habitually probing generalist

Thanks to a suggestion from David Bade I have been reading a fair amount of Roy Harris lately.

I have read both The Language Machine and The Language-Makers.

David suggested that I begin with the epilogue to The Language Machine, entitled “Saying Nothing.” It is absolutely brilliant! I then read the book from the beginning and re-read the epilogue when I got to the end. Here’s what I said in my weekly reading “log” of 20-26 May:

Thank you, David!

I must say that the lengthy paragraph on page 172-173 caused me to shudder to the core of my soul both times I read it; even more so the 2nd time having the full impact of the book behind it. I will most certainly be reading much more Harris.

Highly recommended! And do begin with the Epilogue.

As much as I enjoyed these books, they are primarily historical analysis and negative philosophy; i.e., they are critiques of other views and theories of language and linguistics. Responding to a lunch invite with David that I had to miss due to being in Louisville, I told my advisor to tell him this:

I’m just about to finish my 2nd Harris book. You can tell him I’m impressed; but I need to find his “positive philosophy” on linguistics soon. These are more historical and how we got to the situation we’re in/have been in, or more of a “negative philosophy.”

In response I was told to read “Signs, Language and Communication” and the books published since 2002. Also to look at some articles in the journal Language & Communication. There is also a new book coming out soon that looks good, Definition in Theory and Practice: Language, Lexicography and the Law.

Harris’ positive theory is known as integrationism. I find his critiques of other views to be enlightening and wonderful, but I want to look at his positive philosophy before reading much more of the earlier critiques. I imagine I will be reading a lot of Roy Harris’ work; I will be looking for good used copies of the ones I’ve already read to purchase even. They were that good.

Today I picked up both of these, following David’s advice:

Wolf, George and Nigel Love, eds. Linguistics Inside Out: Roy Harris and His Critics. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science. Series IV, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, v. 148. (1997) [Well, this one was on my own advice.]

Harris, Roy. The Linguistics of History. (2004)

I also ordered the following via ILL due to the same:

The Semantics of Science. (2005)

The Necessity of Artspeak: The Language of the Arts in the Western Tradition. (2003)

I also have on hand from my first trip to the stacks a couple of weeks ago:

The Language Myth. (1981)

Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games with Words. (1988)

Lots of good reading ahead.

And this should only go to show folks who think they ought to “school me” that it may even be possible.

As a teaser, here is the paragraph from the epilogue of The Language Machine that causes my soul to shudder (see above):

The mythology of the language machine is the mythology of a technologically advanced society which has not yet come to terms with its own linguistic self-awareness. It is a society whose linguistic capacities and facilities have fast outgrown its comprehension of them. It is a society which looks in the linguistic mirror, does not like what it sees, and consequently shrinks from linguistic responsibilities. The signs of its linguistic insecurity are everywhere. It is a society whose words change meaning as they cross frontiers, and whose frontiers are maintained by governments with a right to mint their own truths which is as well established as their right to print their own postage stamps. It is a semantically bemused society in which aggression is always defence, censorship is always exercised in the interest of free speech, and wars are invariably fought to preserve peace. It is a society which proliferates jargon while deploring it, and cares more about the pollution of its rivers by detergents than about the pollution of its communicational space by detergent advertisements. It is a society whose citizens are told that smoking may damage their health but that nuclear power is safe. Its mass media daily produce verbiage for public consumption on a scale never before seen. It is a society of people who have more language to cope with than they can possibly manage, of people ceaselessly bombarded by words they only partly understand. It is a society in which language is increasingly perceived as untrustworthy, and its untrustworthiness increasingly perceived as being without remedy. The typical neurosis of such a society is logophobia. It worries about words while abusing them. No other society could have numbered Orwell among its intellectual heroes, or enacted legislation to enforce ‘plain language’, or have seen its most popular poet murdered by an admirer who gave as his reason that he understood the words of the poet’s lyrics, but not their meaning. In short, it is a society which fears the linguistic jungle it has created because it knows that in jungles only the law of the jungle prevails (172-3).