Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

degré zéro

I started reading a provocative and out of print book the other day called Language, Thought, and Logic by John Ellis. He takes linguists, philosophers of language, computer scientists, and anthropologists to task for attempting their assaults on the theory of language by always starting at zero. In chapter one he parodies this attitude:

The mood can be summed up thus: There is Saussure—but that does not really work, for it seems to suggest that categories of things are a fiction of our language, and it is unable to deal with our strong intuitive sense that there are natural kinds of things in our world; there is Wittgenstein—but that, though suggestive, is full of enigmas; there is Chomsky, but the latest model of generative grammar is constantly being recalled for redesign of structural flaws, and it still breaks down regularly after it is supposed to have been fixed; there is Whorf—but that is imaginative without being sound. Therefore, given this confusion, we may as well start at the beginning all over again. This mood weakens the sense of obligation that scholars usually have to know and build on their predecessors; first because there is so much that has been said in so many contexts that nobody could master it all, and second, because the only result of all this activity seems to have been confusion that suggest that there is something wrong with all of it. Thus we arrive at the strange condition of linguistic theory at present in which, no matter how much sophisticated thought has taken place in the past, we are still constantly asked to consider yet another attempt to begin again at the conceptual beginning with a theorist who wants us to look at his or her version of the basic language situation in which there are speakers, listeners, sounds, things, and so on, to see how he or she will build the conceptual base of linguistic theory from the ground up. Predictably, the proliferation of these new beginnings means that they will all suffer the same fate as their forerunners: they do not achieve th sought-for basic conceptual clarification but instead add to the confusion.

[pp.8f.]

More later, as I uncover it.