New Books in Language

James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers the significance of philology, the study of language, that for centuries was synonymous with humanistic intellectual life. Turner provides a detailed and fascinating study that traces philology’s beginning in Greek and Roman speculation about language and follows it to the early twentieth century. At the library in Alexandria, Greeks speculated about language, invented rhetoric, analyzed texts and created grammar. Roman diffusion and Christian adaptation spread the influence of philology. The medieval scholars kept it alive until the Renaissance when humanist gave it new life only to escape the most toxic aspects of the Reformation. By the nineteenth century, philology covered three distinct modes of inquiry: textual philology included the study of ancient and biblical literature, language theories of origin, and comparative historical studies of structure and language systems. All philologists held to the belief that history was key to understanding the diversity and change in language. Comparative methods and genealogical understanding accompanied historical analysis. These methods applied not only to texts but also to material objects, structures, art, people groups, and eventually became the foundation for the modern disciplines of anthropology, history, art history, linguistics, literary and religious studies we know today. Turner points to the need to reintegrate scholarly erudition away from insular disciplines and recover the expansive and humanistic reach of philology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze? Or slow-moving but inexorable farmers from Anatolia? These are just some of the many possibilities discussed in the scholarly literature. But in 2012, a New York Times article announced that the problem had been solved, by a team of innovative biologists applying computational tools to language change. In an article published in Science, they claimed to have found decisive support for the Anatolian hypothesis. In their book, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis make the case that this conclusion is premature, and based on unwarranted assumptions. In this interview, Asya and Martin talk to me about the history of the Indo-European homeland question, the problems they see in the Science article, and the form that a good theory of Indo-European origins needs to take. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

I must admit that my relationship to philosophy of language is a bit like my relationship to classic literature: I tend to admire it from afar, and rely on the opinions of people who have read it. The danger is that the received wisdom can sometimes be unreliable, for one reason or another, either making something accessible sound rarefied, or making something subtle and elusive sound banal, or both. In his book, Philosophy of Language: the Classics Explained (MIT Press, 2015), Colin McGinn sets out to demystify some of the classic and much-cited texts in philosophy of language, and in doing so, also opens up some interesting new angles that tend to get overlooked. In this interview, we talk about the works, their historical context and their (ongoing) reception, and consider how the field has developed and might develop in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both visual and text. But it is not necessarily the ubiquity of screens that has societal implications. The significance is in how screens fundamentally change how we ingest information. In her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford University Press, 2015), Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching, Research & Learning at American University, asserts that despite the benefits of convenience and monetary savings, reading onscreen has many drawbacks. Using surveys of millennials in the United States, Japan and Germany, combined with anecdotes, and information from writers, Baron provides evidence of the impact of technology on reading, and thinking, in society. Just listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify, especially when one examines the output of totalitarian states. In those cases, language and imagery are employed for the purpose of shaping mass opinion, forming group allegiances, constructing worldviews, and securing compliance. It is undeniable that propaganda is employed by liberal democratic states. But it is also undeniable that the use of propaganda is especially problematic in liberal democracies, as it looks incompatible with the democratic ideals of equality and autonomous self-government. It’s surprising, then, that the topic of propaganda has gone relatively unexplored in contemporary political philosophy. In How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015), Jason Stanley develops an original theory of propaganda according to which propaganda is the deployment of an ideal against itself. Along the way, Stanley distinguishes various kinds of propaganda and explores the connections between propaganda, ideology, stereotypes, and group identities. Stanley’s central thesis is that propaganda poses an epistemological problem for democracy, as propaganda is the vehicle by which false beliefs are disseminated and opportunities for knowledge are closed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

A colleague once told me that people in linguistics could be divided into two groups: sheep and snipers. I’m not sure whether this is a proper dichotomy – it’s certainly not quite canonical – but whether it is or not, Pieter Seuren is an example of a linguist who is most emphatically not a sheep. His book From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the Theory of Language (Oxford UP, 2013) develops a number of themes concerning aspects of language that are problematic for existing theories, and yet have been accidentally (he stresses) overlooked in the recent intellectual history of the field. Adopting a broadly universalist standpoint, he is critical of approaches that reject the idea of even looking for generalisations and unity, but he is also critical of many aspects of the programmes that have attempted to find order in language. This is not a book that many people will agree with from cover to cover, but it is one that persuasively challenges much of the accumulated “wisdom” of any given school of linguistic thought. I hope this interview gives some idea of the breadth and depth of the undertaking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

It is generally accepted that lying is morally prohibited. But theorists divide over the nature of lying’s wrongness, and thus there is disagreement over when the prohibition might be outweighed by competing moral norms.There is also widespread agreement over the idea that promises made under conditions of coercion or duress lack the moral force to create obligations. Finally, although free speech is widely seen as a primary value and right, there is an ongoing debate over the kind of good that free speech is. In Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton University Press, 2014), Seana Shiffrin ties these issues together, advancing a powerful argument regarding the central role that sincerity and truthfulness play in our individual and collective moral lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speech to perform acts such as promising, commanding, judging, pronouncing, and christening. Yet it seems that in order to perform an act of, say, promising, one must have a certain kind of normative status; at the very least, one must be accountable. Similarly, in order to issue a command, one must, in some sense, have the authority to do so. It seems, then, that the power to perform acts by means of speech depends upon the normative status and standing of speakers. In Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking (Oxford University Press, 2014), Terence Cuneo appeals to this fact in devising an original and compelling argument for moral realism. He claims that were it not for the existence of moral facts, we would not be able to perform ordinary speech acts such as promising. As we clearly do perform such acts, there must be moral facts. That’s the simple argument that lies at the heart of Cuneo’s fascinating book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–apes–have only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps don’t have language and, if they have culture, it’s extraordinarily primitive in comparison to the human form. What we have between apes and humans is not really a continuum; it’s a break. So how did this break occur? The answer, of course, is evolutionarily. It stands to Darwinian reason that our distant ancestors must have been selected for symbolic use and cultural production, and it was in this natural selective way that they became human. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it presents us with another puzzle: why is human language and culture so astoundingly complex? In order to prosper in the so-called “era of evolutionary adaptation,” neither needed to have been complex at all. A Hominin with a smallish fraction of the symbolic and cultural abilities of Homo sapiens would easily have emerged (and maybe did emerge) as a completely dominant alpha predator. Imagine, if you will, a chimp that could talk a bit and produce reasonably effective missile weapons. How much selection pressure would such a talking, armed chimp face? Not much, at least from other animals. Such an Hominin would not, ceteris paribus, need to evolve new and more complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms. But complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms did evolve. So, we have to ask, where do Shakespeare and Large Hadron Colliders come from? Daniel Cloud has an answer: domestication. In his fascinating and thought-provoking new book The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal (Columbia University Press, 2014), Cloud argues that over the millennia proto-humans and humans have been selecting mates who were good with symbols and selecting symbols themselves. This process–a kind of runaway sexual selection and domestication–rapidly (in evolutionary time-scales) produced both a huge expensive brain and an ornate culture to match. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

I hope I’m not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary rate it as one of the “major transitions in evolution”, placing it in exalted company alongside the evolution of multicellularity, sociality, sexual reproduction, and various other preoccupations of ours. But the nature of the transition is hotly disputed: is there a sudden shift involving the emergence of complex syntax, or is the process more gradual and socially driven? In his entertaining and approachable volume Speaking Our Minds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Thom Scott-Phillips argues for a different approach. On his view, there is a categorical difference between human language and its precursors, but the critical ingredient is ostensive-inferential communication – that is, the ability to express and recognize intentions – and this underlies the expressive power of language. His view calls for a reappraisal of the role of pragmatics in linguistics, from being a communicatively useful add-on to being much nearer the heart of the enterprise. In this interview, we discuss the motivations and implications of this idea, for both evolutionary and more traditional approaches to linguistics, and we look at how comparative studies of other species – not only great apes, but even bacteria – might tell us something useful about the nature of human communication. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language