Paul 1880 vs. 1886 vs. 1920...; Bloomfield 1933/1965

[bwald]

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Just a brief, possibly philosophical, comment on Rich Janda's following
passage on Paul and 19th c (historical) linguistics.
 
>     Moreover, though Paul's lapidary words are excellent for exem-
>plifying the period when linguistics was historical linguistics, they
>certainly show how far he was from contemporary physical scien-
>tists and modern scientists of all sorts in his insistence that, essen-
>tially, you don't have a scientific understanding of a system unless
>you know the history of every piece of it.  No sane geologist would
>today agree that understanding, say, the cliffs of Dover requires one
>to know the origin of every one of its molecules (or atoms, or elec
>trons [electra?], or quarks)....
>     What would have happened without de Saussure--or Bloomfield?
 
I would guess that like most 19th c intellectuals of the "scientific" type,
Paul was partial to the notion of determinism.  Clearly this goes beyond
linguistics to "everything", which includes the history of "everything".
But it still means you gotta know "everything" to *fully* "understand"
anything.  That is different from a partial and somewhat practical (or
heuristic) understanding of the phenomena delimited by some field /
discipline, whether linguistics, geology or whatever.  Faith in total
determinism ends for science with quantum physics and the uncertainty
principle in the earliest 20th c, but the implications were still resisted
by Einstein and people like that.
 
Within linguistics, early structuralism still has that somewhat mystical
deterministic notion, but restricted to "linguistics" as a discipline, as
in the gross exaggeration contained in Meillet's dictum about language
being a system "ou tout se tient", the idea being, I suppose, that if one
thing in the system changes no telling what other changes it will
eventually lead to (by necessity?).
 
I guess the latest outcome for how historical linguistics relates to
"synchronic" linguistics is restricted to such things as the problem of
encountering something strange / unexpected  in the attempted description
of some language.  In this case, we get interested in how the particular
language or dialect acquired this strange property, and we start looking at
its history.  (Even Chomsky & Halle still had the notion that the
synchronic properties of a linguistic system only worked up to the point at
which some aspect of the system was "in flux")  Historical insight into
"unusual" synchronic states we still think (I think) helps us gain insight
into the nature of the property and the implications it has for a language
at any particular time, and for "language" at all times whatsoever.