16.3004, Review: Philosophy of Lang: Harris (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3004. Mon Oct 17 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3004, Review: Philosophy of Lang: Harris (2005)

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1)
Date: 16-Oct-2005
From: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira < ellmcf at nus.edu.sg >
Subject: The Semantics of Science 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 16:46:12
From: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira < ellmcf at nus.edu.sg >
Subject: The Semantics of Science 
 

AUTHOR: Harris, Roy
TITLE: The Semantics of Science
PUBLISHER: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1909.html 

Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Department of English Language and Literature, 
National University of Singapore

We know that the so-called "language of science" depends on the language 
of the scientist. Scientific arguments and findings are wrapped in (and 
often clouded by) the particular language that individual scientists 
happen to speak or choose to publish in. That is, we know that there is no 
language of science. In his latest book, Roy Harris takes one drastic step 
further in the analysis of the intricate relationship between language and 
science. Drawing on evidence from the Western tradition of thought, Roy 
Harris contends that science itself is a construct of language, held 
together by means of an idiosyncratic semantics designed to give it 
credibility. Keeping technical terminology to a minimum, the book weaves 
together insights from linguistics, philosophy and epistemology, targeting 
a wide readership within these areas of interest, as well as among 
researchers from all walks of science.

SYNOPSIS

The book contains nine chapters preceded by a Preface and an Introduction, 
two Appendices and an Index.

In the Preface, Roy Harris (RH) sets the tone of the ensuing discussion by 
presenting the "language myth" that has scientific discourse "as 
providing, at least ideally, a reliable and objective reflection of what 
exists in Nature" (p. xiv). The myth draws on two assumptions. The first 
one reifies the object of science, by claiming that there is a 'what', in 
Nature, ready and waiting for our discovery of it by means of ways to talk 
about it. The second assumption reifies science itself, by claiming that 
its language can reasonably mirror that 'what'. The consequences of these 
assumptions become clear when we are reminded that scientists naturally 
assume their own branch of science as a kind of neutral gauge of 
scientificity, the case in point being mathematicians and the 'language' 
of mathematics, to which one chapter is dedicated. Linguists are no 
exception, and their rhetoric deserves full chapter treatment too. In RH's 
view (and words), linguists have only succeeded in compounding the 
mythical muddle by adding "metalinguistic terminology" of their own (p. 
xv) to other terminology. The Preface also introduces the integrational 
approach to science and its terminology that RH advocates, where "language 
is the product of our daily attempts [...] to establish more or less 
permanent frameworks for our dealings with others" (p. xiv).

The Introduction starts by alerting us to the "time-lag" (p. 1) inherent 
in the conflict between modern scientific thinking and the formulation of 
scientific statements according to an inherited model of language. The 
time-lag is built into language itself, as a semantic time-lag, whereby 
scientists and non-scientists alike continue to talk about new things with 
old words. For example, we still say that the sun rises and sets. This 
being so, the language of science is clearly plagued by the same ambiguity 
and imprecision that we find in everyday uses of language. The semantic 
time-lag associates with the language myth by means of two other 
assumptions, this time about the meaning of words. The 'psychocentric' 
assumption holds that words stand in for ideas in the mind, whereas 
the 'reocentric' assumption holds that words stand in for whatever there 
is (objects, processes) outside the mind. 

Chapter 1, "Language and the Aristotelian scientist", explains why 
Aristotle is seen both as the epitome of the scientist, and the epitome of 
the anti-scientist. He systematised "facts assumed to be known" (p. 7), 
taxonomy being an honourable scientific endeavour, but he consistently 
ignored empirical questioning except as a means of proving the validity of 
assumptions asserted through logic alone. This chapter also explains why 
it cannot make sense to talk about Aristotle's presumed science in his own 
Aristotelian terms, for the simple reason that Aristotle's vocabulary 
lacks a single word for 'science'. RH argues that "it is possible to ask" 
what Aristotle's views of science might have been only in the same sense 
that it is possible to ask "what he might have thought of the capitalist 
system or Association Football" (p. 6). Aristotle's contribution to modern 
science was a persistent language myth, associated with his first-hand 
theorisation about reocentric semantics. The myth is encapsulated in what 
RH terms "Aristotle's fudge" (p. 18), arising from his alleged philosophy 
of science, where the 'real world' is the same for all observers, and his 
philosophy of language, where the meanings of words are conventional.  

Chapter 2, "Before and after Aristotle", argues that the development of 
scientific inquiry necessarily involves developing a corresponding 
language of science. That is, science is not a "timeless supercategory" 
(p. 25), despite scientists' assumptions to the contrary. RH shows that, 
for science historians and practitioners alike, contemporary as well as 
past, the application of Aristotelian views across different objects of 
inquiry and across time appears to define the inquiry as properly 
scientific. In addition, the modern semantics of the word 'science' is 
made to apply freely to domains where it does not belong, including to so-
called "prehistoric" science (p. 26).

Chapter 3, "Semantics and the Royal Society", focuses on the quest, 
initiated in the 17th century, for a language of science which is neutral 
in relation to both its object and its users. This language should 
comprise terms and definitions that are unambiguous, by means of a 
biunique correspondence to "the things named" (p. 52). The pursuit 
culminated in John Wilkins' _Real Character_, and his attempts to remedy 
the arbitrariness (i.e. obscurity) that holds between word and meaning. 
Wilkins set out to use arbitrariness in his favour, through the deliberate 
construction of "a universal system of communication" (p. 55) based on 
precise definitions of precise signs. In other words, we are back to 
Aristotle's assumptions. All objects external to the human mind are 
available for human inspection, they are the same for all observers, and 
knowledge consists in the search for a suitable set of labels to name 
these objects. Naming endows the name-giving scientist with mastery over 
the named, as it did for Adam in Paradise. 

In Chapter 4, "Science in the kitchen", RH addresses the dilemma that 
arises from wanting to claim that scientific inquiry is found in everyday 
life, engaging all and sundry as scientists, while at the same time 
wanting to preserve science as the endeavour of a literate, intellectually 
privileged coterie. The dilemma materialises in the use of everyday words 
as scientific terms, and is compounded by the use of old words to 
represent new concepts. For example, our current definition (and 
understanding) of the word 'copper' does not correspond to earlier 
definitions of this word, but we use the same word to capture 
the 'essence' of copper through a modern definition, in yet another 
example of thriving Aristotelian reocentric semantics. We do this because 
the "Western view of scientific advance has consisted, fundamentally, in 
formulating ever more accurate descriptions of the natural world [...] 
dressed up in new linguistic garb" (p. 64). What this shows is that words 
that make up a scientific vocabulary go on being defined with no other 
purpose than "to _close the circle_ linking language to reality" (p. 67). 
RH argues that if this were not the case, then the discourse of science 
would risk being exposed for the same language-dependent, arbitrary, and 
hence fallible status apparent from any other kind of discourse. Dodging 
this undesirable insight is what fosters the promotion of a discipline as 
scientific, linguistics included. 

Chapter 5, "The rhetoric of linguistic science", draws on the ambiguity of 
its title, to discuss the rhetoric found in (scientific) linguistics 
discourse, on the one hand, and the hype that proclaims linguistics as a 
science, on the other. In linguistics, as across other areas of research, 
the straightforward claim that one reasoning, or one finding, 
is 'scientific' appears to suffice to imbue it with indisputable 
reliability, and its originators with academic prestige. Linguistics must 
therefore claim its own scientificity, not least to secure continued 
funding of its research projects and public recognition of its 
researchers. Among other effects, the pursuit of scientific linguistics 
has led to the decontextualisation of the study of language: the forms of 
language are a scientific object, whereas the uses that we all make of 
language are not, resulting in that languages are treated "as if they were 
dead languages" (p. 88). One of the reasons for this state of affairs is 
that language forms are deemed quantifiable, whereas language uses are 
not. The mistaking of science for quantification is addressed in the next 
chapter. 

Chapter 6, "Mathematics and the language of science", is a two-pronged 
dissection of the myth that mathematics is "the language of science" (p. 
107). First, mathematics is not a language, and second, science needs more 
resources than mathematics can possibly supply. RH shows that numbers and 
quantifications are not a given, prior to analysis and independent from 
it, but a product of analysis, and therefore of language-bound reasoning. 
This is why arguments purporting to show the neutrality of mathematics are 
circular, self-fulfilling their own assumptions. Several of these 
arguments are guilty of the "ethnocentricity" (p. 115) involved in taking 
English, or any other language, as the model of assumed universal 
quantifications -- where the word 'universal' is to be taken quite 
literally, judging by last century's attempts by English-speaking 
scientists to communicate with other intelligent beings in the universe 
through Earth-bound conceptions of numbers.

Chapter 7, "Science and common sense", discusses two issues, with examples 
from Galileo's and Einstein's publications. The first one concerns the 
impasse resulting from attempts to formulate findings that challenge our 
common sense by means of a language which draws, in particular, on "the 
identification of visible items" (p. 140). This is what Heisenberg 
called "the paradox of quantum theory" (p. 140), and what led Niels Bohr 
to state that physics "concerns what we can say about Nature", which, as 
RH notes "seems to make physics a branch of linguistics" (p. 139). The 
second issue is the time-honoured (and currently fashionable) drive to 
make science accessible to everyone. Speaking to the masses, by 
(allegedly) muttering "Eppur si muove" or by discussing dropping stones 
from moving trains, involves dexterous use of language in translating to 
and from scientific concepts and ordinary concepts. But movement and 
trajectories can only be talked about with reference to something else, 
and defining reference is a matter of semantics, not of physics. The 
reocentric and anthropic nature of the common sense language used by 
scientists does not make matters clearer to the masses than it does to the 
initiated. 

In Chapter 8, "Supercategory semantics", RH first illustrates the elastic 
use of self-serving semantics, drawing on examples from geography and 
economics. Self-proclaimed scientific language and the "dogged repetition, 
at every opportunity, of certain key terms in the supercategory 
vocabulary" (p. 169), among them the conspicuous 'science', 'scientist', 
'scientific', appear to entitle inquiry to automatic scientificity. This is so even 
in the face of failure of accepted scientific criteria, e.g. prediction, as is 
well-known from meteorological and economic forecasts. The presumed 
language of science is in fact a self-fulfilling rhetoric, "tailored to the 
advantages of its own practitioners" (p. 172). RH then proceeds to discuss 
the fallacy that "a semantically sanitized language of science" (p. 175) can be
extricated from the tangle of the scientific discourse that remains available to
us. 
Assigning a more scientific basis to the language of science than to any 
other form of human communication is an illusion. Realising that this is 
so, by "applying science to the language of science itself" (p. 168) might 
indeed constitute a "scientific step forward" (p. 175).

Chapter 9, "Integrating science", draws together the main points addressed 
in the book, around the opening statement that there must be "something 
odd" (p. 176) about the way the semantics of science has remained 
unchanged regardless of new findings and supposedly new language to talk 
about them. RH contends that talking about 'superstrings' or about 'a 
universe with ten dimensions' involves features of language, not 
discoveries about Nature, in precisely the same sense that linguistic 
assumptions built the traditional view of Nature as composed of objects 
and their properties. The structure of our universe reflects the structure 
of the language that we use to talk about it, not the other way around.

The two Appendices, "Einstein on science and reality" and "Heisenberg on 
language", explore and exemplify the linguistic conundrums in which 
science finds itself entangled by virtue of semantics. A few of these 
arise to pre-empt objections to proposed theories, others arise through 
contradictions and imprecision in definitions of concepts. One example is 
Einstein's underdescribed concept of 'material object', where "the 
borderline between object and event is unclear" (p. 194). Another example 
is Heisenberg's paradoxical contention that atoms can be named but not 
spoken about in ordinary language, because they are not as real as, say, 
experiments about atomic events, yet the meanings of words of ordinary 
language guarantee our ability to "touch reality" (p. 204). 

EVALUATION

RH approaches his topic by interspersing his arguments and conclusions 
with quotations from scientific texts, and texts about science, that span 
several centuries. One may wonder whether the clinical detail of his 
analysis of these texts is justified, or whether we should instead make 
allowances for what the quoted authors mean and cannot say because 
language itself fails them. But this is precisely the point of contention: 
this is the language that has shaped and continues to shape our alleged 
understanding of what science is. RH's methodological choice makes 
the "muddles" (p. xv) pervading the way in which science is talked about 
all the more apparent. 

RH shows that science is not a timeless, spaceless or selfless endeavour. 
Scientists appear ensnared in the double hubris that results from assuming 
otherwise. One side of it has the scientist as the infallible name-giver 
who, through the act of naming, gains ability (and authority) to talk 
about Nature in a 'special' way. The neutral observer observes, and the 
natural observed is observed, in due Aristotelian order. The other side of 
the scientific hubris has Nature as interpretable through a theory of 
everything that the single, 'special' language is believed to make 
possible. Just like Nature abhors a vacuum, scientists abhor a scientific 
lexical gap. Whatever their area of research, scientists routinely talk 
and write about the properties of the language that must reflect their 
object of interest -- or vice-versa, they reduce their object to a 
language with properties that are inherent to it because God made it so. 
Examples are plentiful: Kepler's mathematical ratios in his harmony of the 
spheres were the key to God's language of creation, just like Stephen 
Hawking finds the mind of God in his own mathematical ratios, or Watson, 
Crick and Wilkins found the language in which God created life. Science is 
a construct of language because scientists impose their language on what 
they assume is there to be named by that language. This means that both 
the 'what' and the way to talk about it are given: if there is a 'res', 
there must also be a name for it, because otherwise there can be no 'res'. 
As RH concludes of several arguments that he analyses, nothing could be 
more circular.

In the area of my 'scientific' interest, linguistics, I found at least two 
important lessons to draw from RH's debunking of science, both equally 
sobering. 

The first concerns the reocentric assumptions that shape the bulk of 
research in linguistics. Language is there, complete with properties and 
rules that the linguist is to describe in the language of science. Through 
this assumption, scientific progress is gauged by the amount of labels 
that purport to designate facts of language. Since reocentrism means that 
one 'true' thing is there, because what is being observed is the same for 
everybody, it entails that what you can say about 'it' can only be right 
or wrong. Presumed facts of language are therefore either 'so' or 'not 
so'. But linguists appear unable to agree on what 'is so' about language. 
The hubris of the naming game has resulted in that there are virtually as 
many 'special' languages to talk about language as there are individual 
researchers, although scientists would presumably like a "language of 
science" to "reflect openly and accurately the realities" of Nature, "as 
distinct from concealing human ignorance or misconceptions" about it (p. 
181). Since language theorists demand wholesale allegiance to their 
terminology to even consider discussion of their theory, there is no way 
to compare theories and therefore no way to decide where the 
presumed 'truth' may reside. The history of linguistics, up to and 
including our time, is a sorry spectacle of impervious factions that take 
bickering about labels for insight about language. Validation of 
territorial claims about terminology is unproblematic: "Simply assert", 
preferably "aggressively" (Postal 2004:287), in the belief that repetition 
of a scientific mantra conjures up scientific status. There is little 
indication of awareness that the misguided quest for a single 'true' 
language is precisely what hampers progress in knowledge. Assuming reality 
as undisputable and naming as infallible entails dissent as heresy 
instead. The instruments of supercategory science (academic positions, 
scholarly publications) then duly implement excommunication, to the 
greater glory of the faithful. 

The second lesson concerns the parochialism that locates the object of 
linguistics in the linguist's backyard. Parochialism is short-sighted, and 
can't see beyond itself. This is why single findings about fragments of 
single languages sanctioned by single speakers at one particular time and 
place are heralded as universal (probably including the extra-terrestrial 
sense discussed above). This is also why the Language, with capital 'L', 
that linguists keep extracting from the dark recesses of Nature, has 
turned out to be English-with-"minimal adjustments" (p. 60). So was John 
Wilkins' universal language of science. It is therefore small wonder 
that "dictionaries of scientific terminology do not include _phoneme_ 
alongside _photon_" (p. 104), although linguists must rank among the most 
vocal in claiming scientificity of their discipline. Randy Harris 
(1993:16) once noted that "just as the middle class is always rising, 
linguistics is always becoming a science", an observation that remains 
accurate today. Recurrent tip-toeing for recognition is in itself evidence 
of a deep-seated malaise, because "disciplines that have indisputably 
achieved scientific status do not need to keep reminding us of it" (p. 
104).

Against this bleak state of affairs, RH offers the eye-opener of a more 
humble integrationist view, that has science as one form of communication 
among others. What we can know, and let other people know about, follows 
from what we are now and what we experienced before, from the language(s) 
we speak, and from the people we find it relevant to communicate with. 
Knowledge is given neither by Nature nor by (a) language, but constructed 
in time and space. RH's arguments stand out all the more cogently through 
his choice of largely accessible language, which is supported by an 
impeccably proofread text. His new book combines  intense scholarship with 
keen insight, often sarcastic, into a thoroughly entertaining read.

REFERENCES

Harris, Randy A. (1993). The linguistics wars, New York/Oxford, Oxford 
University Press.

Postal, P. M. (2004). Skeptical linguistic essays, Oxford, Oxford 
University Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Madalena Cruz-Ferreira teaches linguistics at the National University of 
Singapore. Her research interests include intonation, child 
multilingualism and the language of science.





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