Fifty Years Ago in Etc. (Retrospect).

METALINGUISTICS 

The term "metalinguistics" was devised to cover aspects of linguistic science dealing with the relation of linguistic behavior (language) to other human behavior.

It presupposes the thorough formal analysis of a language -- the microlinguistic analysis of its structure. Metalinguistics is dependent upon the existence of this and similarly thorough analyses of such phases of human behavior as patterning in movements, material objects and their uses, philosophical orientation, relations between persons, etc.

Like language, all of these constitute systems of learned and patterned behavior (including the products of behavior), and comprise what anthropologists call the totality of culture. For each society, the total culture and all its subdivisions must be analyzed as closed systems, having no necessary resemblance to or connection with those of any other society.

As yet, metalinguistics is a field whose study is only begun; this is because only now has microlinguistics reached a point where it can furnish complete enough descriptions of languages to establish definite limits between micro- and metalinguistics. Microlinguistics concerns itself only with differential meaning, that is, whether utterance fractions are the same or different. Metalinguistics, however, which may be described as the study of what people talk (or write) about and why, and how they react to it, is concerned with meaning on all levels. Where microlinguistics stops with the consideration of the structure of the sentence, metalinguistics deals also with the organization of sentences into discourse and the relation of the discourse to the rest of the culture.

Whorf anticipated an important phase of metalinguistics -- the analysis of the interrelationships of linguistic structure and those other structurings of experience expressed in language which may be called the world-view of the speakers of a language. It must be realized that the speakers of a language, as members of one culture, are unaware that their system of logic is not "natural" or universal, but is principally the result of this sort of interaction.

HENRY LEE SMITH, JR., AND GEORGE L. TRAGER "FOREWORD TO SPECIAL ISSUE ON METALINGUISTICS"

Students of general semantics who had the privilege of attending the late Alfred Korzybski's lectures and seminars will recall that he urged upon his hearers the reading of material -- especially articles by Benjamin Lee Whorf -- which today constitutes some of the basic literature of what is here called metalinguistics. Korzybski made available to his students reprints of Whorf's articles, and it was due to his influence that Whorf's essay, "Science and Linguistics," was included as a supplementary reading in Hayakawa's Language in Action (1941) and that "Languages and Logic" was included in Lee's anthology, The Language of Wisdom and Folly (1949). The reasons for Korzybski's interest in the comparative study of the structures of different languages are indicated in such passages as the following from his Science and Sanity (1933):

That languages, as such, all have some structure or other is a new and, perhaps, unexpected notion. Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use (pp.59-60).

For no "facts" are ever free from "doctrines": so whoever fancies he can free himself from "doctrines," as expressed in the structure of the language he uses, simply cherishes a delusion, usually with strong affective components (p.87).

We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of semantic reaction and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses on us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us (p.90).

Neither Aristotle nor his immediate followers realized or could realize what has been said here. They took the structure of the primitive-made language for granted, and went ahead formulating a philosophical grammar of this primitive language, which grammar -- to our great semantic detriment -- they called "logic," defining it as the "laws of thought." Because of this formulation in a general theory, we are accustomed even today to inflict this "philosophical grammar" of primitive language upon our children, and so from childhood up imprison them unconsciously by the structure of the language and the so-called "logic," in an anthropomorphic, structurally primitive universe (p.89).

The explicit formulation of the idea that language can have structures different from that which was formally described in Aristotle's "laws of thought" was based principally, in Korzybski's case, on his observation of the fact that the new languages of twentieth century science are as powerful as they are because they escape the limitations of aristotelian (Indo-European) language structure. (1) As he said, "The whole Einstein theory, or any other fundamental scientific theory, must be considered as the building of a new language of similar structure to the empirical facts known at a given date" (p.30). Philipp Frank, in Einstein, His Life and Times (1947), similarly perceived the scientific revolution of the twentieth century as a linguistic revolution: "Einstein's relativity of time is a reform in semantics, not in metaphysics." Studying as he did the (largely unconscious) linguistic determinants of human behavior, Korzybski was impressed by the degree to which traditional habits of thought, based on tradi tional Western language structure, stood in the way of adequate problem-solving and adequate evaluation.

In order to improve evaluations in social thought as well as in everyday life, Korzybski recommended, therefore, as readers of ETC know, the discipline of making conscious our unconscious (aristotelian) assumptions and becoming acquainted with the possibilities of languages of radically different structure, as in mathematics and mathematical physics. Such a discipline would result, he said, in what he called "consciousness of abstracting," which may be described as the continuing awareness of the degree to which language, in the process of reporting events, imposes its own doctrinal and structural assumptions on the events reported. (2) The individual who is to a high degree conscious of the linguistic and cultural conventions governing his own abstracting processes, Korzybski claimed, is nondogmatic; he is aware of the limitations of his own perceptions and observations and theories; he is able to make allowances for the fact that others may approach events with different backgrounds, hence different abstrac tive systems. Consequently such an individual is more capable than the semantically naive of entering into fruitful communicative interaction with others.

As Professor William G. Leary points out in this issue, such an orientation of evaluative flexibility is exactly the kind of result hoped for by the School of Languages and Linguistics in the training of U.S. foreign service and diplomatic personnel. Hence we can say that metalinguistics and general semantics have quite similar aims. Metalinguistics attempts to do for a relatively specialized group of people, through the study of comparative linguistics, what general semantics tries to do for a larger audience through the study of the methodological and linguistic assumptions underlying modern science.

Metalinguistics and general semantics are alike too in being simultaneously descriptive (in the usual scientific sense) and prescriptive (in that the facts described have implications for education, policy, and action that are virtually impossible to ignore). True, the general semanticists are overtly, and sometimes urgently, prescriptive -- perhaps to the peril of their scientific reputation; while the metalinguisticians tend not to talk about the prescriptive implications of their findings (see Smith and Trager's statement above). Nevertheless, basic to metalinguistics is the perception that failure to take into account differences of language structure and other linguistic and cultural differences leads to distortions and failures of communication. The fact that metalinguistics is being used as it is in the training program of the Foreign Service Institute for the improvement of international communication is evidence that students of metalinguistics are not unaware of the practical and prescriptive implic ations of their discipline.

Sober students of linguistic science have often been critical of general semantics as being not firmly enough grounded in modern linguistics. On the other hand, students of general semantics have often been critical of linguistic scholarship as being over-preoccupied with the sounds of language, vowel changes, morphology, and descriptive grammar (i.e. "microlinguistics") to the exclusion of any apparent concern with the relations of language to human thought and action.

That there should be these imperfect sympathies between linguistic science and general semantics is hardly a matter for surprise: the two disciplines have different origins and different histories. But in their interest in the area of inquiry here adumbrated under the term "metalinguistics," students of linguistic science and of general semantics meet on common ground and arrive at remarkably similar conclusions. It is the hope of the Editors that this issue of ETC will mark the beginning of a closer relationship between the two disciplines, to the mutual correction and enrichment of both.

S. I. HAYAKAWA, "FOREWORD TO SPECIAL ISSUE ON METALINGUISTICS"

NOTES

(1.) "The term 'aristotelian' as used by Korzybski can be translated 'Indo-European' for most purposes, the name of Aristotle being used largely because he was, and remains, foremost in making explicit the structural implications underlying our common Western linguistic heritage, and therefore foremost also in introducing order into Western thought. ... The term 'non-Indo-European,' however, cannot be substituted for Korzybski's 'non-aristotelian,' since historic non-IE languages carry as many (although probably different) conscious or unconscious primitive metaphysical, prescientific, and animistic assumptions as IE languages -- possibly more."

(2.) For example, the sentence "It rains" imposes a division of actor and action upon an event in which there is no such division; the sentence "The grass is green" attributes a (verbally detachable) "quality," greenness, to a "substance," grass. Out of such accidents of linguistic structure arise many of the "problems" of philosophy.

It needs but half an eye to see in these latter clays that science, the Grand Revelator of modern western culture, has reached, without having intended to, a frontier. Either it must bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammelled understanding, or it must become, in Claude Houghton's expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past. The frontier was foreseen in principle very long ago, and given a name that has descended to our day clouded with myth. That name is Babel. For science's long and heroic effort to be strictly factual has at last brought it into entanglement with the unsuspected facts of the linguistic order. These facts the older classical science had never admitted, confronted, or understood as facts. Instead they had entered its house by the back door and had been taken for the substance of Reason itself.

What we call "scientific thought" is a specialization of the western Indo-European type of language, which has developed not only a set of different dialectics, but actually a set of different dialects. These dialects are now becoming mutually unintelligible. The term "space," for instance, does not and cannot mean the same thing to a psychologist as to a physicist. Even if psychologists should firmly resolve, come hell or high water, to use space" only with the physicist's meaning, they could not do so, any more than Englishmen could use in English the word "sentiment" in the meanings which the similarly-spelled but functionally different French utterance le sentiment has in its native French.

Now this does not simply breed confusions of mere detail that an expert translator could perhaps resolve. It does something much more perplexing. Every language and every well-knit technical sub-language incorporates certain points of view and certain patterned resistances to widely divergent points of view. This is especially so if language is not surveyed as a planetary phenomenon, but is as usual taken for granted, and the local, parochial species of it used by the individual thinker taken to be its full sum. These resistances not only isolate artificially the particular sciences from each other; they restrain the scientific spirit as a whole from taking the next great step in development -- a step which entails viewpoints unprecedented in science and a complete severance from traditions. For certain linguistic patterns rigidified in the dialectics of the sciences -- often also embedded in the matrix of European culture from which those sciences have sprung, and long worshipped as pure Reason per se -- hav e been worked to death. Even science senses that they are somehow Out of focus for observing what may be very significant aspects of reality, upon the due observation of which all further progress in understanding the universe may hinge.

BENJAMIN LEE WHORF, "LANGUAGE, MIND, AND REALITY"

(First published in 1942 -- Ed)

The concept of metalinguistics as the study of the overall relation of the linguistic system to the other systems of the cultural totality appears to rest at the present time largely on the provocative studies of the late Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf s central thesis is that language is more than a systematic pattern for expressing ideas -- it is, rather, a means of shaping our ideas: "a program and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for the synthesis of his mental stock in trade." A notion as startling as this needs to be restated many different times in many different ways. Whorf does just that.

He argues, for instance, that our deeply-rooted notion that language is merely an incidental process concerned strictly with communication, not with the formation of ideas, is naive. This notion, he says, is based on the assumption that there are universal laws of logic or reason supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe whether they speak Chinese or Choctaw. But, as a student of comparative linguistics, Whorf tells us he found this assumption invalid. Citing his studies of the Hopi Indian language, he argues that, even where the physical evidence is the same, different cultures may derive very different pictures of the universe because of the language pattern in which their ideas come to be formulated. Specifically, he found among the Hopi no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions with which to refer to what Western cultures know as time. Yet, he points out, Hopi is capable of accounting for and describing correctly, in a pragmatic or operational sense, all observable phenomen a of the universe. This absence of the Western time sense, built into our thought patterns by the words we learn, might, ironically, stand one in good stead as he attempts to grapple with the relativity principle of twentieth-century physics. So, Whorf concludes:

Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar and differs, from slightly to greatly, as between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by different grammars. ... The categories and types we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds -- and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it this way -- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.

This idea is further developed in a series of shrewd observations concerning the English language. Wharf cites our practice of dividing most of our English words into two classes -- nouns and verbs -- each with different grammatical and -- watch out -- logical properties. Our language, he points out, thus gives us a bi-polar division of nature. But nature herself is not thus polarized.

If it be said that strike, turn, run, are verbs because they denote temporary or short-lasting, events, i.e., actions, ... why are lightning, spark, wave, eddy ... nouns? They are temporary events. If man and horse are nouns because they are long-lasting and stable events, i.e., things, what then are keep, adhere, extend, project, continue ... doing among the verbs?

In the Hopi language, on the other hand, lightning, wave, flame, etc., are verbs. Whorf thinks it a humbling experience to discover that a few relatively recent dialects of the Indo-European language family and the rationalizing techniques elaborated therefrom are not necessarily the apex of the evolution of the human mind.

WILLIAM G. LEARY, "STUDIES IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN THE TRAINING OF FOREIGN SERVICE PERSONNEL: THE SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS OF THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMEAT OF STATE"

... it is well to distinguish the various types of knowledge. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of knowledge, the perceptual and the conceptual. Take a table or a chair for instance. It can be touched and perceived directly. This is perceptual knowledge. The uniformity of nature and the idea of a Supreme Being, on the other hand, cannot be verified by the senses, and causality, teleology, and the like are also conceptual in nature. It may be noted that perceptual knowledge cannot be outside the conceptual, nor can conceptual knowledge be separated from the perceptual. As a matter of fact, any conceptual knowledge contains perceptual elements and vice versa. The differentiation between the two is always for the mere convenience of discussion. They do not exist separately.

The kind of knowledge treated in this essay, it will be seen, is not perceptual but conceptual knowledge. In so far as the conceptual guides the perceptual, the importance of the former surpasses that of the latter. This point is often neglected by the empiricists, but from the standpoint of cultural history it is desirable to have it emphasized.

Conceptual knowledge is also interpretative in nature. By interpretation we understand the manipulation of concepts and the employment of categories. For instance the apprehension of a flower is a perception, but it is an interpretation to say that flowers are derived from leaves, or that the formation of the flower is for the purpose of reproduction. In an interpretation of this kind at least the following concepts are being used: any event must have its antecedent; each change must have its cause; and, the final result in a concept of evolution is so much the more derived from interpretation. Therefore, interpretative knowledge, because it contains concepts and results in concepts, is conceptual knowledge. The manipulation of concepts is for the purpose of interpreting perceived facts. Thus, it is evident that conceptual knowledge is interpretative knowledge, and interpretative knowledge is theoretical knowledge.

CHANG TUNG-SUN, "A CHINESE PHILOSOPHER'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE"

As the distance of the feeding stations is moved out farther, somewhere between 50 and 100 meters, the round dance is replaced by the wagging-dance, which tells not only of the presence of food but that it is far from the hive. The vigor of the dance indicates the abundance of the food; the greater the vigor, the greater the number of bees sent out. The distance is directly related to the number of turns of the dancer's body that are made in a given time. The direction of movement of the bee's body in the straight part of the wagging dance indicates the direction of the feeding place with reference to the sun. Since this direction shifts gradually through the day, the dancing bee within the hive must remember this direction of flight and translate its angle in relation to the sun into the same angle to the force of gravity. For within the hive the dancing bee cannot see the sun and must perform on a vertical honeycomb. The bees aroused by the dance must recognize the angle of the dance relative to gravity and must later translate it into angle of flight with reference to the sun. The question then arises: What happens on a cloudy day when the sun is completely obscured? Apparently bees are able to analyze the polarization of light coming to them from any part of the sky, so that even when they cannot see the sun they can perceive in the sky something which is dependent upon the sun's position in the sky.

One's first reaction to all of this is that the lower animals are indeed capable of a greater complexity of behavior than we have dared to imagine. But we may also consider whether some of our own communicative behavior requires as many brain cells as we like to pretend.

We do not know of any creature other than man and the bee which is able to communicate such abstract information as distance or direction. But as a result of von Frisch's work we are now obliged to look for other examples in the animal kingdom: first, among the other social insects such as ants and termites, and then among the gregarious birds and mammals.

There is no evidence that bees transmit their experiences to the next generation and, therefore, they cannot have a "culture." All improvement in behavior in worker bees must, of course, be transmitted only through the drones and queen (because the workers are sterile). It is not known in detail how the queen transmits the "language" to new workers. Presumably the behavior is transmitted as an inherited behavior pattern.

There are not, we believe, any "lessons" to be learned from the bees. Man's behavior, with few exceptions, is learned behavior. The behavior of the bee, with few exceptions, is instinctive or unlearned. Bees have a small and relatively simple brain with only a few thousands of nerve cells. As far as we know, the bee cannot carry on complex reasoning, yet as we have seen, has evolved a system for communicating some kinds of abstract information. With nine billion brain cells for his use, how much more may we expect of man!

REVIEW BY RALPH AND MILDRED BUCHSBAUM OF BEES: THEIR VISION, CHEMICAL SENSES, AND LANGUAGE BY KARL VON FRISCH 

APROPROS of Martin Maloney's article, "The Unknown God: The Demonology of American Broadcasting" in our Winter 1952 issue, the following remarks by Edgar Dale in the January 1951 issue of The Newsletter of the Bureau of Educational Research, Ohio State University, are especially interesting: "We must avoid using the word public as though it were one entity. There is a difference between the public which listens to a soap opera and the public which listens to a symphony. Furthermore, a program may have a large audience and still be a minority audience. ... The audience for the suds serials, for example, is about one-fourth of the women available. It is a minority audience. The number of people who attend any single A-feature film is 13 to 15 million. Five-sixths of the market is not tapped for that particular picture. Comic strips as a whole may have a majority audience, but the percentage who look at any one strip is likely to be a minority. We should, therefore, speak only about giving certain publics what t hey want."

WRITING in the March-April issue of Northwest Architect, William Gray Purcell, who with Frank Lloyd Wright and George Elmslie served his apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan, states a philosophy of architecture which would seem to make sense from a general semantics point of view: "Today's design, as an esthetic communication, seems aware only of the experience of seeing.... Architecture should be held accountable for a free fabric carrying the whole idea of the building and all its functions, physical, mechanical, social, mental and moral as it moves in space, time and mind. We need buildings which are sympathetically conscious of people-in-satisfying-activity. ... I propose that you substitute for static esthetics a philosophy of forms in a constantly changing development continuum shaped by action-meaning. Such a fluid concept would anticipate total grasp by even the simplest people. Everyone could thereby come with perfect naturalness to understand and be grateful for an expanding and enriched folk life."

THE ADDISON GALLERY of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., has extended until September 30 [1952] its exhibition "The NAKED TRUTH and Personal Vision" because of its strong popular interest. Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr., the director, writes: "The purpose of the exhibition is to examine methods of communication in terms of the ideas which are to be communicated and I believe readers of ETC. who may be coming to New England during the summer months would be interested in examining the technique." Starting with a variety of nudes, including the nudes of popular pinup art, the exhibition shows the variety of ways in which different artists abstract from their visual experience. After a consideration of style "as a means of stating the nature of the truth which is personally envisioned," the exhibit turns its attention to the relations between the visual arts and literature and music. Some 80 items, selected from a variety of styles and epochs placed in unexpected juxtaposition, constitute the exhibition. Mr. Hayes says he will be especially interested in the comments of readers of ETC who may drop in to see the show.

DATES AND INDEXES