In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while awake. Some have thought consciousness can’t be explained scientifically, and others have argued that it will always remain a mystery. But most consider some sort of explanation in physical, specifically neural, terms to be possible. In The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford University Press, 2012), Jesse J. Prinz — Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center — synthesizes scientific data and hypothesis with philosophical theory and insight to argue for the AIR theory of consciousness. On his view, consciousness is Attention to Intermediate-level Representations, attention is availability to working memory, and availability to working memory is realized by synchronized neural activity in the gamma frequency range. In this deftly written book, Prinz also provides novel arguments against competitor theories, argues against the idea that there is a phenomenal self, and proposes a mind-body metaphysics that draws on insights from both non-reductive and reductive physicalism.

In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford University Press, 2011), Elly van Gelderen tackles the question of such ‘cyclical’ changes. The book is a catalogue of examples of linguistic history repeating itself, with over a thousand example sentences drawn from nearly 300 different language varieties, and ranging over negation, tense, case, object agreement and beyond. Beyond this descriptive role, however, the book is also an attempt to understand the processes that we see within a Minimalist syntactic framework, in which economy on the part of the language acquirer is crucial for language change and semantic features are continually reanalysed as syntactic before being lost entirely. In this interview, among other things, we discuss the notion of the linguistic cycle, the relationship between historical linguistics and syntactic theory (sometimes strained, but usually mutually beneficial), the polysynthetic languages of the Americas, and whether Old English can be classified as polysynthetic.

The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics. He says that telling the story of the last few decades is a task for someone else. The task he’s taken on here is to describe the progress made in the psychology of language between its actual foundation – around 1800 – and the point at which it’s widely and erroneously believed to have been founded – around 1951. The story that the book tells is remarkable in many ways: not only for its vast breadth and depth of scholarship, but also for the number of misconceptions that it corrects. Levelt uncovers how many modern theories in psycholinguistics are in fact independent rediscoveries of proposals made in the 19th century, and charts the significant positive contributions made to the science by figures who are often overlooked or even derided now (we discuss a couple of such cases in this interview). He vividly depicts how the rapid march of progress was catastrophically disrupted in the early 20th century, by a combination of political strife and scientific wrong turns, before being restored in the 1950s. In this interview we talk about some of the recurring themes of the book – forgetting and rediscovery, the remarkably prescient nature of much 19th century theoretical and experimental work, and the collective misunderstanding of the history of the discipline. And we touch upon the intentional misunderstandings that allowed research in psycholinguistics to be exploited for financial gain or more sinister purposes.

The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our understanding of the Final Solution. We now know much more about the mechanics of destruction in the East, about the interaction between center and periphery in planning and carrying out mass killings, and about the interaction between Germans, local inhabitants and Jews. Twenty years later, historians have begun to integrate these new studies into broad reexaminations of the Holocaust. Donald Bloxham has written one of the best of these. His book, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford UP, 2009), is a remarkable attempt to put the Holocaust into the broader context of global history. It’s analytical rather than narrative. Its arguments are careful and always attentive to nuance and complexity. And Bloxham demonstrates a deep understanding of research on the Holocaust and in the broader field of Genocide Studies. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, you will come out of this book having reconsidered what you thought you knew about the Holocaust and about European history in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

This year is the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion nationwide. Indeed, 40 years ago today, women and men around the country were talking about the decision which they had heard on the news earlier in the day. Some, excited by the Supreme Court decision, were planning to open abortion clinics. Others saw the decision as a terrible mistake and were debating how to organize against the Supreme Court decision. For the past four decades, the fetus has featured prominently in this conflict. But our understanding of the fetus as a historical subject is fairly limited. Prompted in large part by the rising abortion debate, historians, sociologists and medical anthropologists began in the 1990s to study the fetus and the impact which medical technology has had on our view of pregnancy and the fetus. Medical technology, these authors have cautioned, did not merely advance our understanding of the fetus, but also contributed to a view which positioned women and the fetus in opposition to each other, with competing interests and rights. Several scholars have examined the impact which changing notions of pregnancy and the fetus have had on public policy. Sara Dubow‘s Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2010) contributes significantly to our understanding of the ways in which the fetus was constructed – both through medical technology and imagination – and the ways in which the changing meaning of the fetus shaped the lives of pregnant women. Her careful attention to the ways in which medical technology contributed to changes in the social construction of the fetus and influenced the laws governing women’s lives makes this a book not to be missed.

What do “Rip van Winkle,” Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Aesop’s Fables have in common? All of them were translated into Chinese by Lin Shu (Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924), a major force in the literary culture of late Qing and early Republican China. In Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Gibbs Hill charts the rise and precipitous fall of Lin’s career in an exploration of the making of the modern intellectual in China. Completing over 180 translations of Western literary works into classical Chinese while not knowing a single foreign language, Lin built a “factory of writing” dependent on the mental labor of 20 assistants trained in a range of foreign languages. Hill examines the texture of some of the translations produced by this network, offering a model for the close reading of translations both as literary sources and as sources of conflict over competing visions of intellectual, political, and national authority. Lin was ultimately caught in the crosshairs of prominent scholars and activists arguing over the relative roles of classical and vernacular language within a national project, but not before using his writing as a space to work out ideas about the roles of race, slavery, filial piety, and ethics in the transforming society of modern China. It’s a fascinating story about what it has meant in the past, and what it might mean in the future, to render ideas across linguistic realms.

The 1970s and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict are quite possibly the two most depressing subjects an academic could study. With shag carpeting, disco, Watergate, malaise defining the former and an internecine and (seemingly) eternal clash characterizing the latter who on earth would want to study those topics in one monograph? Well, Gil Troy is up to that task. The McGill University history professor not only took up this unenviable task, he has penned a remarkable work, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism (Oxford University Press, 2012). On the surface, Troy details Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s iconic 1975 speech at the United Nations that took issue with that body’s definition of Zionism as racism.  The author’s work, however, is much more than the history of a speech. Troy expertly depicts the history of the contemporary Western left as it pertains to Israel and Zionism while also detailing the work and life of an American original, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. If you are at all interested in contemporary US political history or the modern Middle East–this is a must read.

It’s taken for granted among analytic philosophers that some of their primary areas of inquiry – ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, in particular – involve a special and characteristic methodology that depends essentially on the use of intuitions as evidence for philosophical positions. A thought experiment is developed in order to elicit intuitive judgments, and these judgments have a special epistemic status. Paradigm cases of this methodology include Gettier cases, in which we judge whether the subject in the scenario has or does not have knowledge, and Putnam’s Twin-Earth cases, in which we judge whether the contents of thought depend on the physical nature of a thinker’s environment. The new experimental philosophy movement also accepts this assumption, as it is premised on rejecting it by conducting real experiments (with non-philosophers as subjects) rather than thought-experiments. In Philosophy Without Intuitions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Herman Cappelen, professor of philosophy at the Arche Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews, argues that this assumption is simply false as a descriptive claim about the practice of contemporary analytic philosophy. Instead, a detailed look at the thought experiments shows that uses of the term “intuition” or “intuitively” are better interpreted as an unfortunate verbal tic or as a conversational hedge indicating that a claim is just a snap judgment or a bit of pre-theoretic background. What is not true, he claims, is that the judgments have bedrock epistemological status, are considered justified without appeals to experience and without inference, that inclinations to believe these judgments tend to be recalcitrant to further evidence, or that these judgments are based on conceptual competence or have a special phenomenology.

Building upon The Origins of Meaning (see previous interview), James R. Hurford‘s The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2) (Oxford University Press, 2012) second volume sets out to explain how the unique complexity of human syntax might have evolved. In doing so, it addresses the long-running argument between (to generalise) linguists and non-linguists as to how big a deal this is: linguists tend to claim that the relevant capacities are unique to humans, while researchers in other disciplines argue for parallels with other animal behaviours. James Hurford sides with the linguists here, but not without giving careful consideration to the status of birdsong, whalesong, and similar systems. Meanwhile, at the other end of the evolutionary process (so far), interest is growing in accounts of human syntax that are incidentally much more gradualist in nature and which invite potential explanation in evolutionary terms. Moreover, the idea of quantitative limits on human processing are being appealed to, in conflict with the tradition view of ‘infinite’ generative capacity. In the second part of the book, Hurford charts a course through this field in order to characterise the ‘target’ of the evolutionary story. Finally, he turns to the process itself, positing a role for the ‘symbolic niche’ in the rapid co-evolution of culture and individual capacities throughout the span of humans’ existence, and considering how grammaticalisation might be responsible for the earliest, as well as the most recent, innovations in human language. In this interview, we touch on many of these topics, and try to situate this work within the history of linguistics. We consider the implications of new trends in linguistic theory and research practice, and look at how evolutionary claims might be validated – or at least shown to be plausible, in the face of residual scepticism. And we discuss whether and when genome research will inform linguistic analysis.

The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book she examines the career of a single Nazi administrator in “the East”, Udo Klusa, in minute detail day by day, week by week, month by month while the Germans were improvising what became known as the “Holocaust.” Klausa was not a big wig; he was a functionary, a part of a (particularly awful) colonial machine. He believed in the Nazi mission to “Germanize” Poland, but he was by no means a “fanatical” Nazi. He followed orders (by our standards horrendous ones), but he did not do so mindlessly. He wanted to build a career, but he was not–apparently–willing to do anything to do so. Fullbrook investigates just how far Klausa was willing to go, what he found acceptable and what he found (or seemed to find) objectionable. It’s a tricky subject because Klausa himself tried to cover his tracks after the war. He seems to have seen that policies he once found quite sensible were, after the war, not so. Fullbrook does a masterful job of using archival sources to show where Klausa’s memory becomes particularly selective. Though it would be too much to call Fullbrook’s portrait of Klausa “sympathetic,” it is certainly both historically and psychologically nuanced and therefore helps us understand his mentality both during the war and after.