The Linguistics Wars

I am way too heartbroken right now by the loss of this book, which not only was Margery Fee's and will cost me $$$ to replace, but was chock-full of my thesis notes, now lost, to boot. But I will say that while Harris seems inexplicably uncritical in his support of the generativist project, and comes down hard on the Bloomfieldians--whose work, contrary to the harsh hacking on them as unscientific and uninteresting that Chomsky and assorted hangers-on did in the '60s, was nothing less than the linguistic equivalent of providing a last precious record of endangered species before their extinction--seemingly in the pursuit of nothing more than a compelling narrative, the book is still a joy to read ("And lo, in the East, Chomsky arose"), shows a strong hold on all these syntax issues combined with the ability to translate them to the layman (the secret ability or shibboleth of the English scholar is or should be the ability to explain anything to anyone, as far as I'm concerned), and provides a gripping (!) history of the split between Chomsky and the generative semanticians (Lakoff, Postal, Ross, McCawley, etc.) over whether meaning was generative (ordered by structures on the brain and thus systematizable and reducible to a schema in the same way as syntax) that left me not disappointed that the focus was on some internecine generativist thing rather than the split between Chomskyans and Bloomfieldians, or between Chomskyans and Labovians, or Chomsky and Skinner, or Chomsky and Piaget, or Chomsky and Foucault, or Chomsky and William F. Buckley Jr. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEIrZO069Kg&feature=related), or obviously a theme starts to emerge here, and that's one more reason I enjoye this book, because it spends a lot of time on what unnecessarily aggressive shitheads all these generativists were, and how arrogant, and how they thought they owned linguistics, and how they helped set the discourse for the discipline, and in that sense helps me understand that one of the threads of the condition of modern linguistics where (many, but by no means all, but more than in e.g. English or speech science or pro-writing, the other disciplines where I have experience) people seem to be huge dicks a lot of the time and totally ego-driven might be related to Chomsky's massive paradigm-shifting, and more importantly tone-setting,influence on the field.


Now that was a sentence. ( )

I came to this book hoping that Harris would be the Stephen Jay Gould of linguistics: someone who understands the field well, and can explain major ideas in their historical context. Upon reading, though, The Linguistics Wars strikes me more as an academic Homicide: an intimate portrait showing that science is a dirty business done by real, flawed human beings.

Our story begins with Noam Chomsky as a rising star of linguistics and philosophy in the 1950s, and then focuses primarily on the well-established Chomsky c. 1970 and his conflict with a group of former students who broke off to follow a research program called "generative semantics." While the substance of generative semantics and its differences from Chomsky's "interpretive semantics" program do receive some attention, Harris spends far more time on the personal antipathy between Chomsky and the generative semanticists, most notably George Lakoff. I was left with an impression that, whatever the respective merits of the generative and interpretive theories may have been, the actual unfolding of the debate had more to do with personality than with science.

Not that there's anything wrong with that -- necessarily. An early stage of the debate, it seems, was scientifically productive. The dislike that grew between the two camps did inspire its share of nasty ad hominem and polemic, but also caught linguists by their competitive instinct, resulting in some of the field's most original and influential research. With time, though, scientific debate gave way to personal sniping, and eventually, the generative program fizzled and the "wars" faded away.

The moral of the story is that scientific "progress" is largely a product of the culture that the scientists inhabit. (Maybe the comparison of Harris to Gould is not so far wrong, then; see my review of The Mismeasure of Man.) In the case of Chomsky et al. vs. Lakoff et al., that means the culture of research in modern theoretical syntax; and as Harris points out, it's not inaccurate to say that Chomsky, the ultimate victor in the Linguistics Wars, had founded that culture. In a larger sense, though, it also means the culture of the United States in the 1960s and '70s. While Chomsky was (and remains) an outspoken political ultra-liberal, Chomsky-the-academic is deadly serious and strictly authoritarian. (Perhaps he inspired the discussion in Lakoff's Moral Politics of people who are both politically progressive and academically conservative.) Harris contrasts this with a picture of the generative semanticists as academic hippies, bringing the "sex-drugs-rock & roll" counterculture and its collectivist ethos to their way of doing linguistics. Their hypotheses were grand and their failures public; they promised a map of the human mind that, in the end, they could not deliver.

Original post on "All The Things I've Lost"