linguistic forms, but most of them seem to me to be mistaken in this belief. In thinking about abstract matters, the fact that the words for abstractions are no more abstract than ordinary words always makes it easier to think about the words than about what they stand for, and it is almost impossible to resist consistently the temptation to think about the words. (Russell 1924:367-9 [1959:38-9]) 'Metaphysical garbage' is more or less the negative counterpart of 'magic key'. There are few if any obvious metaphysical garbage traces in Humboldt. In the quotation from Humboldt given above, immediately after he declares that "there resides in every language a characteristic world-view", he proceeds to deny any implication that this state of affairs mitigates the connection of thought to the 'simple truth', which is the principal claim of the metaphysical garbage view: These expressions in no way outstrip the measure of the simple truth. Man lives primarily with objects, indeed, since feeling and acting in him depend on his presentations, he actually does so exclusively, as language presents them to him. (Humboldt 1836 [1988:60]) The worldview embodied in a language is seen instead as a positive force, producing national unity in its linguistic but also its cultural and social dimensions.
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