History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

James McElvenny

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences explores the history of the study of language in its varied social and cultural contexts.

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Aug 31, 2025 • 33min

Podcast episode 44: Ian Stewart on the Celts and historical-comparative linguistics

In this interview, we talk to Ian Stewart about modern ideas surrounding the Celts and how these relate to historical-comparative linguistics. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 44 Crump, Margaret, James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge: A Life of Science during the Age of Improvement (Nebraska, 2025). Davies, Caryl, Adfeilion Babel: Agweddau ar Syniadaeth Ieithyddol y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (Caerdydd, 2000). Droixhe, Daniel, La Linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600-1800): rationalisme et révolutions positivistes (Geneva, 1978). Lhuyd, Edward, Archaeologia Britannica: Vol. 1 Glossography (Oxford, 1707). Pezron, Paul-Yves, Antiquité de la nation et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appellez Gaulois (Paris, 1703). Pictet, Adolph, ‘Lettres à M. A.W. de Schlegel sur l’affinité des langues celtiques avec le sanscrit’, Journal asiatique 3.1 (1836), 263-90, 417-448; 3.2 (1836), 440-66. Poppe, Erich, ‘Lag es in der Luft?: Johann Kaspar Zeuß und die Konstituierung der Keltologie’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1992), 41-56. Prichard, James Cowles, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations: Proved by a Comparison of their Dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages (London, 1831) Roberts, Brynley F., Edward Lhwyd: c.1660-1709, Naturalist, Antiquary, Philologist (Cardiff, 2022). Shaw, Francis, ‘The Background to Grammatica Celtica’, Celtica 3 (1956), 1-16. Sims-Williams, Patrick, Ancient Celtic Place-Names in Europe and Asia Minor (Oxford, 2006). Sims-Williams, Patrick, ‘An Alternative to “Celtic from the East” and “Celtic from the West”’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30 (2020), 511-29. Solleveld, Floris, ‘Expanding the Comparative View: Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache and its language materials’, Historiographia Linguistica 47 (2020), 49-78. Stewart, Ian, The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton, 2025). Stewart, Ian, ‘After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History’, Journal of Modern History 95 (2023), 808-846. Stewart, Ian, ‘James Cowles Prichard and the Linguistic Foundations of Ethnology’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 46 (2023), 76-91. Van Hal, Toon, ‘Moedertalen en taalmoeders’. Het vroegmoderne taalvergelijkende onderzoek in de Lage Landen (Brussels, 2010). Van Hal, Toon, ‘When Quotation Marks Matter: Rhellicanus and Boxhornius on the differences between the lingua Gallica and lingua Germanica’, Historiographia Linguistica 38 (2011), 241-52. Van Hal, Toon, ‘From Alauda to Zythus. The emergence and uses of Old-Gaulish word lists in early modern publications’, Keltische Forschungen 6 (2014), 219-77. Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Ian Stewart, who’s a historian of Britain and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. [00:32] Ian’s latest book, The Celts: A Modern History, is coming out in March 2025 with Princeton University Press. [00:42] In this book, Ian offers a path-breaking, and at the same time magisterial, account of how the modern notion of the Celtic nations took shape. [00:51] Linguistic evidence and theorizing, as Ian shows in his book, played no small part in these developments. [00:58] Ian’s also looked at the early history of historical-comparative linguistics in Britain and suggested some key revisions to the standard narrative of how this field took root there. [01:10] The stories of the modern notion of the Celts and of early historical-comparative linguistics in Britain have many points of contact, and this is what Ian will be talking to us about today. [01:21] So, Ian, who are the Celts? [01:23] What was the significance of identifying the so-called Celtic nations in the modern period? [01:30] IS: Hi, James. [01:32] As you know, I’m a big fan of the podcast, and so it’s really exciting to be here. [01:36] Who are the Celts? [01:38] Well, that depends on who you ask and when. [01:42] It’s a question that’s been asked in many different ways over the last two and a half thousand years, at least. [01:48] To begin with, the Celts are a people who started to be mentioned in classical sources in about 500 BCE. [01:56] Herodotus, for example, refers to them as a people living somewhere in Western Europe. [02:02] In the 4th century BCE, people like Plato and Aristotle refer to them as a warlike people. [02:07] This is especially after a Celtic group sacked Rome in about 387 BCE, and then 100 years later, another group invaded the Balkans. [02:18] And so, you see, the Celts remained the steady presence as a bellicose people somewhere in Europe, but they became sort of less feared as the Romans grew in power. [02:30] Caesar’s famous Gallic Wars, obviously written in the middle of the 1st century BCE, is about the conquest of Gaul, one of whose parts is called Celtica. [02:40] And so, as we move into the first few centuries of the Common Era, references to the Celts start to become fewer, and by 500 CE, you know, they stop altogether. [02:49] So, to sum up, basically, from the classical sources, the Celts are a barbarian people who were fearsome enemies, with their own complicated social, cultural, and religious structures, who feature strongly in the literary record between about 500 BCE and 500 CE. [03:08] The details about this group, or groups, are really hazy. [03:12] They’ve been argued about in all sorts of different ways. [03:15] We don’t know, you know, how much sort of common identification among groups there was, but what we can basically say is that there were people speaking Celtic languages in most of Western and Central Europe, including Britain and Ireland, modern France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Central Europe, Southern Germany, and as far east as Anatolia. [03:38] And so even though the Celts didn’t have their own literary cultures, and even though the historical record left by classical writers is pretty imperfect, the Celts left behind all sorts of evidence — including linguistic evidence, as you alluded to — that later scholars would make use of to construct this picture that we now have. [03:56] Now, why they become important in the modern period is, basically, they become rediscovered during the Renaissance [04:04] — when the predominant approach to history was genealogical, and the origins of nations, regions, cities, dynasties, all sorts of institutions, take on huge importance in establishing legitimacy — [04:19] and so scholars devoted considerable energy in tracing the migrations and conquests of ancient peoples [04:26] in order to give their own nation, or whoever they were writing for, a prestigious pedigree. [04:32] And basically, because of what I just mentioned about their extensive presence in the classical sources, and through their close association with the Gauls especially, the Celts retained this important place in the historical imagination. [04:45] So basically, from the early modern period, it’s off to the races, and they become claimed as prestigious ancestors in all of the countries I mentioned. [04:56] And so, my book is basically about this Celticism, which is basically why people in different places around Europe, from the early modern era to the present, have answered the question, who are the Celts and the way that they did, usually in favor of their own nation. [05:12] They’re usually trying to claim the Celts as their particular special ancestor, and the wranglings over the Celts basically change… [05:23] I sort of say that they’re determined by… basically, that these pictures of national images of ancestry change as a result of scholarly imperatives, but also political imperatives. [05:35] So it’s not just that nations are invented from scratch. [05:39] You know, in the modern period, as some of the literature, some of the classical literature — you know, classical in terms of history of modern nations and nationalism — basically, nation builders work with materials at hand. [05:50] But at the same time, scholars are often nation builders, and their political commitments shape their scholarship. [05:56] JMc: And why is genealogy the dominant model for nation building in this period? [06:02] Why is the key thing to trace your nation back to a particular set of ancestors? [06:08] IS: Basically, I think it’s a pretty simple equation that primacy was really important, so being the first people somewhere, having had, you know, the most extensive territory or the most glorious conquest. [06:25] And so basically, pedigree meant prestige, and we have to remember that before the rise of modern scholarship, you know, before modern historical linguistics, archaeology, folklore I suppose, and things like that, you’re basically working with the classical sources, [06:43] and so if a people is mentioned extensively in the classical sources, like the Celts are, there’s a lot more you can do with that. [06:50] JMc: So you mentioned that the Celts left behind a certain amount of linguistic evidence. [06:55] How much of a role did this linguistic evidence play in the modern project of constructing Celtic identity, and was it the main kind of evidence, or was archaeological evidence just as important, for example? [07:09] IS: Things change over time, but I would argue that language has been the most important and consistent thread in tracing the history of the Celts over the last five centuries. [07:20] Basically, linguistics is crucial in the Celtic case for two reasons. [07:26] The first is that it’s only through linguistic scholarship that the entirety of the modern Celtic family was recognized, [07:33] so in other words, that the speakers of the two linguistic branches — so Welsh, Breton, and Cornish speakers — are related to speakers of Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic. [07:46] And that’s realized about 1700. [07:48] And the second is that it was only through comparative linguistics that the Celtic nations were recognized to be a part of the wider Indo-European family, as opposed to an indigenous population that was pushed further west by invading Romans or Goths, etc. [08:05] And so I can unpack those two things for you. [08:08] On the first point about providing a more holistic picture of the Celts, the interesting thing is that in the early modern period, neither the Welsh nor the Irish, their dominant linguistic tradition isn’t thought to be Celtic, and they actually weren’t thought to be related to each other, and I think this is particularly striking because these are probably now seen as two of the most Celtic nations. [08:32] But basically, native Irish tradition held that the language derived from the ruins of Babel, where the best parts of all languages were cobbled together, and then taken by the Scythians, who became the Scots, to Egypt, Spain, and then Ireland. [08:46] And it’s really complicated, but the point is that it definitely wasn’t Celtic. [08:50] Meanwhile, Welsh tradition held that it derived from Hebrew. [08:54] So before the 18th century, the Celts are sort of most associated with Gaul, and therefore France, and more surprisingly, with Germany. [09:02] So Toon Van Hal has shown how French and German humanists argued over what language Gaulish really was, and which of their modern vernaculars was closest to it, and so the languages of Britain and Ireland aren’t really into the picture. [09:16] It’s more of a Continental argument until about the end of the 17th century, and in fact, no classical sources refer explicitly to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland as Celts. [09:28] But basically, the important thing that happened was that Caesar had actually described many of the cultural links between Gaul and Britain, and one of those that he’d mentioned was language. [09:37] So as soon as scholars in the early modern period started to get their hands on Welsh vocabularies, they were able to trace links between the few Gaulish words that they had and Welsh, [09:49] and the person who provided the most crucial work was the Dutch scholar Marc van Boxhorn, who recorded that he was so pleased to receive a Welsh dictionary that he kissed it. [09:59] And if the ancient Celts spoke Gaulish, the thinking went, and, according to Caesar, the ancient Britons spoke a similar, if not the same, language as the Gauls, then because Welsh was descended from the language of the ancient Britons, it was probably Celtic too. [10:16] And it was already recognized that Breton and Cornish were related to Welsh, so they all became seen as this cohesive group with likely ties to the ancient Gauls or Celts. [10:26] This is hammered home increasingly towards the end of the 17th century, especially by a Breton monk named Paul-Yves Pezron, who got many things wrong but really succeeded in driving that point home. [10:38] But at this point… [10:39] So in the 1690s, the Brittonic languages and the Gaelic languages were still seen as unrelated. [10:46] The key move here was made by a Welsh scholar named Edward Lhuyd. [10:50] He’s a real hero in Celtic studies. [10:53] He travelled around Britain and Ireland doing fieldwork for several years at the turn of the 18th century, and he actually recorded words from speakers of these languages and drew up vocabularies. [11:06] So in late 1699, he had composed a comparative vocabulary of Welsh, Irish and English words, and there he noted that there were a number of sound correspondences, and the most famous of these is the P and C or Q distinction in Celtic. [11:23] And this is a quote from Lhuyd. [11:24] He said, “I cannot find the Irish have a word purely their own that begins with a P and yet have almost all of ours which they constantly begin with a C.” [11:36] So some of the classic examples of this distinction are pen and ceann (so pen is Welsh for “head,” and ceann is obviously Irish) or pedwar and cathair, which is the number four. [11:50] But it can also be mac, which is the Irish word for “son,” and mab, which is the Welsh word. [11:56] This is now called the P and Q Celtic distinction, and this gave rise to the terrible joke that Celticists have to mind their P’s and Q’s. [12:05] But so it was Lhuyd’s achievement to show that these two branches of language were related and could be referred to as Celtic. [12:16] And so for the second part, connecting the Celts to the Indo-European family, it was comparative philology, obviously, that did this. [12:23] And so after the Celts become established as this cohesive group, there are still lots of opinions flying around in the 18th century. [12:32] We’re still in the era before comparative and historical linguistics became a cohesive discipline with recognized principles and dogmas, really, if you like, [12:42] and actually, some people might have recognized that the Celts were a distinctive family, but they started to doubt whether it was a family that belonged to the larger Indo-European family, because the Celtic languages have some strange features. [12:57] Its vocabulary is quite different. Its grammar also seems strange. [13:02] So, most obviously, it’s a VSO grammatical system, so verb, subject, object. [13:07] It also has, and this is probably the most famous thing, a system of initial mutations where the first sound of a word changes based on its grammatical function in relation to the word before it. [13:18] This can be for grammatical purposes or just euphony. [13:22] And so some people doubted that together these features could be reconciled with the other Indo-European languages, and people like A. W. Schlegel, so no mean philologist, was someone who doubted the position of Celtic. [13:36] And just to make a long story short, in the 1830s, three works were published by the English scholar James Cowles Prichard, by the Genevan Adolph Pictet, and by the German Franz Bopp, who published work explaining these differences and showing how they fit within the European… Indo-European framework. [13:55] Prichard compared Welsh and Sanskrit, Pictet, Gaelic and Sanskrit, and Bopp showed the principles and operation behind the initial mutations, and so these three works together definitively established that the Celtic languages were Indo-European, and therefore that the Celtic race, as it was starting to be called at this time, was part of that larger Indo-European family or race. [14:17] JMc: So one of the key figures that you mentioned just there was the Englishman James Cowles Prichard. [14:23] So what exactly was his contribution to demonstrating that the Celtic languages are part of the larger Indo-European family, and how exactly did his proof work, and what methods did he use to construct it, [14:37] and did he have any priority over any of the other scholars working at the time on the problem of Celtic as an Indo-European language? [14:46] IS: That’s a really, really interesting question, one that I’ve worked on for a long time. [14:51] I think he… [14:52] Well, he was someone that was overlooked both in Celtic studies and in the history of Celtic philology, and therefore in the history of Celticism. [15:00] He’s most recognized for having been Europe’s leading ethnologist, so kind of the first phase of anthropology. [15:08] He’s like a physical and cultural anthropologist, but really his largest concern was to ensure that the Celtic nations were — in this instance, his largest concern — was to show that they were part of the Indo-European family for two reasons. [15:23] The first one is biblical orthodoxy. [15:25] He was raised a Quaker, he converted to Anglicanism, but he still obviously adheres to the biblical account. [15:32] And the second reason is that he’s Welsh. [15:34] His mother was descended from a Welsh family, at least is what I think we know, but accounts kind of differ on this. [15:41] Some say that he could speak Welsh with his patients, where he was a physician in Bristol, but it’s clear that he could read Welsh, and he was connected to Welsh cultural circles. [15:50] But the thing that I think that’s most interesting about him in this case is that he was recognizing the sort of the full import both of the Indo-European idea, and of the possibilities for comparative philology, before the major developments in Germany, above all. [16:06] So in 1813, he said that “[i]t’s only an essential affinity in the structure and genius of languages that demonstrates a common origin. [16:15] This sort of relationship exists in the Sanskrit, the ancient Zend, as well as the modern Persic, Greek, Latin, Germanic dialects; and is found, though not to the same extent, in the Celtic and Slavonic.” [16:26] And so basically, what you have there is a pretty clear paraphrase of the philologer passage from William Jones. [16:34] So I think Prichard comes to that as… [16:36] That’s an early conclusion, both in the context of Celtic comparative philology, and I think in the history of comparative philology writ large, but basically, he puts off… [16:47] He says he’s going to publish a work about the Celtic and Slavonic dialects, as he calls them, but he puts this off until 1831. [16:55] He did publish an essay in 1815 where he showed some of these proofs that would appear in his later work, but these were mostly just comparative vocabulary, [17:06] but once you see everything that he puts together, it’s pretty clear that this needs to be explained, and that if it’s not borrowing, you know… [17:17] If it’s borrowing, then there’s a lot of explaining to do, because there is a ton of similarity, but what he eventually does is, he shows some of the grammatical similarities in 1831. [17:28] So he shows that verbs — that’s his main point of evidence — he shows that verbs are conjugated in the Celtic languages in essentially the same way as we’re familiar with in, you know, with the Indo-European languages. [17:40] He shows that verb endings come from abbreviated pronouns, and he’s really riffing off of the work of Franz Bopp here. [17:48] But Prichard was working with modern Welsh, and so he couldn’t really construct a historical grammar in the way that Grimm had for German, but his vocabulary proofs, like I said, are very convincing. [17:59] And Grimm himself announced as soon as he read this work that he had decided… that Prichard had shown this was Indo-European. [18:06] Now, at the same time, Adolph Pictet is working in Geneva on a proof using mainly Irish and Scots Gaelic to show similarities with Sanskrit, and he’s really targeting A. W. Schlegel, and he publishes this proof in a series of three open letters. [18:22] And it’s really funny, Pictet definitely owned Prichard’s work because his copy exists in the Cornell Library, but he never references him, and just over 20 years later, he writes to an Irish scholar who is reviewing a work by Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who wrote the first historical grammar of the Celtic languages. [18:43] This Irish reviewer had written that Zeuss proved the Celtic languages to be Indo-European, and Pictet actually wrote that, “No, no, no, I showed this many years ago, and it’s not fair that you’re saying it was Zeuss.” [18:58] So it’s ironic because Pictet was himself being unfair to Prichard. [19:02] And so, while I think Prichard is recognized to some extent in the 19th century, once we get to the 20th century he’s really written out of the story for reasons that we’re familiar with in the history of linguistics: because as soon as someone’s proof is superseded, they become basically dismissed. [19:21] And so I think part of what I’ve tried to do is recover Prichard both for Celtic studies and for the history of linguistics as part of this sort of new narrative… well, a revision to the standard narrative that you said earlier about what’s happening in the field, and he’s a good example of how approaching the history of the subject in this way can show new things, I think. [19:43] JMc: So Prichard’s been forgotten in the standard narrative that we tell these days about the history of historical-comparative linguistics. [19:53] How does restoring him to his proper place in this narrative challenge this received story that we usually tell in the history of linguistics? [20:03] IS: Well, basically, I focus on Prichard because he’s the best linguist out of all the British scholars I’ve worked on, but he actually comes at the end of this line of scholars in Britain who realized the significance of the Indo-European idea well before the sort of German developments. [20:26] And they were all Scots, actually, except for Prichard, though he studied at the University of Edinburgh, and I think that’s really important, because it’s the Edinburgh Review where a lot of this stuff is aired. [20:37] And so this is significant for a couple reasons, one of which is that the history of comparative philology or historical-comparative linguistics in Britain hasn’t really moved on from Hans Aarsleff’s book in 1967, The Study of Language in England, and there, you know, he includes some Scottish developments as part of the English story. [20:59] But so basically, what I’ve tried to do is add Scottish scholars to the picture, and also tried to show that, against Aarsleff’s narrative, that there were people aware of basically the importance of the Indo-European idea, and what comparative philology could do, well before the 1830s, but they were all doing different things with it. [21:21] So Alexander Hamilton, who’s famous for having taught Friedrich Schlegel, he constructed a comparative vocabulary in 1810 in the Edinburgh Review, which Prichard then picked up on, but he was more of a philologist than a comparative philologist, and ultimately, he wrote a really big work on Indian mythology. [21:40] John Leyden was another comparative philologist, but he was far too ambitious, and he was more interested in South Asian and Asian languages, and he died before he could complete anything substantial. [21:51] His friend Alexander Murray completed a big magnum opus, where he clearly recognized the Indo-European idea, and he included the philologer passage, but he was trying to trace the origin of language, which he reduced to nine sounds, which made his book kind of ridiculous at the time. [22:06] But the point is that he was interested in the origin of language and not necessarily the comparison of language for its own sake. [22:13] And all of these guys came before Prichard, who I said had reached this sort of Indo-European recognition by 1813, but his main interest was ethnology. [22:23] And so, what I think I’ve shown is not that British scholars invented comparative philology or anything like that, but basically that they were better than they’ve been getting credit for, and they were interested in many other things, and they died before they could produce anything substantial. [22:38] And British scholars, in this respect, I think, fit into this larger story where, since we’re moving beyond the standard narrative where Jones discovers the Indo-European connection and then it sort of is built from there, [22:52] there’s obviously this revised story that’s developed over the last few decades, like Daniel Droixhe and Toon van Haal are two people who have shown that there was a great deal of what could be called comparative philology going on in early modern Europe. [23:04] Okay, the grammatical aspect wasn’t developed, but the framework is definitely there. [23:09] And our friend Floris Solleveld has been rewriting the history of linguistics in the 19th century and showing how that similar ideas that we think of with the Indo-European family were being developed in relation to families like the Malayo-Polynesian group. [23:25] But Floris has really shown also just how difficult it was to get linguistic samples, and that scholars actually had to have the material with which to work. [23:36] And so, if you read Wilhelm von Humboldt or Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, two early 19th-century linguists, they weren’t talking about the philologer passage. [23:45] They were praising, you know, Adelung and Vater and the Mithridates, you know, for bringing much more linguistic evidence beyond Europe to light, and Prichard actually also reviewed the Mithridates, and that’s where he lays out his idea of the Indo-European idea fairly early. [24:03] And so with this… the revised standard narrative is part of realizing that people were using language and linguistic studies for things far beyond just, you know, the intrinsic language of… language itself. [24:16] I think it should help us to realize that language was… is, was and has always been, you know, a central point of consideration in definitely the Western intellectual tradition from the ancient period onwards. [24:31] So I think it’s, you know, it’s helpful for us to realize that with the study of language, we can learn a lot more about the human sciences and the humanities, and I think also that the humanities and human sciences, social sciences, have a lot to learn by considering the history of linguistics. [24:46] JMc: Great. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [24:50] IS: Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Thanks for having me, James. [24:52]

13 snips

Nov 30, 2024 • 27min

Podcast episode 43: Judy Kaplan on universals

Judy Kaplan, a historian of the human sciences and Curatorial Fellow at the Science History Institute, dives into the fascinating world of mid-20th century American linguistics. She discusses the clash between structuralism and generative grammar, revealing how key scholars shaped the field. The conversation also explores the evolution of language universals, touching on pivotal conferences and the Cold War's impact on linguistic research funding. Kaplan highlights the balance between linguistic diversity and universal principles, making for an engaging and insightful discussion.

Oct 31, 2024 • 31min

Podcast episode 42: Randy Harris on the Linguistics Wars

In this engaging discussion, Randy Harris, a professor at the University of Waterloo and author of 'The Linguistics Wars,' delves into the intense controversies of 1960s and 70s American linguistics. He shares insights on the rivalry between Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff, exploring foundational theories like deep structure and generative semantics. The conversation also highlights the emotional complexities behind scientific debates and the evolution of cognitive linguistics, showcasing how these conflicts shaped the discourse in modern linguistic theory.

Aug 31, 2024 • 26min

Podcast episode 41: Chris Knight on Chomsky, science and politics

In this interview, we talk to Chris Knight about Chomsky, pure science and the US military-industrial complex. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 41 Radical Anthropology Group. YouTube channel | Vimeo channel Allot, Nicholas, Chris Knight and Neil Smith. 2019. The Responsibility of Intellectuals; Reflections by Noam Chomsky and Others after 50 years, with commentaries by Noam Chomsky. London: UCL Press. Open access Chomsky, Noam. 2016. ‘Chomsky responds to Chris Knight’s book, Decoding Chomsky’ Libcom Chomsky, Noam, and Chris Knight. 2019. ‘Chomsky’s response to Chris Knight’s chapter in the new Responsibility of Intellectuals book’. Libcom Knight, Chris. 2016. ‘John Deutch – Chomsky’s friend in the Pentagon and the CIA’. Libcom Knight, Chris. 2016. Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics. Newhaven: Yale University Press Google Books Knight, Chris. 2023. ‘The Two Chomskys: The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?’ Aeon Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1988. The Politics of Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Chris Knight, who is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London and a long-standing political activist. [00:33] These two strands of his work and striving come together in the Radical Anthropology Group, which Chris co-founded. [00:41] Among the group’s activities are a regular series of talks and lectures, which can be watched online on the group’s Vimeo channel. [00:49] The link is available on the podcast page. [00:52] In a recent update on the podcast, we promised that we’d look at the history of linguistics in the Cold War period, [00:59] with a focus on how the social and political climate of the time may have helped to shape the field of linguistics [01:06] — that is, how this climate influenced what linguists took an interest in, how they approached their subject matter, human language, [01:13] and how they marketed themselves and their work. [01:17] Chris has produced some very provocative work that explores the relationship of the research of Noam Chomsky, perhaps the key figure of linguistics in this period, [01:27] to the U.S. military-industrial complex of the Cold War. [01:31] Chris has written about this most extensively in his 2016 book Decoding Chomsky, [01:37] but also in a number of articles that are referenced on the podcast page. [01:41] The great conundrum Chris seeks to resolve in these texts is how Chomsky could reconcile the fact that his research was paid for largely by the U.S. military [01:51] with his activism in opposition to the Vietnam War and in support of other left-wing causes. [01:58] So Chris, could you outline your views for us? [02:01] What was the relationship of Chomsky’s linguistic research at MIT to the U.S. military-industrial complex, [02:09] and what effect did this have on Chomsky’s approach to studying language? [02:15] CK: Well, Chomsky was initially employed at MIT rather than, say, a more posh place such as Harvard because, being Jewish — and, as Chomsky put it, the anti-Semitism around being as thick as soup — it was easier for him to get a job at MIT, [02:33] and his initial employment was to work on a kind of craze of the time, actually: machine translation. [02:39] Chomsky, from the outset, realized that for machine translation to work, you’d have to have computers far more powerful with far greater memory than anything that was around at the time, [02:51] and he realized that, really, you just need a vast number of sentences, and you kind of average them out and work out what the probable meaning of it is. [03:00] I say “you,” “you” being a computer here. [03:04] And he wasn’t interested at all, and what was much more exciting to him, but also very exciting to the U.S. military, [03:12] was the idea that just possibly the human mind is itself a digital computer of some sort, [03:19] and that underlying all the world’s different languages was this simple code. [03:25] So Warren Weaver had — this great fixer and founder of all sorts of things going on in U.S. military, industrial plus intellectual relationships — argued that possibly… [03:37] He actually used the analogy of the Tower of Babel, that underneath all the differences, if you delve right down to the very basis of language, you’d find a simple kind of underlying code, [03:47] which Chomsky before long called universal grammar. [03:51] And why that was exciting to the military would mean that you could just possibly ask the generals during, say, a nuclear war to kind of talk to their missiles. [04:03] I say talk, probably they meant type on a keyboard to their missiles, [04:07] but you could talk in any of the world’s languages, and the missiles would kind of get it [04:11] because installed inside the missile or inside the bomber or other form of technology would be this kind of black box containing the principles of all the world’s different languages. [04:23] So that was an extraordinarily exciting and ambitious idea, and when Chomsky was invited to work on it, he more or less said, [04:31] “Well, I’ll work on the principle. I’ll work on the science. I won’t work on any practical applications. I won’t try to operationalize what I’m doing. [04:41] Anyone else wants to do that, that’s up to them.” [04:44] But because this is intellectually exciting and thrilling, in fact, that underlying all the world’s languages is a simple universal grammar, he promised to work on that. [04:54] JMc: But isn’t it the case that Chomsky’s approach is rather formalist and that he’s interested in the structures of languages, [05:02] not necessarily in any semantic aspects? [05:05] So even if he could describe an underlying universal grammar of all languages, it would actually not be something that could be used in practice for the purposes of communication or for instructing machines. [05:20] CK: Well, exactly. And actually, in order to clarify this, Chomsky was very anxious to draw a very sharp distinction between language’s social use — social conversation, social communication — and language as formal structure, [05:39] and in fact, sometimes argued that possibly the very word “language” was misleading. [05:43] His interest was, if you like, grammar. [05:46] And yes, I mean, that’s absolutely right, but the point I think I would make is that there was a cost to this, [05:55] because in the end, in order to draw the sharpest possible distinction between language as use and language as grammar, [06:05] he argued that language is essentially not communicative, that essentially language is the language of thought [06:12] and that the first human on the planet ever to, if you like, [06:16] speak in his own words was talking to itself. [06:20] So in order to absolutely ensure that he kept his politics apart from his work for the military, he stripped language of everything social. [06:31] And you can sort of see why that was kind of necessary, because anything social in language is likely to be not just social, but political, [06:39] and if it’s political, it’ll be political in a context which Chomsky would have thoroughly disapproved. [06:47] So to make quite sure that he wasn’t colluding with the U.S. military on a political or social level, strip out the social from language and leave just the forms. [06:58] And so language is, if you like, the language of thought. [07:01] Language isn’t for communication. [07:03] But of course, the moment you do that, you then wonder, well, [07:06] what’s grammar for, if it isn’t to make thinking externalised and therefore accessible to others? [07:12] I mean, do we really need grammar when we’re thinking to ourselves? [07:15] Obviously, that’s a huge philosophical debate, but I think most cognitive scientists these days would say, well, no, [07:21] grammar is precisely to make sure that what’s in your head gets out to other people — in other words, make sure that it’s externalised. [07:29] And of course, language for Chomsky is I-language, internal language. It doesn’t get externalised. [07:34] JMc: But the formalist turn that Chomsky made wasn’t necessarily original to him, was it? [07:40] I mean, you know, what is often called American structuralism that immediately preceded his work in generative grammar – in particular, the school of the Bloomfieldians – already had a very formalist approach to language, [07:53] and that was couched in behaviourist terms, which Chomsky argued against. [07:57] But the actual processes of analysis where you concentrate just on the forms of language and describe the distribution as the Bloomfieldians did, [08:06] but then Zellig Harris, Chomsky’s teacher, and Chomsky himself, you know, talking about it in transformational terms, [08:12] this focus on pure form in language, without any consideration of meaning or use, you know, was something that the Bloomfieldians were already doing. [08:23] CK: Well, yes, no doubt about that. [08:25] And of course, Zellig Harris, in many ways Chomsky’s teacher, [08:30] his project was to make text accessible to a computer, to make texts legible, and that was the whole point of his formalism. [08:39] So there’s no doubt that different forms of formalism were around. [08:43] And of course, in my book, I explain how actually you can trace that right, right back through Jakobson, right back to the Russian formalists, Russian formalism, [08:52] including the extraordinary poet Velimir Khlebnikov. [08:56] And that whole idea of formalism is to try at all costs to kind of rescue science, and linguistic science in particular, rescue it from politics, [09:06] because if you just have pure form, you can argue that you’re doing something on the level of astronomy. [09:13] I mean, E=MC2; is not politics, it’s just pure science. [09:17] And there’s something clearly liberating and inspiring about the idea of doing pure science uncontaminated by politics. [09:26] The point I’m making is that if we go to the extreme in that direction, [09:32] you just haven’t got language. [09:35] I mean, all I’m saying is that at the end of the day, language is social, it is communicative, [09:41] and if you strip away not only the politics, [09:43] but the social dimensions, what you’ve got is some form of computation. [09:49] But I would argue, and I think most people these days would argue as well… Including people who’ve been taught by Chomsky. I mean, Steven Pinker, I can think of hardly any linguist these days who would argue that language hasn’t got some necessary and intrinsic connection with communication. [10:04] So if we take it too far, what you’ve got might be interesting, but it’s just not language. [10:10] JMc: Has Chomsky responded at all to your account? [10:14] CK: Yes. I mean, we’ve had a very difficult relationship over the years. [10:20] I was one of the founders of EvoLang, along with Jim Hurford, and we had a big conference in 2002 in Boston at which Chomsky made the final sort of massive contribution at the end of the whole week. [10:32] And yes, he has responded. [10:35] When my book came out, he described it as a “vulgar exercise of defamation, a web of deceit and misinformation”. [10:44] “The whole story is a wreck… complete nonsense throughout.” [10:48] JMc: That’s a direct quote, I take it. [10:50] CK: These are direct quotes, yes. That’s right. [10:53] And I kind of rather proudly put those comments in the front of my book, because at least it was a response from Chomsky. [11:02] He argued that the reason why he’s legitimately describing it as a wreck is because, quote, no military work was being done on campus during his time at MIT. [11:16] Which is fine, except that he also says the following: [11:19] “There was extensive military research on the MIT campus. In fact, a good deal of the nuclear missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus.” [11:29] So what I’m saying is, the point I’m making about the just inescapable involvement with military technology and missile guidance technology, it’s not a point that Chris Knight makes. [11:42] It’s a point that Chomsky makes on numerous occasions. [11:45] And for some reason, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but Chomsky’s political admirers [11:51] — and of course I’m a huge admirer of his politics — [11:55] they’re always trying to find some connection between his linguistics and his politics. [12:00] They’re always trying to sort of say, Well, there must be something liberating about his linguistics and left-wing about his linguistics, in many cases. [12:07] And every time Chomsky came across activist supporters who asked him to explain that connection, he just got more and more impatient. [12:13] He just sort of shook his head. [12:14] “You’re not going to find anything politically inspiring in my linguistics. Forget it.” [12:18] And the Left just couldn’t kind of cope with this. [12:22] So how do I put this? [12:24] I mean, what I’m saying is that if you are a left-wing activist working in this military lab, [12:30] you’re going to need to draw a line between the two sides of your work. [12:38] I mean, just let me… I mean, a passage from my book, actually. [12:42] I describe how he became a friend of somebody called John Deutch, who before long was to become director of the CIA. [12:55] And Chomsky recalls, “We were actually friends and got along fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human beings can disagree about. [13:02] I liked him. We got along very well together. [13:03] He’s very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open, sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I had no problem with him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I’m told, who was supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT.” [13:05] And so I’m just saying we need to appreciate the glaring contradiction here, because this is Chomsky’s view of the CIA. [13:31] “The CIA does what it wants. [13:33] It carries out assassinations, systematic torture, bombings, invasions, mass murder of civilians, multiple other crimes.” [13:39] In Indonesia, as Chomsky rightly points out, in 1965, the CIA organized a military coup to prevent the Communist party, described by Chomsky as the “party of the poor,” from winning a key general election. [13:53] The ensuing repression resulted in a staggering mass slaughter of perhaps half a million people. [13:58] So I mean, you know, you’re friends with a future director of the CIA, who’s a chemist involved in fuel-air explosives and other weapons of mass destruction. [14:10] You’re aware that the CIA is, from Chomsky’s point of view, a criminal organization. [14:16] You’re friends with, you have lunch with these people. [14:21] And then in the evening, you have a meeting with anarchists and revolutionaries and anti-capitalists and anti-militarists. [14:29] And I’m simply saying, can you see, you’re meeting with these people at lunchtime, in the evening, [14:34] you’re meeting with the opposite camps. [14:36] You wouldn’t want the anarchists present in your discussions with the future director of the CIA. [14:41] And when you’re at your anarchist meeting in the evening, I don’t think you’d want the director of the CIA to be publicly present in that meeting either. [14:47] You’ve just got to keep those two things apart, [14:50] and keeping them apart meant keeping apart different parts of Chomsky’s passion, Chomsky’s, if you like, his mind, his brain [14:59] — to the extent that when an interviewer said to him, “Well, there seem to be two Noam Chomskys. What do they say to each other when they meet?” [15:07] And Chomsky says there’s no connection. [15:10] There’s no connection between the two of them. [15:13] The connection is almost non-existent. [15:15] There is a kind of loose, abstract connection in the background, but practical connections are non-existent. [15:20] So he’s basically telling us that the two Noam Chomskys aren’t really on speaking terms. [15:26] Okay, I mean, you’re in a difficult situation. [15:29] You want your job. You can do very good work in that job, but there are institutional contradictions. [15:34] And I’m not even saying that Chomsky should have not taken the job. [15:38] I mean, because by taking that job and becoming such a star figure in linguistics based in MIT, he then gained a platform from which to launch his assault on the U.S. military, beginning with the invasion of Vietnam. [15:53] So had he not had that job, he might have been like any other sort of activist on the street somewhere without that powerful voice. [16:00] By the way, I need to say how much we right now miss that voice. [16:06] It’s well known, of course, that for over a year now, Noam has been not well, and we have lost a voice of sanity in what I regard as an increasingly deranged political world. [16:21] It’s a huge loss. We would have benefited so much from Chomsky’s voice, [16:25] particularly in connection with Palestine and what’s going on today in Gaza. [16:30] I’m saying that simply to stress, I’m not even criticizing Chomsky. [16:34] I’m saying in a difficult situation, all of us have to make a living. [16:37] We all have to have a job. Whatever job we take, mostly it’ll be financed by some kind of corporation or capitalist outfit or another. [16:45] More than others, perhaps, Chomsky is just, his contradictions, if you like, all of us experience those contradictions — in his case, to an extreme extent. [16:57] JMc: But I think Chomsky would perhaps argue, and you’ve touched on this point in a few of the things that you’ve said, [17:03] I think Chomsky would argue that there is such a thing as pure science, [17:08] that is, science as an activity that’s pursued without any political implications or interference, [17:15] and that whether someone is a good or a bad scientist has nothing to do with their politics. [17:22] And, I mean, if we follow this line of reasoning, we might even say that explicitly mixing politics and science [17:29] leads to such ridiculous outrages as the German physics of Nazi Germany, [17:34] the Lysenkoism of Stalinist times, or in linguistics to such things as Marrism. [17:40] So do you think that Chomsky is being disingenuous in insisting on pure science, [17:45] or do you think that he’s just mistaken? [17:49] CK: I think the most important thing today is the autonomy of science. [17:56] Science is a collectivist form of knowledge. It’s accountable. It works on the basis of peer review. [18:02] If you take, say, for example, climate science, I mean, how much do we need science these days to have its own autonomous, independent voice? [18:13] I would think, and Chomsky would certainly agree with this point, which is that probably the survival of our species as well as the rest of the planet may depend on freeing science from politics, [18:25] and in particular making sure that genuine scientists accountable to one another, [18:30] to the scientific community, have a voice. [18:34] In order for climate science to have its voice, climate science itself has to be respected by political activists as the source of their inspiration. [18:45] In other words, we need politics to be subordinated to science. I think science needs to guide politics. [18:53] When it’s the other way around, when it’s politics which distorts and guides science for its own purposes, [18:58] of course that leads to the idiocies of Stalinism, Lysenko being, of course, the most famous example. [19:05] But how can science be autonomous without having some, if you like, political agency? [19:12] That’s the point I’m trying to make. [19:14] Now, Chomsky certainly wanted science to be autonomous, but he said that science has got no relevance to politics, [19:22] it’s another thing altogether. [19:24] Science, he argued, can make contributions as tiny fragments of knowledge, but it can’t put together any kind of big picture. [19:31] Climate science is putting together a big picture of what it means to be a living planet, what it means to be alive, [19:37] how we humans even exist today with our minds and bodies and languages as one of the many species on this planet going right back to the origin of life four billion years ago. [19:46] JMc: So is your account of Chomsky’s linguistics essentially psychoanalytic in nature? [19:53] And by that I mean, do you think that Chomsky has subconsciously moved into abstract theorising to escape the possibility of his work ever being used in practice, for military purposes, [20:03] or do you think that he actually made a conscious decision to move into the abstract and away from any practical applications? [20:11] CK: Well, I certainly don’t feel we need psychoanalysts to work these things out. [20:16] JMc: I just mean, do you think that he’s made a conscious decision, or do you think that he’s not even aware of it himself [20:22] and you have revealed this underlying conflict taking place in his brain subconsciously? [20:28] CK: I think Chomsky himself found it easier to do his science and to do his politics [20:37] and not worry too much about the connection. [20:41] When he was asked about it, he would usually discourage people from thinking there was a connection. [20:47] As you know, I regard the connection as not a simple one. [20:51] It’s a connection between opposites. [20:53] His science is doing one thing, his activism is doing a different thing. [20:58] His science is for one part of society, essentially for the U.S. military. [21:01] His activism is to contribute to the opposition to that same military. [21:08] And so we have a connection between opposites, if you like. [21:11] We have, of course, the classic term for that is the dialectic. [21:14] I quote in my book, Chomsky is saying that when he hears the term “dialectic,” he says, “I reach for my gun.” [21:20] He doesn’t like that whole concept. [21:21] Well, okay, I can see why you wouldn’t want to think that your science is the opposite of your politics. [21:27] But okay, to me, it’s just crystal clear that he’s right to say they have no connection, but he’s wrong to sort of deny this paradoxical connection. [21:38] Okay, Chomsky does say — and again, I quote it in the book — [21:42] he says, “One of the things about my brain,” his brain, “is, it seems to have separate buffers, like separate modules within a computer. [21:50] I can be on an aeroplane going to a scientific conference, and meanwhile, [21:55] I’m writing notes about the speech I’m to make at an activist event. [21:59] So my brain can be doing these opposite things at once.” [22:02] I mean, all of us can do that to an extent, of course, [22:04] but I would simply say, again, it’s not explicitly conscious. [22:08] It’s not out there. If it was out there, Chomsky would be proud of it, happy about it, explain it. [22:13] But you can see, can’t you, it would be very difficult for him to be public about it and out there. [22:19] I mean, it’d be very difficult for him to be explaining to an activist audience what he’s doing for the U.S. military. [22:24] It’d be very difficult for him to be having a meal with John Deutch and discussing his political activism against everything that John Deutch stands for. [22:32] It’s difficult. I can do it because I’m not directly involved. [22:35] I think for Chomsky it was difficult, but not for psychological reasons. [22:38] I think for essentially social, political, I think the best word is “institutional.” [22:42] I think it was an institutional conflict. [22:45] To some extent, all of us are involved in those conflicts. [22:47] We live in a certain kind of society, conflict-ridden society. [22:50] But Chomsky is probably the most extreme example of the consequences of those institutional contradictions and conflicts. [22:59] JMc: So are the facts of your account contested at all? [23:01] CK: No, not really. It’s all on record. [23:05] I don’t think there’s a single thing I’ve said about the military priorities of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, [23:14] I don’t think there’s a single thing in my book that hasn’t been said perhaps more cogently and powerfully by Chomsky himself. [23:24] But I first became aware of it many years ago, and it was Fritz Newmeyer’s book, The Politics of Linguistics, which drew my attention to all of this. [23:34] He quoted Colonel Edmund Gaines. [23:36] He interviewed this colonel to ask why the U.S. military at the time was sponsoring transformational grammar, Chomsky’s research and the research conducted by Chomsky’s colleagues, [23:50] and he said, “We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.” [24:01] So in the course of writing my book, I decided to ask some of Chomsky’s students working in the MITRE Corporation. [24:09] And of course, the MITRE Corporation is not exactly the same thing as MIT, but it’s closely connected with MIT. [24:15] It’s where the theoretical accomplishments in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, particularly the Electronics Research Laboratory, [24:23] get operationalized, get turned into practical applications. [24:26] I asked Barbara Partee what she was doing supervised by Noam in the MITRE Corporation, [24:32] and she told me that the idea was that “in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things,” [24:41] and “it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than teach the generals how to program.” [laughs] [24:49] It’s just such a beautiful quote. I mean, really, everybody knew what they were doing. [24:54] And Barbara Partee said that “we had sort of feelings of anxiety about the work we were doing,” because Barbara, as all Chomsky’s students, I think, were all pretty anti-militarist, [25:05] weren’t at all happy about what was going on in Vietnam at the time. [25:08] But there you are, they were doing this, and somehow, they managed to square what they were doing with their consciences [25:14] on the basis that it would be a very long time before you could actually, in practice, kind of talk to a missile and tell it, [25:22] “Go right. Go left. Hit the Viet Cong. Not there, you idiot. Go there,” [25:25] and talk to it in any language or type out on a keyboard in any language. [25:30] It was so far off in the future that somehow it didn’t matter too much that what they were doing was politically suspect. [25:37] JMc: Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [25:40] CK: Thank you very much, James. [25:42]

May 31, 2024 • 27min

Podcast episode 40: Interview with Nick Riemer on politics, linguistics and ideology

In this interview, we talk to Nick Riemer about how linguistic theory and political ideology can interact. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts References for Episode 40 Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Althusser, Louis 1996 [1965]. Marxism and Humanism. In For Marx (B. Brewtser, tr.), London: Verso, 218–238. Althusser, Louis 2014 [1970]. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) (B. Brewster, tr.). In Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso, 232–272. Althusser, Louis. 2015 [1976]. Être marxiste en philosophie. Paris: PUF. Auroux, Sylvain 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Liège: Mardaga Barsky Robert F. 2007. The Chomsky Effect. A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower. Cambridge: MIT. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs 2003. Voices of Modernity. Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1991. Language and Symbolic Power (G. Raymond and M. Adamson, tr.). Cambridge: Polity. Calvet, Louis-Jean 2002. Linguistique et colonialisme. Paris : Payot. Canut, Cécile 2021. Provincialiser la langue. Langage et colonialisme. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam Charity Hudley, Anne H., Christine Mallinson, Mary Bucholtz 2020. Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession. Language 96: e200-e235. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2020.0074 Chevalier Jean-Claude, Encrevé Pierre, 2006. Combats pour la linguistique, de Martinet à Kristeva. Essai de dramaturgie épistémologique. Lyon : ENS Éditions. Chomsky, Noam 2004. Language and Politics (C.P. Otero, ed.). Expanded edition. Oakland, AK Press. DeGraff, Michel. 2005. Linguists’ most dangerous myth: the fallacy of creole exceptionalism. Language in Society 34: 533-591. DeGraff, Michel 2020. Toward racial justice in linguistics: The case of Creole Studies (response to Charity Hudley et al.). Language 96: e292-e306. Eagleton, Terry 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Errington, Joseph 2008. Linguistics in a colonial world: a story of language, meaning, and power. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Flores, Nelson Jonathan Rosa 2015. Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review 85: 149-171. Golumbia, David 2009. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Greimas, Algirdas-Julien 1956. L’actualité du saussurisme. Le français moderne 24: 191-203. Heller, Monica and Bonnie McElhinny 2017. Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hirschkop, Ken. 2019. Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950. Writing on Language as Social Theory. Oxford: OUP. Honneth, Axel 2008. Reification. A new look at an old idea. New York, Oxford, OUP. Horkheimer, Max. 1992 [1947]. Eclipse of reason. New York: Continuum. Hutton, Christopher 1999. Linguistics and the Third Reich : mother-tongue fascism, race, and the science of language. London: Routledge. Jones, Peter E. and Chik Collins 2006. Political analysis versus “Critical Discourse Analysis” in the treatment of ideology: some implications for the study of communication. Atlantic Journal of Communication 14: 28-50. Knight, Chris 2016. Decoding Chomsky. Science and Revolutionary Politics. New Haven and London: Yale. Makoni, Sinfree and Alastair Pennycook (eds) 2007. Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Marcuse, Herbert 2002 [1964]. One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2ed. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl 1976 [1867]. Capital. Volume I (Ben Fowkes, tr.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1976. The German Ideology. 3ed. Moscow: Progress. Mbembe, Achille 2016. Decolonizing the University: New Directions. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15: 29-45. Mbembe, Achille 2013. Critique de la raison nègre. Paris : La Découverte. Rehmann, Jan 2013: Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection. Leiden: Brill. Riemer, Nick 2019a. Cognitive Linguistics and the public mind : Idealist doctrines, materialist histories. Language and Communication 64: 38-52. Riemer Nick 2019b. Linguistic form : a political epistemology. In James McElvenny (ed.), Form and formalism in linguistics, Berlin: Language Science Press, 225-264, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.2654369 Riemer Nick 2021. L’emprise de la grammaire. Propositions épistémologiques pour une linguistique mineure. Lyon: ENS Éditions. Open access : http://books.openedition.org/enseditions/38952. Riemer Nick 2023. Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine. Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield. Rosa, Jonathan and Nelson Flores 2017. Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46: 621-647. Rudwick, Stephanie and Sinfree Makoni 2021. Southernizing and decolonizing the Sociology of Language: African scholarship matters. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 267-268 : 259–263. Stockhammer Robert 2014. Grammatik. Wissen und Macht in der Geschichte einer sprachlichen Institution. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa 1987. Decolonising the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature. Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House. Vološinov ,V. N. 1973 [1929]. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, tr.). New York: Seminar Press. Žižek, Slavoj (ed.) 1994. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso. Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Nick Riemer, who’s lecturer in linguistics and English at the University of Sydney in Australia, and also associated with the Laboratory History of Linguistic Theories in Paris. [00:35] Nick has a broad range of interests in the study of language, [00:39] most notably in semantics, history and philosophy of linguistics, and the politics of linguistics. [00:45] It’s these political dimensions of linguistic scholarship that Nick is going to talk to us about today. [00:51] His current project is a monograph on the politics of linguistics since Saussure. [00:58] So Nick, what have the politics of linguistics been like since Saussure? [01:02] NR: Thanks a lot for inviting me on the podcast, James, and obviously, there’s no single answer [01:09] to that question. In fact, many linguists since Saussure have denied that there is any [01:16] connection between linguistics and politics. It’s a surprisingly common declaration that [01:22] you come across linguists making throughout the 20th century that these two things actually [01:28] have no connection. And it’s sort of reflected, I think, in the conventional historiography of linguistics. [01:36] I mean, you can tell me whether you agree with this, but it seems to me that the way we usually [01:41] talk about linguistics and politics is by talking about how particular ideas and theories [01:46] and frameworks in linguistics might reflect external trends in society and politics. It’s [01:54] often struck me that that’s a sort of overly passive way of construing the relationship, and it ignores [02:00] the fact that linguistics doesn’t just reflect what’s going on outside. It also contributes [02:06] to it, shapes it, plays an ideological function in reinforcing or challenging it. And that’s what [02:13] I’m interested in, in the period after Saussure. And I think the… to answer, to try and answer, your question a little bit [02:22] because the connections are just so vast and manifold, I think the key is to seeing linguistics [02:27] as a social practice, to seeing it not in idealist terms as a body of doctrine or discoveries [02:36] which unfolds according to its own internal logic, and in which the theorists and the [02:43] participants are these purely disinterested truth-seekers, but to see it as something [02:50] which unfolds largely in the context of higher education, in a social context where the players [02:56] themselves are engaged in political tussles internally within the field, but where the [03:02] discipline also does arguably perform various ideological and political functions. [03:10] JMc: But why focus on linguistics? I mean, it’s a fairly niche discipline, isn’t it, within the university landscape? [03:17] NR: Because I had the misfortune or the folly to become a specialist in part of linguistics, [03:24] and from that got on to taking an interest in the history and the philosophy of the discipline. [03:29] So, you know, to the man with the hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I’m just, in embarking on [03:35] this project, I’m, as we all do, working on what I know and what I feel I can make some [03:40] contribution to. Obviously, you can’t separate the history of linguistics from the wider [03:45] history of the human sciences and from wider intellectual history, even though for much [03:51] of the 20th century, especially its later part, I would say there has been a certain [03:56] isolationism in the discipline. [03:59] And it’s certainly notable, I think, that linguistics in the West was, to a large and surprising [04:08] extent, immune, for instance, from the waves of social critique and political critique [04:15] that swept over the rest of the humanities and the social sciences from the 1960s. [04:19] I mean, there were versions of that that did touch linguistics, but it has been a quite [04:25] sort of technical and scientific and rather sort of isolationist discipline, and I think that [04:32] performs an ideological function in itself, actually. [04:35] JMc: OK, but do you think that that represents linguistics as an entire discipline or just [04:39] particular schools of linguistics? [04:42] Because, I mean, you could argue that linguistics as [04:45] a field has actually served as a model science, as a model to many of the other human sciences, [04:52] especially in the 20th century, and in fact that a lot of post-structuralist theory is a reaction [04:57] to structuralism, a body of doctrines that have come out of linguistics. [05:03] NR: Yeah, absolutely it is, and there’s no doubt that structuralism was a pilot science, as it was [05:09] often called for… and had a massive influence, and there was this sort of linguistification of [05:15] the world that happened in the wake of structural linguistics, where it looked as though for [05:21] a while everything could be treated as though it was a language which operated on structuralist principles. [05:27] I mean, I suppose Lacan is the most celebrated version of that. [05:31] But at one point in the ’60s and ’70s, it looked as though everything had a grammar. [05:37] Music had a grammar, dance had a grammar, urban planning had a grammar—everything had a grammar. [05:42] And I think that’s one of the things that makes asking questions about the politics [05:46] of our ideas about language interesting, that language is a sort of model, as you say, [05:54] for a whole lot of other symbolic and also maybe non-symbolic domains, [06:00] so it’s interesting to inquire into the underlying political assumptions that might drive research into language structure. [06:12] Because if I… Perhaps I can just elaborate on that slightly. [06:15] I mean, you know, when we talk about language and politics and language in society, I think we’re really used to looking [06:21] at the obvious things, so we’re looking, we look often at the contribution of language to, [06:26] of linguistics to colonialism. [06:28] So, you know, its use as part of expert knowledge among, [06:34] among colonizers in the, in the service of control of colonial populations. [06:39] We look at language standardization, which is about a similar dynamic within the West, [06:47] the dispossession, the linguistic dispossession of subaltern classes by particular, you know, [06:54] certified registers of national languages, which were typically not the ones that were [07:01] spoken by, you know, rural and working class populations, but which was imposed on them as part of the project of, you know, universal primary education. [07:12] Language planning, you know, the way that language planning is done to serve particular political ends. [07:17] So that’s all very interesting, and I think in linguistics in general, we do have [07:23] a reasonable understanding of that. [07:24] And it’s certainly very salient, you know, linguistics and racism, linguistics and class exploitation. [07:31] These are well understood, but what we have less of a interest in, I think, [07:35] and which I myself find really worth exploring [07:39] is the way in which our basic structural ideas about the nature of grammar might be the product of, and might also [07:47] reinforce, particular ideological settings, which play a role in, for want of a better word, [07:54] Western European or Anglo-European capitalist modernity, [07:57] and I think there are a lot of interesting things that we can say about that. [08:01] JMc: So if I might just query the specifics of your historiographic scheme, why do you start your discussion of the modern field of linguistics [08:11] with Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics? [08:13] So, I mean, there’s, of course, a tradition of treating Saussure’s Course as the founding scripture of modern synchronic linguistics, [08:20] but there’s also plenty of historical scholarship that shows that this is largely a convenient myth, [08:26] that there’s a great deal of continuity between Saussure and what came before him—and what came immediately before him, that is—namely the Neogrammarians, [08:37] and also that a lot of what is considered Saussurean is, in fact, later interpretation that people have made in setting up [08:48] Saussure’s Course as the scripture that they base, you know, all of their ideas on. [08:54] NR: Yeah, I mean, it’s clear that, you know, there are lots of continuities, as you say, between the [08:59] Course, which of course wasn’t from Saussure’s own pen, but which was a retrospective reconstruction [09:04] by his colleagues on the basis of lecture notes, as we all know. [09:09] There’s an obvious continuity between that and the Mémoire on the vowel system. [09:14] There are similar sort of structuralist, for want of a better term, ideas that you can see in both of them, I think. [09:21] But to the extent that any starting point for any project is arbitrary, as of course it is, [09:28] I still think there are good grounds for starting with Saussure, because [09:33] retrospectively that text was imbued with an enormous weight in the structuralist period. [09:39] You know, maybe not immediately, but, you know, in the ’50s, certainly, people looked back to, [09:45] and earlier as well, people did look back to, you know, Saussure as the sort of founding charter of [09:51] this new intellectual movement, which was by no means just Saussurian, but which did appeal to [09:58] many of the ideas in the Course in General Linguistics as the starting point for this [10:03] exciting new way of thinking about language. [10:06] And I mean, if we just look at two aspects of Saussure, [10:10] I think we can, you know, see that there is a reason to take the Course seriously as a starting point. [10:18] One is the concept of synchrony, you know, the idea that there needs to be a break with the [10:24] predominantly sort of historical mode of investigation of language, which was true of [10:31] the comparative-historical method and then of Neogrammarians, [10:36] and the other is this abstraction that Saussure, you know, really popularized, or that the Course really popularized, [10:44] which is langue, you know, the idea that there is some kind of abstract formal structure at the heart [10:53] of language which can be meaningfully studied out of connection with actual acts of language use, [11:00] actual discourse, actual linguistic interchange. [11:04] And that really set the stage, I think, in important ways for the whole formalization, for the whole abstraction that became such a feature and [11:14] hallmark of ‘linguistic science’, quote-unquote, in the subsequent decades. [11:21] And there’s really interesting things, I think, that we can say about the ideological valency of both of those things, [11:29] this divestment that Saussure accomplished of language from the historical flow, the situated [11:37] historical flow of temporal, you know, human interaction embedded in all of those things which, [11:45] you know, give human interaction its particular characteristics: you know, our gender, [11:50] our ethnic background, our particular position in whatever speech community and society we’re in. [11:56] All of these things, Saussure was seen as providing a licence to ignore, or at least to background, [12:04] and I think we can see in that, you know, a particular, a recognizable move that we see widely, I would say, in bourgeois culture, [12:16] which is just a backgrounding of social conflict and social tensions and the class character of society, [12:23] and also particularly the problems of racialization and the racialization of different linguistic subjects. [12:29] All of that is largely backgrounded by the decision to look at this thing which is called langue, and to take language out of [12:37] the social contexts that it really surely belongs in, in a significant way. [12:43] So that’s one, I think, interesting way in which what became doctrine in linguistics did contribute to this image that [12:50] liberal society, that bourgeois liberal society, has of itself in the West, which is this [12:56] fantasy of a social homogeneity, and this backgrounding of society as this dialectical, [13:03] conflict-ridden, intrinsically contradictory thing, out of which, you know, transformative social [13:09] change could arise if we only let it. [13:13] JMc: OK, but I mean, a counter-argument, or perhaps it’s not a counter-argument, [13:18] but one thing that has been said about this idea of la langue, or as it later became, in generative theory, competence—or at least Chomsky has argued that his notion of competence is a version of la langue (although that, of course, is controversial)—but one argument that has been made in support of that, which you may simply dismiss as bourgeois rationalization, [13:43] is that having this notion that everyone, all people, have exactly the same [13:50] linguistic ability, which manifests itself in competence, or in a langue, means that everyone [13:57] is the same. [13:58] So it’s a radically egalitarian move. [14:01] One way in which this argument has been deployed is in defence of Creole languages. [14:06] So Michel DeGraff, who is a generativist at MIT, [14:10] has argued that all humans have this capacity for language, and that it’s the same, [14:16] means that Creole languages are legitimate languages of the same kind as any standard [14:21] European language that might have lexified them, or any other language in the world. [14:26] So what would you say to an argument like that? [14:29] NR: I mean, I think that’s certainly true. [14:31] It’s certainly true that, you know, the starting hypothesis of the generative enterprise is that [14:37] there is this thing which we have in virtue of our membership of the human species, which is this [14:42] unique uniform language acquisition device, or universal grammar, or whatever we want to call it. [14:48] I mean, some people have interpreted that as a sort of anti-fascist gesture, or anti-racist gesture, and I think it certainly lends itself to that, [14:56] although Chomsky has been very sort of toey about strongly drawing that connection between what he thinks of as his scientific enterprise, [15:06] and any kind of ideological or political conclusions that you could draw from it. [15:10] But I think the connection is there, and it’s obvious, and he doesn’t deny it either. [15:14] It’s also worth saying that it’s not unique to generativism. [15:17] I mean, there are plenty of people you can find in the history of linguistics before Chomsky [15:21] asserting strongly the universality of human language, and challenging the idea that some languages were primitive or less developed than others, so… [15:32] JMc: Sure, but I raised this question at this point because I think that it [15:37] ties into the critique you made of langue, and by extension competence, as a bourgeois rationalization. [15:46] NR: Yeah, the extent to which I think… I mean, it’s interesting to see what [15:51] led Chomsky into his distinctive mode of approach to linguistics. [15:57] And of course, what got him into it in the first place was his connection with Zellig Harris, [16:04] who was strongly identified with socialistic politics in the US in the ’40s. [16:12] So the very impetus for Chomsky’s whole model was a stringently left-wing one, which was about collectivism, and which was an anti-Bolshevik kind of socialism, I think. [16:28] So historically, to tie it to bourgeois politics in that way [16:32] does miss something important about at least the impetus that Chomsky had to get involved with that whole sort of project or to initiate that project in the first place. [16:44] And even if we can recognize that there’s this hypothesis of equality, which is just embedded there in the generative approach, [16:52] there’s another way in which it really does buy in, I think, to a characteristic ideological formation in late capitalism, [17:01] which is just its individualism, right? [17:04] It’s a highly individualistic way of approaching language, to the extent that Chomsky has quite often said, or Chomskyans have quite often, I think, said, that really, [17:14] we all have an individual idiolect. [17:18] So there’s this disavowal of the shared nature of language. [17:22] There’s also this idea that language ultimately isn’t about communication at root; it’s about the expression of thought. [17:28] So these are ideas which really put the focus on the individual and background social determinants of linguistic behavior in a way [17:38] that, for example, conversation analysis, which you’ve discussed on the podcast recently, tried to address in some ways, at least. [17:47] So that sort of hyper-individualism is, I think… it buys into a standard default way of conceiving of society in our kind of world, which is society as an aggregate of individuals. [18:01] I mean, Thatcher famously said there’s no such thing as society, and it’s famous, [18:05] but in a way, linguists have been saying that for decades before it came out of Margaret Thatcher’s mouth. [18:12] And it’s interesting to think of linguists not just saying that, [18:17] but saying that in lectures to very large numbers of undergraduates and saying it with the authority [18:25] or claiming the authority of science for it in the way that Chomsky claims the authority of science. [18:30] And I think it’s interesting to ask what kind of ideological contribution our discipline is [18:37] making to the maintenance of this whole deeply exploitative, deeply ecocidal economic order, [18:45] which is catapulting us into environmental destruction and social upheaval and permanent war. [18:52] What is the contribution of linguists and of the discipline to that ideologically? [18:57] And that’s one of the questions that I want to ask—not blaming linguistics for everything by any means (that would be ludicrous), but just acknowledging that this thing we do, this [19:07] discipline that we’re in is caught up with all of these things in ways that have often been disavowed [19:13] or at least silenced under this claim of scientificity that we like to make. [19:19] JMc: Sure. But I mean, radical individualism of the Chomskyan kind could also be an anarchist move, right? [19:25] It’s not necessarily neoliberal. [19:27] NR: No, no, it’s not. And that is obviously the political affiliation that Chomsky has claimed for it. [19:33] And, you know, he’s said with respect to… I mean, he was a member of the [19:39] Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. [19:41] So, you know, his political affiliations, formally speaking, absolutely aren’t in doubt, [19:46] but, you know, ideology has this nasty way of escaping from you. [19:50] And it is interesting to think about, you know, the… I mean, Chomsky has just been… [19:58] He’s had this schizophrenic split, of course, between his linguistic work and his political activism, which has been, in my view, you know, exemplary in many ways, [20:10] and he has… [20:11] He certainly cannot be accused and shouldn’t be accused of being on the wrong side. [20:15] I mean, you know, he has doggedly fought against, you know, US power, for example, doggedly fought against, [20:25] you know, the abuses of Zionism, to give another example, doggedly fought against, [20:29] you know, interference by the US in the governments of the developing world. [20:34] So, you know, his politics are not in doubt. [20:38] But what is in doubt is the ideological tenor or valency of this model that he contributed to. [20:44] And, you know, if we look at people like George Lakoff or Steven Pinker, for example, you know, they’re perhaps the two neo-Chomskyans or people with Chomskyan linguistics in their background [20:58] who’ve most explicitly contributed to political discourse and have tried to weigh into political debate in the US, [21:06] and it’s interesting to look at how they do that. [21:08] You know, Lakoff has done it in the favour of, in my view, [21:11] completely dead-end Democrat politics of the most sort of counterproductive kind. [21:21] Pinker is a neo-reactionary of a very clear stripe, yet they both have, you know, [21:29] adopted those individualistic, highly intellectualist approaches to politics, [21:34] which I think have their roots in Chomskyan ideas about the nature of the mind. [21:40] JMc: So if I can just ask one more question, do you think these developments in linguistics of having [21:46] an abstract notion of la langue, which is examined synchronically, so separate from any notion of history, are entirely internal to the discipline, [21:55] or do you think that there are external forces [21:57] that might have helped to shape this image of language that linguists support, such as technological developments in the 20th century? [22:05] NR: Yeah, well, that’s an interesting question, and obviously any kind of answer is speculative. [22:11] But one of the things that we can say about the context [22:14] in which, you know, important thinkers in the 20th century developed their ideas about language is [22:18] that it was a context of the progressive and sort of galloping autonomization of language from human speakers. [22:28] So you see that in the development of broadcast technology, of things like the telex, [22:34] of things like the networked computer, and then more recently of, you know, technological [22:40] innovations like, you know, automatic text generation, text translation, you know, AI. [22:48] So there is this sense in which throughout the 20th century language is being increasingly [22:53] separated from its base in live human interaction, and I don’t think we have to be, you know, [23:00] starry-eyed romantics to see that as the natural niche of language. [23:06] It is in embodied, socially situated interaction. [23:11] And ever since Gutenberg, or ever since the invention of writing, [23:13] in fact, linguistics has been in part of this dynamic of this increasing and now, as I said, [23:20] galloping autonomization, you know, the freeing of language from bondage to actual flesh-and-blood speakers, [23:27] you know, the emancipation of language from the spoken word, which has just gathered pace astonishingly. [23:35] And I do think that notions like langue and competence can be seen as part of that dynamic, this idea that language is at root an abstract system. [23:46] And I think it was, no doubt, in complicated ways, reinforced by that, at least. [23:52] And I also think that there’s another interesting angle here, maybe, which is that one of the things that we… [24:00] One of the ways we typically talk about language, we talk about ourselves as using language, [24:06] and this increasing reification of language, this way that linguists increasingly had [24:14] of hauling language out of its interactional basis in interaction between people, and of [24:21] treating it as this, you know, mathematizable formal system, this is reification writ large. [24:27] And what I mean by that is the treatment of something which is fundamentally a social process [24:33] as a thing, which can be, you know, manipulated by a sovereign subject, by a subject who is free [24:41] and rational, and able to just use this system to achieve its own goals and to achieve its own ends, [24:49] in the ideal case, and in the case that’s assumed, in a way that’s pretty much free of social determinants. [24:55] You know, we’ve got the linguistic system out there at the disposal of [25:01] the free linguistic subject, who’s like Homo economicus in the linguistic domain. [25:07] You know, they just make a rational means-end calculation. [25:10] They use whatever words best express whatever ideas they have in their head, which are aimed at achieving their particular interactional ends, [25:18] you know, getting what they want. [25:20] That, I think, has been the sort of model of language that is often not articulated as crassly as that, though sometimes it is. [25:28] But I think it underlies so much of the way we think about language, and it’s particularly not challenged by so much of, you know, scientific linguistics. [25:38] And that reification, I think, participates in this same sort of ideological complex that I’ve been talking about, in that it feeds in and reinforces, [25:47] and does reflect, this view we have of what society is under capitalism, [25:53] which is this collection of rational individuals who are unconstrained in using their intelligences to [26:01] improve their particular individual situations, in competition often with other people. [26:08] And our view of language just buys into that very uncritical, very, you know, unsociological, [26:18] very sort of Pollyannaish conception of the way society works, where society is not something [26:24] which is fundamentally riven with class conflict, but where it’s something where there are [26:29] free agents who, sure, are in competition with each other for various goods, but they’re in [26:34] competition on an individualistic basis, and everything that we need to say about them [26:39] can be understood as rational. [26:41] So, you know, that’s the other really striking thing about linguistics in the 20th century. [26:45] It’s hyper-rationalism, it’s hyper-intellectualism, [26:48] the way that emotions just got screened out, but maybe we can talk about that another day. [26:53] JMc: Yeah, OK. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [26:56] NR: Thanks very much for having me, James.

Apr 30, 2024 • 26min

Podcast episode 39: Interview with Ingrid Piller on Life in a New Language

Ingrid Piller discusses her upcoming book 'Life in a New Language' focusing on migrants' challenges in adapting to a new culture. The interview covers collaborative data projects, struggles of migrants learning English in Australia, impact of migration on identity, and the methodology of ethnographic studies.

Mar 31, 2024 • 24min

Podcast episode 38: Interview with Dan Everett on C.S. Peirce and Peircean linguistics

Dan Everett, a Professor of Cognitive Sciences and noted for his fieldwork with the Pirahã, discusses the life and philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. The conversation dives into Peirce’s significant impact on modern linguistic theory, including his innovative triadic model of signs. Everett critiques traditional linguistic approaches while emphasizing the complexities of language, meaning, and communication. The dialogue also contrasts Peircean and Chomskyan linguistics, shedding light on differing views of language evolution and purpose.

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