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Title: The Language Connection: Philosophy and Linguistics (Bristol Introductions) by Roy Harris, Ray Monk ISBN: 1-85506-498-7 Publisher: Saint Augustine's Pr Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Review of Harris, The Language Connection
Comment: Review of Harris, The Language Connection

While I was reading this book and becoming more exasperated by the minute, I learned that Roy Harris had referred to Chomskyan linguistics in a 1997 publication as "cloud-cuckoo-land," and I felt justified in being nearly as coarse myself at the outset of this review. But by the end of the book one finds that Harris is perfectly sane. After all, his earlier work was eminently sensible and even long overdue; I think especially of _The Language Myth_ (1981) and _Reading Saussure_ (1987).

What Harris lacks is not sanity nor even brilliance, but simply knowledge of, or even distanced respect for, that concern of philosophy known as metaphysics. Although Anglo-American philosophy has labored long under the illusion that metaphysical questions can be treated as language questions (and thus join or at least sidle up to the natural world as "observables"), this has turned out to be a failure, and it is this failure that Harris unknowingly explores. Firmly seated in the house he is burning down, Harris regularly uses the term "metalinguistics" where we expect "metaphysics" and uses the latter term only in its all-too-modern dyslogistic sense, taking it to mean something like "mysticism."

Here is Harris's position in a nutshell (and if it seems a bit sophomoric in the nutshell version you are welcome to buy and read the book). Speech is a human activity, wherein real speakers say real things to each other in various real contexts. But over the last 2500 years, both grammarians/linguists and philosophers have treated a language as a system which exists "all by itself," a system which speakers "use" when they produce speech. Thus the grammarian/linguist has his "words" and "sentences" and the philosopher has his "terms" and "propositions." This is what Harris calls "the segregational approach" to language -- language "decontextualized" -- and in his view we should get rid of it, or at least be aware of the "metalinguistic illusions" into which it leads us. The segregational approach, according to Harris, is historically due to the reification of linguistic objects as an educational strategy by grammarians and philosophers in order to stake out domains of inquiry. Thus it is both contingent and "parochial" in origin, and therefore quite arbitrary.

At the end of Chapter 4 Harris writes: "the use of metalinguistic predicates like 'true' and 'false' (or their relatives in other languages) does not reduce to a simple matter of assessing whether what someone says is the case actually is the case. For that way of putting it already assumes that what is the case is independently given." (Well, yes.) He adds, "And that too is a metalinguistic presupposition." It is, of course, a metaphysical presupposition.

Probably Harris's most provocative remark is on p 30: speaking of the shift from the grammarian's "sentence" to the philosopher's "proposition" he writes: "No theorist in the Western tradition has so far managed to tackle it successfully." That "successfully" saves him, for philosophers have indeed noticed that while for Plato language was a reliable guide to metaphysics (to use the formulation of Paul Vincent Spade), for Aristotle it was not. (It is difficult to see a basis in language for substantial form.) It is no surprise that some have regarded recent philosophy, especially in the Anglo-American analytic vein, as essentially Platonic.

As might be expected in an all-too-modern book, we find the claim that our metalinguistic framework is culture-bound. So here we find an abundance of terms like "Western grammar," "Western eyes," "the Western syllogism," "Western logic," "Western habits of thought." (One wonders why in such writing one never finds "Western computer" or "Western mathematics" or "Western science" - actually there is a very shocking revelation to be made: almost all of what Harris calls "Western" is now for all practical purposes universal.) Various examples, from imaginary to real, of alternative metalinguistic frameworks are given in support of this idea. For some eight pages it is suggested that "a white horse is not a horse" would make sense to a Chinese of the Ming Chia school, though it does not to us, _not_ because it really doesn't make sense, but because we are Westerners. Yet Harris claims he is not a cultural relativist. He is merely making us aware of our illusions.

Of course the fact is that all this stuff that is supposed to be "culture-bound" has taken root in quite a few rather different cultures since ancient Greece. Harris fails to see the actual connections among reified language, logic, and mathematics which have turned out to be experientially valid throughout the late history of civilization. "Brutes abstract not," I believe Locke wrote somewhere.

Finally, there is the inevitable self-reversal. Harris could not have written his book without assuming the very metalinguistic framework he professes to find unjustified. The author bravely parries this, saying that a reader who makes this point has misunderstood his intent: he does not say we should stop playing the "game" but should merely avoid letting it lead us into "metalinguistic illusions." (p 148) But in fact, Harris does not merely "play the game" but explicitly uses metalanguage in order to construct his own specific arguments. An excellent example is the argument about "what is meant" by the calling of a name in a roll call (p 155). Very much like Hobbes, who in speaking about the untrustworthiness of sense perception, acknowledged that only sense perception itself can reveal this.

Why four stars? Because Harris as a whole is a linguist to be reckoned with, and because when you extract his arguments and put them as clearly as possible, you can (I hope) see why we need metaphysics. If you don't like the sound of "metaphysics" be of good cheer. Most of what this book presents as devastating critique could be cleared up with one perfectly ordinary concept from the methodology of science, one which appears not once in this entire work: "theoretical construct."

Ken Miner