The End of Linguistics

[John McCreery]

At 9:50 PM +0800 3/26/2001, Kerim Friedman wrote:
> Let us take one issue raised in the article:
>
> ****
> The author claimed that the failure to define a unified theory was a sign that
>Linguistics has failed.
> ****
>

Kirim,

Thank you for an unusually thoughtful response. Allow me to say, however,
that you have misread Halpern. Halpern does not say that the failure to
definite a unified theory was [sic] a sign that Linguistics has failed. He
makes three specific claims, the first of which is that,

"All of these investigations and projects have their interest and value, but
they give little promise of converging toward a comprehensive and unified
theory of language."

The issue for Halpern is not whether or not a theory exists, but rather,
whether, given the variety of things that people who call themselves
linguists study, any such theory is likely to be created. He rates the
probability low.

"Linguistics," he writes, "has declared no aspect of language alien to
itself--and this, while admirably catholic and generous, is fatal to its
hopes of being a science."

Plainly, Halpern has in mind a narrow view of what a science is. He assumes
that a science must have a distinct and coherent subject matter. I take this
to be the point of  Celso's remark concerning a Real Unified Object. But
since Celso does not explain himself or offer a cogent alternative view of
what a science might be, the illocutionary effect is near zero and the
perlocutionary effect little more than a sniff from an upturned nose.

Be that as it may, the proper rebuttal it seems to me is either (1) to
demonstrate that all of the various things in Halpern's laundry list do have
some coherent relationship to each other or (2) to offer an alternative view
of science that allows, for example, a scientific analysis of a series of
phenomena that share some family relationships at various points in the
series but not a set of properties uniformly shared by all of its members.
There is also, of course, (3) to disclaim interest in the field's being a
science at all--a move that some anthropologists, e.g., Ruth Behar, have
made vis-a-vis anthropology.

I will go on record as saying that I share a view I associate with Pierre
Bourdieu, i.e., that disciplinary boundaries are, like all social
distinctions, sites of struggle between competing interests. I will go
further and assert, as I have already on Anthro-L, that academic disciplines
are historical formations that typically exist at nodes where various
streams of intellectual conversation intersect. Speaking either as an
administrator or as someone considering an academic career, my primary
interest would be in  whether the intersections involved in any particular
discipline looked interesting and productive. Those involved in linguistics
and anthropology have both seemed so to me. At the end of the day, however,
it hardly matters what I think. It may matter a great deal, in an age of
shrinking resources and administrators looking for places to cut what they
see as deadwood, whether people who call themselves linguists can make a
better case for their hobbies than those I have heard so far on this list
(present company excluded).

Cheers,





John McCreery
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