The “culture of the field”

By the time Thomas Kuhn published the Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, linguists were already debating the possible revolution afoot in their field. Kuhn’s book intensified that debate. In 1962, a panel on the history of linguistics was featured at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Shortly thereafter, the Wenner-Gren Foundation sponsored two more conferences on the history of the discipline that were specifically designed to question the extent to which Kuhn could be applied to an analysis of linguistics over time. In one estimation, the cascade of papers touched off by these meetings bore the unmistakeable imprint of the history of science (Percival, 1990).

The practitioner-historian Dell Hymes underscored this debt to the history of science in a memo that outlined a “statement of purpose” for the second Wenner-Gren conference at the Newberry Library in 1968. The statement reads as follows:

The present situation in the study of the history of linguistics is generally recognized as unsatisfactory. Existing treatments of the subject for the most part do not rise above the level of simple chronicle, or of apologetics for current theories. There are major gaps in basic research and in our knowledge of important periods and schools, due partly to the general limitation of attention to aspects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly to the small number of knowledgeable specialists.

It is of great value to enable scholars with a genuine interest and knowledge in the history of this field to meet, not only to bring them into closer touch with each other, but also to emphasize their connection with the history of science, of which their work is ultimately a part. Such a conference can help to build the ‘culture of the field,’ encouraging co-operation and research.

Hoping to create such a “culture,” the Newberry Conference was intended to do two things. First, Hymes recommended “a general emphasis on developing the study of the history of linguistics as part of the study of the history of science and ideas.” Second, a “special effort” was to be undertaken to “represent the study of non-Western traditions, the pre-nineteenth-century West” and “neglected aspects of the nineteenth century.”

Roman Jakobson Papers, MC-0072, box 5, folder 16. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Distinctive Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

These programmatic remarks are interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, we can see that Hymes was concerned with making linguists’ self-study more inclusive, strongly anticipating recent calls to pluralize the historiography of science. Second, conference participants were incorporating contemporary work in the history of science in an effort to define and legitimate the discipline as a science. This seems important to me because it suggests the extent to which historians of science may have been responsible for helping to delimit that category in the first place.

Dell Hymes to Roman Jakobson, 2 March 1968. Roman Jakobson Papers, MC-0072, box 5, folder 16. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Distinctive Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Roman Jakobson gave the concluding comment at the Newberry conference, a speech that was, by all accounts, a huge success. In a letter to Jakobson dated 2 March 1968, Hymes reflected:

I believe that the dignity and adequacy of a field require that it comprise a serious study of its own history…I have never felt that dream quite realized before; but now, thanks especially to you, I feel that the crucial line has been crossed, that from now on, American linguistics need never be the same in this regard.

What was included in Jakobson’s breakthrough comment? While the bulk of the essay that eventually came out of it is dedicated to a detailed discussion of the speculative grammarians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it concludes with a sharp comment about how these modistae anticipated the Port-Royal grammar of 1660 (Jakobson, [1975] 1985). At stake in the essay, then was Chomsky’s own rediscovery and invocation of the Port Royalists as a justification for his transformational-generative program. Jakobson wrote:

The diffusion of the Grammaire Générale et raisonnée, whether direct or mediate, since its original edition of 1660, was enormous until the first half of the last century, a century which after 1846 put an end to its numerous republications. The temporary aversion and oblivion, linked to the one-sided historical bent which was particularly potent among linguists of the late nineteenth century, found, however, a severe retort in Saussure’s Course of General Linguistics, recorded by his students: La base de la grammaire de Port Royal était beaucoup plus scientifique que celle de la linguistique postérieure…Saussure countered the…negative attitude toward to Port Royalists by a negation of negation, and his unerring flair for the dialectic of scientific advance confronts us with a predictable continuation of this development in the recent fierce discussions, reevaluations, and critical editions of this “traditional” textbook.

Jakobson’s reference to the “fierce discussions, reevaluations, and critical editions” attending the “‘traditional’ textbook” harkens back to Hymes’ concerns about the prevalence of apologetics and narrow foci in the historiography of linguistics.

So what? The Newberry Library conference is significant for me because it raises questions about overlaps between linguistics and the history of science during the second half of the twentieth century—is this best understood as a story of common origins or parallel development? With more specific respect to the universals project, I am currently pursuing the hypothesis that the profusion of historical self-study among linguists during the 1960s and ‘70s can help to explain the pivot from studies of linguistic diversity, which dominated the first half of the twentieth-century American scene, to the prioritization of unifying frameworks in the history of linguistics.

Works cited:

Jakobson, Roman. 1985. “Glosses on the Medieval Insight into the Science of Language.” In Idem, Volume VII Contributions to Comparative Mythology. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 185-198.

Percival, Keith. 1990. “The Past Quarter Century in Linguistic Historiography.” MALC: 262-276.