Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories: System, Order, Creativity 9789811512544, 981151254X

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Feifei Zhou

Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories System, Order, Creativity

Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories

Feifei Zhou

Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories System, Order, Creativity

Feifei Zhou Department of English Lingnan University Hong Kong, China

ISBN 978-981-15-1254-4    ISBN 978-981-15-1255-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

This book grows out of my PhD thesis which was completed in 2014 at School of English, University of Hong Kong. It would not have been possible without the generous financial support in the form of a 4-year PhD Fellowship provided by Research Grants Council of Hong Kong. I would like to extend my gratitude to Adrian Pablé and Chris Hutton at HKU for intellectual inspiration, illuminating guidance, and generous support throughout my PhD years and beyond. I am truly grateful for the opportunity of having worked with them and benefited from their teaching, the symposiums, and conferences organized by them. They have been excellent supervisor and mentor to cultivate rigorous, imaginative scholarship and foster independent critical thinking. I would also like to express my indebtedness to my teachers in mainland China, where I finished most of my education. My deepest thanks go to Zhu Lei at Shanghai International Studies University for first awakening my interest in linguistics, and to He Gang of East China Normal University for guiding me through an initial academic training. I also thank my colleagues in the Department of English at Lingnan University for their support while writing the book. I am grateful for the help I have received from the editors at Springer at various stages of preparing the manuscript. Two anonymous reviewers made valuable comments on earlier drafts of this book. Lastly, I would like to thank Intellect Books for permission to use material from F. Zhou and X. Zhou, ‘Was Confucius teaching us how to do things with words? Reflections on ethics in language and communication’, Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 9(2). I feel extremely lucky to have the support from my husband Louis in almost every aspect of my life as a working mother at the beginning of her career. For Simon our son I wish for him to, creatively and courageously, navigate his own way through in this multilingual world we brought him into. I dedicate this book to my parents with my deepest love.

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Contents

1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 Part I System and the Individual Speaker 2 Saussure: Langue as an Autonomous System����������������������������������������   13 Two Readings on Langue Versus Parole����������������������������������������������������   19 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 3 Bloomfield: A Grammar System������������������������������������������������������������   27 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   33 4 Chomsky: System and the Ideal Speaker–Hearer��������������������������������   35 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   39 5 Labov: Systemic Variation and Knowledge������������������������������������������   41 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   47 6 Bucholtz and Hall: System and Identity������������������������������������������������   49 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   54 7 Haugen, Mühlhäusler and Mufwene: System and Language Ecology����������������������������������������������������������������������������   55 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 8 Conclusion to Part I ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   67 Part II Social Order 9 From Durkheim to Garfinkel: Social Facts and Social Order������������   71 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   80 10 Garfinkel: Members’ Methods of Producing Order����������������������������   83 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   91 vii

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Contents

11 Case Study������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 Agnes’s Case����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 Breaching Experiments������������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   98 12 Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson: Order in Conversation����������������������   99 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  110 13 Social Order, Rationality and Modernity����������������������������������������������  113 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  116 14 Pragmatics: Order in Speech Acts����������������������������������������������������������  119 Excuses, Abnormal Situation and Communicational Order����������������������  120 Speech Act, Convention, Intention and Rules��������������������������������������������  121 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  129 15 Comparison of Conversation Analysis and Speech Act Theory������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  135 16 Conclusion to Part II ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  137 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  140 Part III Creativity 17 Creativity, Linguistics, and the Skinner–Chomsky Controversy����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  143 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  148 18 Comparing Chomsky, Skinner and Harris: How Are Human Roles Conceptualized?��������������������������������������������������������������  151 Chomsky����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  151 Skinner ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  156 Harris����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  160 Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  163 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  164 19 Comparing Chomsky, Skinner and Harris: What Counts as ‘New’?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167 Chomsky����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167 Skinner ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  170 Harris����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  172 Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  175 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  176 20 Comparing Chomsky, Skinner and Harris: Thoughts on Politics and Human Nature����������������������������������������������������������������  177 Chomsky����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  177 Skinner ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  180

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Harris����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  183 Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  185 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  187 21 Alternative Theories: Creativity, Metaphor and Everyday Conversation��������������������������������������������������������������������  189 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  195 22 Creativity, Machines and Posthumanism����������������������������������������������  197 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  209 23 Conclusion to Part III������������������������������������������������������������������������������  213 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  218 24 Conclusion������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  221 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  228 Name Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  229 General Index ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  231

About the Author

Feifei  Zhou  is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, where she teaches Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics. In 2014, Zhou received her PhD in Linguistics and the History of Ideas from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include the history of linguistics, health discourses, and linguistic landscapes.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

What is the relation between the individual speaker and language? How is social order possible? And where do we get our linguistic creativity?—These are the three questions which are fundamental to our understanding of language and human nature. That mainstream linguistics as practiced by linguists and taught as a course, with its many sub-disciplines and extended disciplines, tends to lose sight of these enquiries should not obliterate the fact that these questions were originally posed by three trailblazing theorists, Ferdinand de Saussure, Harold Garfinkel and Noam Chomsky, at crucial points of language research in the twentieth century. By refocusing on these three important themes, linguistic system and the individual speaker, social order, linguistic creativity, this book attempts to investigate how language theorists conceptualize human beings and how their theorizings are intimately linked with methodological dilemmas of linguistics as a discipline. It seems especially relevant to gain a solid and contextual understanding of models of the human in linguistics when calls to embrace posthumanist ideas both within and outside linguistics are increasingly heard these days. Linguistics is a discipline dedicated to the scientific study of language. Language itself, however, is an object of concern shared by other disciplines, such as literature, literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and law—a list which covers most disciplines in human sciences. Moreover, in their daily lives, lay people find themselves constantly negotiating meaning and achieving understanding. Saussure, commonly taken to be the founding father of modern linguistics, was the very first to offer a solution to the study of language, which as a phenomenon is ‘at the same time physical, physiological and psychological’ and ‘belongs both to the individual and to society’ (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 25). The solution was to make the linguistic system object of study for linguistics and carry out research within this autonomous discipline. Since then, linguists have contributed a series of analytic frameworks and tools to better describe and theorize the workings of language. The questions are: After so many years of development, what do linguists bring onto the table in our understanding of language and the human? How can lay people be instructed by linguistics? Two disciplines which are © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_1

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1 Introduction

i­mmediately of interest for us to consider the status of linguistics are applied linguistics and literary criticism. Applied linguistics, as implied in the name, means ‘the application of linguistic theories’—a definition used by those linguists who wish to maintain a seamless relation between linguistics and applied linguistics: for them, applied linguistics is not significantly different from linguistics—it is simply ‘linguistics outside the library or study’ (Davies, 1999, pp. 3–4). Other views argue that linguistics has no role in applied linguistics or linguistics should be treated as a component of applied linguistics which ‘extends from theoretical studies of language to practical concerns with language in the classroom and elsewhere’ (ibid.). Behind these divergent views concerning the status of linguistics and applied linguistics lies a shared recognition of two different kinds of linguistic research, i.e. one with a formalist concern of linguistic description and modeling, the other with a more engaged role in addressing social and institutional problems in which language is a central issue. Then where does linguistics actually stand in terms of these two? As to the discipline of literary criticism, Fish (1980, p. 98) discusses the disagreements of literary criticism and linguistics about the study of literature. Linguists believe that their categories such as phonemes, stresses, morphemes and syntactical patterns, which describe the workings of language, will eventually be relevant to the critical act of reading literature because in their eyes literature is, after all, language. Yet, literary critics maintain that in linguists’ gaze of literature, a  literary work ‘ceases to be a literary work and “becomes” a piece of language merely’ and linguistics cannot be treated as literary criticism (Schwartz, 1970, p. 184). These discussions point to an urgent need to understand the practices and nature of linguistics as a discipline: How does it come to terms with real-world social problems? Why is it thought to be unfit to study literature? Where does it stand in relation to other disciplines? The development of linguistics in the twentieth century can be characterized as the empirical study of language within an autonomous scientific discipline. However, this endeavor confronted many difficulties brought about by the tension between the recognition that language is a phenomenon inseparable from individual speakers, culture, communities, society, history, politics and an explicit need to objectify language as an observable entity. Linguists’ efforts to answer the three questions introduced in the beginning are illustrative of this inherent tension: whether to emphasize the situatedness of every individual’s language use and their efforts of making meaning and maintaining order or to postulate the existence of a universal system which guarantees determinate meaning and understanding; whether to define linguistic creativity as the ability to understand and produce infinite grammatical sentences or to consider every speech act which requires contextualizing efforts as creative—these choices also directly shape the positioning of linguistics between the human sciences and the natural sciences. In the past century, the aspiration to build a science of linguistics in the fashion of the natural sciences, which aims to carry out neutral and objective study of language as a social entity or a biological organ, has been shared by most linguists. For example, Chomskyan linguistics, as the most prominent representative within formal linguistics, entirely decontextualizes language from its usage by studying an innate language faculty

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which issues linguistic creativity. A group of scholars working within history of linguistics, language and ideologies such as Roy Harris, John Joseph, Talbot Taylor and E. F. Koerner seek to challenge this so-called objectivity and neutrality of linguistics. For example, Koerner (2004, p. 21) makes a distinction between two kinds of ideologies in examining language theories: one is ‘state-sponsored ideologies’, and the other is ‘usually unspoken culturally-derived presuppositions and prejudices that may underlie more or less all opinions and all research activities’. For him, Hutton (1999) provides a good example which examines how implicit ideologies sponsored by linguistic enquiries interlock with state-sponsored ideologies. From a broader perspective, this line of thought is consistent with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism as shown in the following quotation: My book is that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis (from which present-day Orientalism derives) can be understood, not as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the Orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism. (Said, 1978, p. 122)

Said draws our attention to the disguised structures inherited from Western religious and philosophical traditions which run behind so-called ‘objective knowledge’ about the Orient. In Joseph Errington’s book Linguistics in a Colonial World, the knowledge about non-Western languages in colonial times is put under the same critical light. By tracing how linguists in colonial periods contributed to the establishment of power and legitimized authority in dealing with unfamiliar languages through adapting and exploiting familiar linguistic categories (Errington, 2008, p. 4), Errington highlights the interaction between linguistic categories and other projects in the same historical period. He attempts to examine ‘how linguists’ work had meanings and uses which outstripped their own purposes and understandings, taking on lives of their own when, as texts, they circulated among different readers in different societies, and served different projects’ (2008, p. 12). Hutton makes a similar observation: ‘the idealizations of linguistics might be seen as a harmless form of conceptual clarification or idealization; but they can be linked to socio-­ political reality in politically radical ways’ (1999, p. 8). This reflexive attitude which aims to display ideological implications of linguistics by investigating how it was situated in specific historical and political circumstances, no doubt, finds Chomskyan linguistics inadequate. For example, when discussing examples of postcolonial contact with speakers of endangered languages, Errington expresses doubts about Chomskyan linguistics’s concern of a panhuman ‘language faculty’: ‘the progressive flattening of linguistic diversity in a globalizing world will make the field’s investment in the universal properties of “Language”, rather than in individual languages, seem increasingly solipsistic (2008, p. 169)’. These works on the one hand historically situate linguistics within broader intellectual and political milieus, and on the other hand suggest an urgent need to ‘deconstruct’ the contained ‘solipsistic’ enquiry performed in formal linguistics. In agreement with this line of critique, my book, by closely examining the analytical frameworks and categories contributed by linguists to the study of the above-­

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mentioned three themes, which provide a revealing perspective to investigate the theoretical tensions in linguistics, seeks to further problematize the autonomous, scientific and ideologically neutral status of linguistics as is proclaimed within the discipline. In addition to these insights gained from scholarly works, my project is also very much influenced by the understanding that every human science theorist, while working as, for instance, a linguist, an anthropologist, a literary critic, is nevertheless also embedded in the lay world. In their daily living and researching activities, they produce, spread and contest the use of categories. To use Harvey Sacks’s example: ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’ (1974, p. 216), hearers of this sentence will most likely understand ‘the mommy’ as the mommy of the mentioned baby though alternative readings are also possible. Why is that the case? Instead of attributing this understanding to the meaning inherent in the two sentences, Sacks draws our attention to shared categorizations among social members such as family, mother and baby. In the words of Stanley Fish, ‘[…] the determination (of relation and significance) is the work of categories of organization—the family, being a student—that are from the very first giving shape and value to what is heard and seen’ (Fish, 1980, p. 334). This predetermines that theorists are already within the world recognizing, seeing, naming and writing about the world though they tend to take the perspective of a Martian1 who sees the world for the first time, like what Sacks meant by ‘feigning ignorance’ (observed to be existing among his students): I found in these papers that people will occasionally say things like, ‘I didn’t really know what was going on, but I made the inference that he was looking at her because she’s an attractive girl.’ So one claims to not really know. And here’s a first thought I have. I can fully well understand how you come to say that. It’s part of the way in which what’s called your education here gets in the way of your doing what you in fact know how to do. And you begin to call things ‘concepts’ and acts ‘inferences’, when nothing of the sort is involved. And that nothing of the sort is involved is perfectly clear in that if it were the case that you didn’t know what was going on—if you were the usual made-up observer, the man from Mars—then the question of what you would see would be a far more obscure matter than in that she was an attractive girl, perhaps. How would you go about seeing in the first place that one was looking at the other, seeing what they were looking at, and locating those features which are perhaps relevant? (1992, p. 83)

In a similar way, linguists, in their study of language as a designated object, have to take on the double roles of ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’ at the same time: ­sometimes they will go about seeing in the first place that people are talking to each other in a certain language (certain languages) then feigning that they do not understand what they are saying to each other until the analysis of their linguistic tran-

 A Martian is one of Chomsky’s favorite examples. He invites us to imagine ‘a Martian scientist who studies human beings from the outside, without any prejudice. Suppose that he has a great deal of time at his disposal, say, thousands of years’ (Chomsky, 1977). He goes on to hypothesize that the Martian scientist on observing the uniqueness of human species in many respects, will eventually seek to ‘determine the genetically fixed mental structures which underlie the unique achievements of this species’ (ibid.). By invoking this science-fiction-like example, Chomsky tries to lend force to his arguments about the existence of an innate language faculty in human species. 1

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scriptions proves that they actually share the same linguistic system, both speakers and researchers. By feigning ignorance, that is, adopting ‘a completely man-fromMars attitude toward any language he analyses and describes’ (Nida, 1949, p. 1), researchers prioritize the task of locating an objectively existing system whose function does not depend on the embodied existence of both the speaker and hearer, their interpersonal relations, their situatedness in time and space—or the simple act of ‘perceiving someone doing something’. Ignoring these contextual vicissitudes of researchers’ activities, this Martian stance adopted by linguists in investigating language will, undoubtedly, create methodological dilemmas. Drawing on these two sources of insights, this book on the one hand situates linguists’ work in the greater intellectual and ideological landscape with the goal of breaking down its proclaimed autonomy as a neutral scientific discipline; on the other hand it underlines the double roles of linguistic theorists in the everyday social world and examines the tensions resulting from this situation. To a certain extent, the stance I adopt in the book can be analogized to one of ‘feigning ignorance’ of linguistics as a discipline in that I observe the discipline from outside and seek to understand it by first rendering its practices ‘strange’ and ‘problematic’. The purpose lies in gaining a critical space where the priority is not to pass judgment on the theorists but try to understand them. To achieve this, under each theme I will analyze the texts of a group of theorists and reveal the efforts they have made in tackling a certain theme and the difficulties they have encountered. As I will elucidate, their similarities and differences in theorizing cut through major dilemmas in twentieth-­century linguistics such as abstraction and particularity, linguists’ reification and lay categories, systems of knowledge and contextualization.2 The book will be organized as follows. In the first part, I will study the theme of ‘system and the individual speaker’. All the linguists under discussion are landmark linguists of the twentieth century. The way I read them concentrates on their similar take on the relation between the linguistic system and the individual speaker. In all these theories, individual speakers are thought to be sharing a certain system of language (or communication), which explains their knowledge about language and the social meaning of language. The argument I put forward is that this system view of language strongly limits linguists’ capacity to address important topics concerning the individual speaker, especially their creative agency in meaning-making and the lay practices which contribute to the regularity and stability of languages.

 These dilemmas are also shared by anthropology in its study of other human societies, their cultural and linguistic systems. The difference, however, lies in that anthropology is more vulnerable than linguistics because these dilemmas confront them more immediately (when abstract models break down in the face of diverse living realities) while in linguistics, the documentation of linguistic data and systematization of linguistic systems give an impression that languages are in the end systems of sound-meaning units. That also partly explains why anthropology experienced a major representation crisis in the 1960s while a similar crisis in linguistics has remained untouched until recently. 2

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1 Introduction

Most of these linguists under discussion are pursuing research within a properly defined scientific discipline of linguistics and they espouse the view that linguistics takes descriptions of language systems and linguistic variations as its goal. As the founding father of modern linguistics, Saussure is largely concerned with theoretical abstractions given that his project can be understood as the carving out of a field for linguists to work on, namely, the study of an autonomous linguistic system constituted of interdependent language units, which as a whole resides in a language community. The problem faced by later linguists in studying this system is: where can we locate this system? In structural linguistics developed by Leonard Bloomfield, this system is taken to be an objectively existing grammar system composed of recurrent units waiting to be described. It is implied that as long as linguists can provide a structural description of the grammar, the linguistic system will thus be located and later be projected back to the community as a communicational system shared by its members. Structural linguistics, by endorsing the notion of ‘system’ as a contained, fixed grammar system shared by the community, fails to examine the whole set of lay practices (and the practices of writing) which contribute to the ‘regularity’ observed in language and grammar. Chomskyan linguistics, though commonly perceived to be a revolution against Bloomfieldian linguistics, will be revealed in this part as an extension of structuralism and upon analysis I will demonstrate how the system view of language perseveres in his theory in the form of a biological organ. In comparison, Labovian linguistics, together with recent developments in sociolinguistics, attempts to link up a system view of language with observed variations in language. I will point out that their theories require the existence of a predetermined model of individual speakers, in which their agency and creativity are largely restricted. In the end, I will critically examine a new school of linguistic research called ecology of language, represented by Einar Haugen, Paul Mühlhäusler and Salikoko S. Mufwene. These authors, by highlighting the links between biodiversity and linguistic diversity, challenge the view that languages are autonomous, contained systems with clear boundaries and encourage a dynamic perspective to look at language contact and language change with special emphasis on the role of individual speakers. Based on detailed textual analysis, I will argue that their understanding of language speakers’ roles is still very much constrained. Overall, this part demonstrates that important issues in understanding the individual speaker such as his/her embedded nature in social–historical settings, his/her situated understanding of language in lay practices, etc. could not be adequately addressed within a system-dominated linguistics. Part II will be devoted to the study of ‘order’. Set against the theorists discussed in Part I, Garfinkel stands out as an anti-system sociologist who explores the possibility of order-production without postulating a system shared in advance among social members. The central idea of his theory, ethnomethodology, stipulates that it is members’ moment-to-moment ongoing activities that produce a shared order. By conducting a detailed study of his theory I argue that an ethnomethodological view on order significantly foregrounds the role of human beings and their reflexive understandings in carrying out mundane activities. However, conversation analysis (hereafter, CA), an approach to the study of language and social interaction inspired

1 Introduction

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by ethnomethodology, implies a mechanistic picture of human interaction due to its over-reification of social members’ order-producing activities. In this part, firstly I will place Garfinkel’s efforts to study social members’ methods in producing and maintaining order at center stage while articulating the links between his theory and Durkheimian sociology, as well as Schultzian phenomenology. Durkheim’s focus on social facts guides Garfinkel to seek concrete and micro social details, which further directs his attention to individual social members’ methods of producing these ‘facts’ and ‘details’. For Garfinkel, these micro processes constitute the texture of social order. Phenomenology on the other hand draws his attention to a new understanding of knowledge which is phenomenologically situated and embedded in hands-on experiences. Drawing upon these two important resources, Garfinkel puts forward an image of the social member which is both embedded in real-life activities and reflexive about the accountable nature of his acts. After this, I will examine the working premises of CA and reveal that their problems in systematically modeling human conversation spring from the dilemma faced by social scientists in general, who is at the same time an expert-outsider and a layman-insider. Some strands of CA that seek to scientifically model human conversation, will be revealed in my analysis to be running counter to member-oriented ethnomethodological thinking. Lastly, the links between Garfinkel’s theory and the circumstances of individuals in modern societies will be explored. Overall my discussion underlines that his emphasis on the locally produced order and members’ methods proves relevant to modern man’s circumstances defined by an ever-­growing diversity of roles and identities. Another school which contributes interesting thoughts on language and social order is speech act theory (hereafter, SAT) within the tradition of ordinary language philosophy and pragmatics. SAT offers us valuable insights to consider speech as social action. For J. L. Austin and John Searle, two leading theorists in this school, language is neither a fixed system of codes nor a means of representing states as true or false, instead, it is used by social actors in establishing obligations and relationships, performing social acts in a significant context. Through close examination of central concepts and theoretical constructs within SAT such as ‘convention’, ‘rule’, ‘intentionality’, ‘force’, ‘constitutive rule’ and ‘institutional fact’, I will offer a detailed critique of its take on ‘order’. Different from ethnomethodology which places members’ work as the order-producing and order-maintaining efforts, SAT tends to suggest that it is the rules and conventions that turn physical language behaviors into obligation-inducing speech acts. A detailed comparison of its attempts to locate order in speech acts and the school of CA in conversations is conducted at the end of this part. CA tends to dismiss actors’ intentions while in SAT and pragmatics, this concept occupies a central place. This account of the pragmatic tradition focusing on its discussion of conversational order, intention, norms and rules in comparison with the ethnomethodological tradition will substantiate the discussion of ‘social order’ and highlight the distinctiveness of how it is framed in these two influential schools of thought. In the last part, I will discuss how linguists talk about ‘creativity’. As a fascinating topic for both lay and scholarly debates, ‘creativity’ did not come to the fore-

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1 Introduction

front of linguistics until Chomsky made it the central concern of his generative grammar in the 1960s. His emphasis on ‘creativity’ in linguistic study was tightly linked to his critique of B.  F. Skinner’s thoughts on language behaviors, which according to him, give no space to address the creative aspect of language learning. Drawing on some recent publications, I will review and re-evaluate the Chomsky– Skinner controversy. Chomsky claims to follow the rationalist tradition by upholding the idea that an innate language faculty gives rise to creative language use in human beings. Yet upon closer analysis, I will demonstrate that his emphasis on this human creativity in producing and understanding new sentences is not about creativity at all. On the other hand, Skinner’s avoidance of the use of mental categories (including creativity) will be scrutinized in detail to  demonstrate that his theory, different from commonly presumed to be the case, does leave room for creative behaviors. In addition to addressing the Chomsky–Skinner controversy, I will introduce another author, Roy Harris, whose theory gives a central place to creativity, yet contrasts significantly with both Chomsky’s and Skinner’s versions. In the main part, I will provide a nuanced comparison between Harris, Skinner and Chomsky focusing on three themes: (1) How are human roles conceptualized? (2) What counts as ‘new’? (3) Thoughts on politics and human nature. These comparisons will reveal significant differences between these theories while highlighting similar patterns in their views on linguistic creativity and their political stance. Moreover, by analyzing Ronald Carter’s recent book on creativity in everyday conversation, I demonstrate that his theory is a culmination of the tendency to democratize the notion of ‘creativity’ since the Romantic period by anchoring it in concrete daily conversations. On the whole, I examine linguists’ understanding of creativity as manifested in these four major authors and argue that they can be read contextually as a reaction to the modern crisis surrounding the definition of human being, namely: What makes men different from machines? How is creativity crucial to being human? Following that, through close examination of scholarships in posthumanism, artificial intelligence, robotics, and distributed cognition, I discuss the ‘creative’ acts of machines and distributed systems, and the implications of these new technologies and developments for us to rethink and reflect on human language use. Ways of meaningfully and effectively working with machines in language and communication activities will also be briefly discussed. As an attempt to analyze linguists’ works in the spirit of sociology of knowledge, my book provides a new perspective to look at linguistic texts, which foregrounds their understanding of the human. The main discovery of my enquiry is: the need to objectify language gives rise to a much reduced image of human being characterized by a codified process of communication, a machine model of human behavior and a formalistic understanding of creativity, while more open-ended approaches, by emphasizing human creativity and reflexivity, prove better in capturing situated language use. I will argue for a shift of focus from locating general scientific laws behind the phenomenon of language to underlining the particularity of language use in different situations by individual speakers who have a history and a memory. Failing to consider this highly situated nature of language, mainstream linguistics seeks to anchor communication in a certain shared system of identical units. As I

References

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will argue, this way of looking at human communication only ends up postulating that human beings’ unique language ability comes from their ‘machineness’—a language machine in the brain or access to a language machine shared by the whole community. In the concluding pages, instead of evoking the dichotomy between the human and machines to promote a humanist outlook or fall into an affectless posthumanist world, I will develop some thoughts prioritizing the consideration of human existence as an embedded, dynamic, interactive and open-ended existence in which we speak and write to attune to each other (and non-humans), as well as to our own past and future.

References Chomsky, N. (1977). Empiricism and rationalism. Retrieved May 1, 2019, from https://chomsky. info/responsibility02 Davies, A. (1999). An introduction to applied linguistics: From practice to theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Errington, J. J. (2008). Linguistics in a colonial world: A story of language, meaning, and power. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hutton, C. (1999). Linguistics and the third Reich. London: Routledge. Koerner, E. F. K. (2004). Essays in the history of linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Nida, E. (1949). Morphology: The descriptive analysis of words. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sacks, H. (1974). On the analyzability of stories by children. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology. Harmondworth: Penguin. Sacks, H. (1992). In G. Jefferson (Ed.), Lectures on conversation. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Saussure, F.  D. (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. English version: Saussure, F. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). London: Duckworth. Schwartz, E. (1970). Notes on linguistics and literature. College English, 32(2), 184–190.

Part I

System and the Individual Speaker

1.1  Introduction This part looks into the theme of ‘system and the individual speaker’ as represented in the works of several linguists who have one after another been considered as landmark figures in twentieth-century linguistics. The notion of ‘system’, proposed by Saussure in the founding text of modern linguistics, Course in General Linguistics, has exerted a long-lasting influence on linguistic theorizing. In this text, Saussure emphasizes that linguistics should study langue, the system shared by a community instead of individuals’ parole. I will argue that this emphasis, on the one hand, fuels linguists’ efforts to abstractly describe and model languages, on the other hand, steers their attention away from addressing the role of individual speakers. Saussure’s idea that language is a semiological system constituted of interdefining linguistic signs directly inspired structuralism in anthropology, semiotics and philosophy. Detailed analysis of a range of linguistic works will be made to show how this notion of ‘system’ takes on different dimensions in the hands of different theorists. To a certain extent, these mainstream linguists, by explicitly or implicitly endorsing this concept of linguistic ‘system’, have shaped the development of the discipline of modern linguistics. It will be made clear that due to this theoretical emphasis a very important dimension of language in social life cannot be addressed, that is, how individuals make sense of and make use of language in their day-to-day life. Important topics such as the normative dimensions of language, the agency of individual speakers, the construction of their linguistic knowledge, etc. cannot be satisfactorily dealt with in this framework. This part will be organized chronologically dedicating each chapter to a focused study of representative linguistic texts. The conclusion will pull the lines together and try to situate the discussion in a wider context and explain why the notion of system runs persistently throughout the development of linguistics.

Chapter 2

Saussure: Langue as an Autonomous System

The lecture notes of Saussure’s students published in 1916 with the title Cours de Linguistique Générale (hereafter ‘the Course’) were taken to be the best collection of Saussurean thought until the discovery of his own lecture notes and manuscripts in his father’s house in 1996. Based on these newly discovered materials, Bouquet and Engler published Ecrits de Linguistique Générale (‘Writings in General Linguistics’) in 2002. In the preface, comparing several quotations from the 1916 book and Saussure’s manuscripts, they make the following remarks: As in the above quotes, the original manuscripts reveal a Saussurean thought which is much less categorical than in the Cours since it often admits his doubts on important points and even uses them heuristically. At the same time, this is even more radical since it is turns into a veritable campaign against the lack of epistemological thought which characterizes linguistics—in other words, as a campaign for a renewal of the fundamental concepts of this science. (Bouquet & Engler, 2006, p. xiv)

As can be seen from the quotation, the authors see the newly discovered notes as a more authoritative reference to Saussure’s thought. The doubts and hesitations of Saussure concerning the theoretical study of language expressed in these notes, according to them, could be further explored to reflect upon the limitations of the current state of linguistics, which was, first and foremost, inspired by the 1916 text. Harris (2000, p.  274) makes a distinction between three Saussures: Saussure the putative author of the Course; Saussure the lecturer; the real Saussure. For him, to attribute views to the second Saussure requires evidence from the lecture notes of his students and his own notes because no other evidence is available. Based on this categorization, we can put this 2006 book under ‘Saussure the lecturer’. Fully aware of the presence of conflicting texts on the study of Saussure and the risk of choosing an ‘outdated’ text, I still think the Course is the most relevant text to introduce Saussure’s notion of the linguistic system. The reasons are: this text was published much earlier and for a long time was the only text available when referring to Saussurean linguistics. To put it crudely, the influence of Saussure upon twentieth-century linguistics comes mainly from this text. Since what I am concerned with is not a historical exegesis of the Saussurean texts to decide what the © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_2

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‘real’ Saussure would think but a thematic tracing of ideas through texts, the Course proves to be the most relevant text to be used.1 Overall, I will study relevant discussions in the Course and introduce a series of important concepts concerning the linguistic system with a focus on the distinction between langue and parole. The purpose is to return to the moment when the decision was made to establish the linguistic system as the object of study and examine the inherent difficulties in this decision and its consequences. At the very beginning of the Course, having acknowledged the multidimensions of language as a general phenomenon and thus the impossibility of studying all its dimensions at the same time, Saussure single-mindedly provides a solution: One solution only, in our view, resolves all these difficulties. The linguist must take the study of linguistic structure as his primary concern, and relate all other manifestations of language to it. Indeed, amid so many dualities, linguistic structure seems to be the one thing that is independently definable and provides something our minds can satisfactorily grasp. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 25)

It is this viewpoint that creates the object of study for linguistics, that is, la langue or the linguistic structure. To a certain extent, this move which selects the linguistic structure out of the ‘mess’ of ‘language in its entirety’ straddling ‘the boundaries separating various domains’ (ibid.) is fully responsible for the identification of any linguistically relevant item which otherwise cannot be established. In other words, the object of study for linguistics is not given in advance but created by the will of a linguist determined to carry out research in the field of linguistics. We cannot help but ask: what are the consequences of this move? Will this designation of object of study do justice to the entirety of language, which is ‘at the same time physical, physiological and psychological’ and ‘belongs both to the individual and to society’ (ibid.)? The linguistic system in Saussure’s theory is presented as an autonomous, semi-closed system,2 which, unlike a nomenclature, does not have a direct relationship with the real world existing outside language. Two principles which are central to the workings of any linguistic system are postulated: the principle of arbitrariness and the principle of linearity. The first principle is concerned with the nature of the linguistic sign. Saussure writes, The link between signal and signification is arbitrary. Since we are treating a sign as the combination in which a signal is associated with a signification, we can express this more simply as: the linguistic sign is arbitrary. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 100)

In a Saussurean linguistic system, every linguistic sign is a combination of the signifier/signal (the sound pattern) and the signified/signification (the concept). Yet it is acknowledged that no natural motivation linking up a certain sound pattern with a certain concept exists and it is in this sense that he defines the ‘linguistic sign’ as  However, other texts of Saussure will also be quoted for the purpose of illustration.  Language as a ‘semi-closed’ system highlights the point that language as a system is subject to external influences which work on the system as a whole in triggering a reconstitution of the whole system. This semi-closedness somehow ensures that the system remains autonomous even though from time to time it undergoes changes due to external factors. 1 2

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arbitrary. As a consequence, this principle helps to sever any link between the linguistic system and the outside world, and contributes to a contained and autonomous image of the system. This ties in with another important concept in Saussurean linguistics, the ‘value’. Values can be approximately treated as meanings; they are not intrinsically given in signs, but are created from differences occupied by different signs in a given system. Saussure explains in the following terms: Similarly, a word can be substituted for something dissimilar: an idea. At the same time, it can be compared to something of a like nature: another word. Its value is therefore not determined merely by that meaning for which it is a token. It must also be assessed against comparable values, by contrast with other words. The content of a word is determined in the final analysis not by what it contains but by what exists outside it. As an element in the system, the word has not only meaning but also—above all—a value. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 160)

The value of a word depends upon its ‘external environment’, namely, the other words residing in the same system. To determine the meaning of a certain word boils down to examining its relations within a linguistic system because ‘all the words which express neighbouring ideas help define one another’s meaning’ (1916/1983, p. 161). For example, in order to find out the meaning of the sign mouton, we need first to decide which linguistic system it belongs to and what its relations with other words in that system are. On the other hand, the arbitrary nature of linguistic signs does not mean that the free choice of individuals has a role to play in determining the meaning of signs in a system. On the contrary, Saussure designates that the system should be treated as a social fact residing in a collective mind, independent of influences exerted by individuals: The arbitrary nature of the sign enables us to understand more easily why it needs social activity to create a linguistic system. A community is necessary in order to establish values. Values have no other rationale than usage and general agreement. An individual, acting alone, is incapable of establishing a value. (Saussure, 1916/1983, pp. 157–158)

However, notwithstanding the arbitrariness of signs, the linguistic system, through its workings within a community characterized by its many social activities and contractual agreement between members, gives a certain determinacy to the meaning of signs. Other than this, individual efforts are not capable of directly working on the system. Overall it can be seen that the principle of arbitrariness provides support for Saussure’s move of grounding the system in some relatively determinate existence—the collectivity of a given community. For Saussure, ‘any means of expression accepted in a society rests in principle upon a collective habit, or on convention, which comes to the same thing’ (1916/1983, p. 101). So it is not any intrinsic value of signs, but ‘this rule’ (ibid.) of social conventions that makes them obligatory.3

 To be sure, Saussure is aware of the existence of some motivated signs in the province of semiology such as mime, yet he thinks that a system with entirely arbitrary signs represents better the ‘ideal semiological process’ (1916/1983, p. 101), of which language is an example. 3

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The second principle is associated with the linear organization of linguistic signs composed of different segments: The linguistic signal, being auditory in nature, has a temporal aspect, and hence certain temporal characteristics: (a) it occupies a certain temporal space, and (b) this space is measured in just one dimension: it is a line. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 103)

Language, in its spoken form, unfolds temporally in a linear form. A sequence of linguistic signs consisting of paired relations between signifier and signified, according to Saussure, can be analyzed into, on the one hand, a linear organization of sounds—a ‘continuous ribbon of sound, along which the ear picks out no adequate or clearly marked divisions’ (1916/1983, p. 145)—and on the other hand, a sequence of thoughts. He explains as follows: [W]hen we know what meaning and what role to attribute to each segment in the sequence, then we see those segments separated one from another, and the shapeless ribbon is cut up into pieces. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 146)

This unit-by-unit pairings between sound and thought reminds us of the first principle on the arbitrary relation between sound and thought. Segments of sound and thought are organized linearly and the relationship between them shifts along a linear dimension; this provides an explanation about the arbitrariness of signs. As discussed earlier, it is postulated that there exists a pairing relation between sound the signifier and concept the signified, both of which can be analyzed into segments of different sizes. Yet the system itself on the whole is shifting from time to time (that is, diachronically. See later discussion). In consequence the slot of a concept which matches a specific sound segment at a given moment will be shifted to match another sound segment or a sequence of sound segments at another moment. To quote from the published notes of Saussure by Bouquet and Engler: A linguistic system consists: […] a b c - nor of coexisting relationships between form and idea such as …, although A B C positing the duality of each term is an advance on the previous viewpoint. But this system is made up of a confused difference of ideas playing at the surface of a difference … of forms, […]. (Saussure, 2006, p. 56; emphasis in original)

This observation clearly states that in a linguistic system such shifting of differences on both sides of form and meaning continuously takes place. The principle of linearity explains the linear manner of this shifting of signified and signifier. This explains why for Saussure ‘the whole mechanism of linguistic structure’ (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 103) depends on the linear nature of linguistic sign. In addition to these two principles, there are two distinctions which are important to the understanding of the linguistic system: first, the distinction of synchronic and diachronic; second, the dichotomy between langue and parole. Diachronically a linguistic system evolves constantly while synchronically language users only appear to deal with forms and rules. By synchronic linguistics Saussure intends to show how language appears to work for language users when they have no

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k­ nowledge of the evolution of language across different historical stages. He provides a famous analogy to explain the differences between these two perspectives: [A] state of the board in chess corresponds exactly to a state of the language. The value of the chess pieces depends on their position upon the chess board, just as in the language each term has its value through its contrast with all the other terms. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 126) [I]n order to pass from one stable position to another or, in our terminology, from one synchronic state to another, moving one piece is all that is needed. There is no general upheaval. That is the counterpart of the diachronic fact and all its characteristic features. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 126)

According to Saussure, the synchronic perspective should be given more emphasis because it corresponds to the language users’ perception of a linguistic system at a given moment, just like for chess players, the current state of the chess board, instead of what happened before, plays a more important role. Furthermore, the diachronic change from one linguistic state to another is deemed uninformative as to the workings of language because for Saussure speech operates only upon a given linguistic state. Again, it is the same in chess because ‘in order to describe the position on the board, it is quite useless to refer to what happened ten seconds ago’ (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 127). From this analogy we see that though linguistic systems can be conceived both synchronically and diachronically, Saussure places more emphasis on ‘synchrony’ which for him captures the perspective of the speakers.4 Furthermore, it is not only the perspective, but also ‘the consciousness of the speakers’ that needs to be studied if we want ‘to know the extent to which a thing is a reality’ (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 128). We are also told by the Course that langue is not to be confused with parole and it is the former which linguistics should focus on as object of study. Langue resides in the collective mass while parole is constituted of fragments of individual speech which do not yield to linguistic study; moreover, langue is considered essential while parole is ancillary or more or less accidental (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 31). I will introduce the famous speech circuit to illustrate (Fig. 2.1).5 In the above speech circuit, as Saussure further explains, for a sequence of linguistic signs to reach from A to B, we have to make sure that the following processes happen one after another: a psychological process in A’s brain where concepts are associated with sound patterns; a physiological process in A where the brain sends out an impulse to the organs of phonation concerning specific sound patterns;  This statement is challenged by later sociologists who study synchronic linguistic features in order to gain insights into diachronic language change. They point out the possibility of synchronic co-existence of more archaic and newer linguistic forms. This quotation serves as a good illustration: ‘What is missing in his [Saussure’s] conception, however, is the possibility of a moment in time when a more archaic gasti and a more innovating variant, gesti, did coexist in the minds of some very real speakers of the language.’ (Weinreich, Labov, &  Herzog, 1968, p. 122) 5  Due to copyright issues, here I use the diagrams published in Saussure (1916). The English translations of the French terms are listed below: Audition (Hearing), Phonation (Vocalization), Concept (Concept), Image acoustique (Sound pattern). 4

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Fig. 2.1  The speech circuit (Saussure, 1916/1931, p. 28)

a physical process where sound waves travel from A’s mouth to B’s ear; a physiological process in B where sound patterns are transmitted from the ear to the brain; a psychological process in B’s brain where sound patterns are associated with concepts. When A and B communicate with each other, the actual sentences they have uttered belong to the field of speech while the function of the speech circuit requires a certain ‘faculty of association and coordination which comes into operation as soon as one goes beyond individual signs in isolation’ (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 30). It is also emphasized that this faculty plays ‘the major role in the organization of the language as a system’ (ibid.). For communicating individuals, through the existence of langue as ‘a kind of mean’ (ibid.) which links up isolated individual signs as a social phenomenon, they are able to ‘reproduce—doubtless not exactly, but approximately—the same signs linked to the same concepts’ (ibid.). In short, behind all the sentences produced by individual speakers at different times, there exists a supra-­ individual linguistic system which resides in the collectivity. The reason why individuals like A and B understand each other despite the fact that they speak different ‘paroles’ is precisely because they are in a community where a linguistic system is operating. Saussure explains this process in the following words: The individual’s receptive and co-ordinating faculties build up a stock of imprints which turn out to be for all practical purposes the same as the next person’s. How must we envisage this social product, so that the language itself can be seen to be clearly distinct from the rest? If we could collect the totality of word patterns stored in all those individuals, we should have the social bond which constitutes their language. It is a fund accumulated by the members of the community through the practice of speech, a grammatical system existing potentially in every brain, or more exactly in the brains of a group of individuals; for the

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language is never complete in any single individual, but exists perfectly only in the collectivity. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 30)

This seems to suggest that the system of langue depends on the existence of a social accumulation process of individual members’ acts of speech which can be seen as the deployment of the stock of identical imprints, yet it is also strongly demanded that langue as a social product should be clearly distinguished from individual speech acts. Upon closer reading, we discern an inner tension between these two aspects, namely, if langue is merely an accumulation of individual acts of parole, why do we need to designate it as a distinct category as an autonomous closed system for linguists to study? As to the relation between langue and individuals’ parole, on the one hand, Saussure seems to suggest that changes in langue can only be initiated by individual acts (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 139, 231); on the other hand, parole is taken to be an accidental, imperfect realization of langue by individuals, who cannot exert any power on the workings of langue. In fact, we come to see that Saussure himself is not entirely sure about the boundary between langue and parole: Where syntagmas are concerned, however, one must recognize the fact that there is no clear boundary separating the language, as confirmed by communal usage, from speech, marked by freedom of the individual. In many cases, it is difficult to assign a combination of units to one or the other. Many combinations are the product of both, in proportions which cannot be accurately measured. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 173)

As made clear in the above quotation, when a speaker uses certain idiomatic expressions from a language, for example, ‘raining cats and dogs’ in English, we cannot decide whether these combinations belong to parole or langue. Is Saussure suggesting that in the realm of parole, we should distinguish the ‘langue’ part and the ‘non-­langue’ part? Faced with this inconsistency, I will examine below in detail the distinction of langue and parole, which will inform discussions on the legitimacy of linguistics’s singling out langue as object of study and the ontological status of the ‘system’.

Two Readings on Langue Versus Parole As to the critique of Saussure’s distinction of langue and parole, we have a significant collection of documented literature, which is beyond the scope of the present study (see Koerner, 1972, and Genaust, 1976 for details). I will, however, focus on two recent readings by Roy Harris and Paul Thibault. These two crystallize some fundamental issues brought about by Saussure’s distinction, such as, the relationship between the social and the individual, and our understanding of meaning-­ making activities, etc. In Hutton (1990, pp. 99–100), Schuchardt (1917) and Rogger (1941, 1954) are selected as two representatives of a strong tradition in Saussurean criticism which rejects the basic distinction between langue and parole. According to Hutton,

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Schuchardt denies any essential or ontological distinction which is worth making between the language of the individual and that of the collective; following him, Rogger makes a further statement that there cannot be any relation of actualization or instantiation between langue and parole. Basically, both of them advocate a view of language featuring a single level which can be concretely identified in individuals’ acts of speech, on the basis of which any collectivity is formulated as the accumulation of these acts. In other words, we do not need to postulate an abstract system consisting of units existing in the collective for it to be realized in the ­individual sphere as the utterance of a linguistic form; instead, individuals’ production of speech can simply be envisaged as the ‘externalization or putting to use of the object’ (Hutton, 1990, p. 100). To use Schuchardt’s analogy, it is ‘like taking a ripe cherry from the tree and putting it on a plate’ (ibid.). Harris, the founder of integrational linguistics, can be put in this tradition which rejects a distinction between langue and parole. His critique deals a heavy blow to Saussurean linguistics by directly questioning the ontological status of the system. Drawing upon Culler (1976) and Spence (1962), Harris comments that ‘it is rather difficult to see what would remain of Saussurean linguistics without this distinction’ (Harris, 1987, p.  23). For him, Saussure started linguistics from the wrong end, namely, from langue instead of parole. In consequence, this mistake is responsible for two fallacies enshrined within linguistics: first, the fixed-code view which postulates a linguistic system composed of linguistic signs possessing fixed meanings; second, the telementational model of communication which treats communication as the transference of thoughts or ideas from one mind to another (Harris, 1981, 1987). On the basis of this critique of ‘the language myth’ comprising the above two fallacies, Harris proposes a ‘demythologized linguistics’, which can also be called ‘integrational linguistics’ or integrationism. With the aim of liberating ‘language’ from an autonomous field inhabited by words and fixed meanings sponsored by ‘the language myth’, integrationists treat language users’ creativity in making and interpreting new signs as the force sustaining communication through shifting situations (More details in Part III). In his analysis of Saussure’s model of speech circuit, Harris underlines the inconsistency between ‘treating langue as “external” to the individual and the need of localizing it within one of the “internal” sections of the speech circuit’ (1987b, p. 24). According to him, Saussure offers a solution out of this inconsistency, that is, to define langue as ‘a social, supra-individual reality’, of which ‘each person has an individual internal representation’ (ibid.). This solution results in a telementational model of communication, namely, in talking to each other, identical copies of linguistic signs which belong to the same linguistic system are exchanged between the speaker and the hearer. Moreover, Harris makes a sharp observation concerning Saussure’s admission of the impossibility of separating langue from parole and argues that this is to ‘concede the impossibility of drawing a boundary between individual initiative and collective usage’ (Harris, 1987, p. 235). This admission, for Harris, reveals a methodological disaster in the project of establishing linguistics as a discipline:

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If the status of linguistics as a science depends precisely on not conflating langue and parole, this concession is in any case a disaster for Saussure; but it is a double disaster inasmuch as the indeterminacy of syntagmatic relations also entails the impossibility of a fixed system of valeurs. (ibid.)

In his highly polemical engagement with Saussure’s works, Harris tends to treat Saussure’s linguistics based on a study of the linguistic system as an incompatible opposite of integrational linguistics which studies individual language users’ integrating activities in communication. Yet one of his recent publications paints a ­different picture. In the article titled ‘Was Saussure an Integrationist?’, Harris lists several of Saussure’s thoughts which have ‘integrationist leanings’ (Harris, 2006, p. 213) based on Saussure (2002). For example, Saussure criticizes the lexicographer’s concept of a word which operates on ‘a false externalization of both form and meaning’ (ibid.). He also attacks the view which treats forms as given in the external, physical world while meanings exist only in the mind. Instead, he proposes that we should treat words’ existence as ‘sanctioned from one moment to the next by those who use them’ (ibid.). Drawing on these examples, Harris speculates that if Saussure went on to develop his linguistics of parole, it will look very much like integrationism. Furthermore, Harris does not think that linguistics of parole can be developed alongside the linguistics of langue without changing some premises about the nature of the linguistic sign and the linguistic system as implied in the Course. In other words, linguistics of parole cannot simply be seen as a study of ‘the individual’s execution of materials supplied by la langue’ (Harris, 2006, p. 215). What should be embraced in linguistics of parole for him, instead, is the integrationist notion ‘total speech’ (Toolan, 1996), which ‘occur[s] in particular situations, for particular purposes and with particular results’ (Harris, 2006, p. 215). So we can see that in spite of this changed view of Saussure, Harris remains suspicious of any systematic study of language as the Course strongly proposed. If it is right to say that the newly published notes of Saussure have pushed Harris to consider a change of view from Saussure the structuralist to Saussure the integrationist, the case of Paul Thibault, the author of Re-reading Saussure, is another story. Unlike Harris who laments the methodological crisis experienced by Saussure, Thibault (1997) presents a consistent image of Saussure as a great thinker who thinks the ‘unthinkable’ and seeks ‘the possibility of the impossible’ (1997, p. xx). Saussure is seen as the proposer of a metatheory about signs and meaning-making activities which provides a conceptual framework for new thoughts to fill in. While Harris sees Saussure’s admission of the unclear boundary between langue and parole as a hint of methodological crisis, Thibault (1997, p. 67) offers a coherent reading of Saussure’s stance. For him, this admission attests Saussure’s awareness of the ontological hiatus between society and the individual, which cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy. In Thibault’s words, the different statuses given to langue and parole could consistently explain both the ‘freedom of combination’ on individuals’ part and ‘the regularity and typicality of syntagmatic patterns’ (1997, p. 67). He argues that individuals’ freedom of combination in a community where there is no limit on what language users can do in and through language forms will bring no possibility of meaning-making. On the other hand, the regularity of lin-

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guistic patterns does not mean that they are totally fixed or determinate, instead, new combinations are always possible and creative ones can emerge within a community. To summarize, what Thibault sees in Saussure’s distinction is a coherent account of individuals’ relation with the linguistic system, which is, individuals’ freedom in language use could be attributed to their will and intelligence while ‘individual intentions and purposes are always mediated by a system of social possibilities for acting and meaning’ (ibid.). Thibault also offers an interesting reading of Saussure’s belief that individuals cannot exert changes on the linguistic system. He argues that the fact that ‘the individual alone cannot directly act on and change the system of langue’ (1997, p. 79) does not mean that we can thus reduce individuals to ‘functional slots’ in an anonymous and coercive social structure. In fact, he thinks that Saussure’s argument is more complicated. Saussure’s system is not distributed across individuals on the basis of some sort of legislative contract or gentlemen’s agreement; instead, the potential offered by the system could be understood as distributed ‘across the typical systems of value-producing relations and practices in the linguistic system’ (ibid.). The following passage from Saussure (1957, p.  22) is quoted by him to explain this distinction: The original contract gets confused with that which happens all the time in the linguistic system (with the continuous creation of signs), with the permanent conditions of the linguistic system: if one sign is added to the linguistic system, the meaning [signification] of the others decreases proportionally. Reciprocally, if by some remote chance only two signs were chosen at the beginning, all meanings would be distributed [réparties] over these two signs. One would have designated one half of phenomena, and the other, the other half.

Thus changes in the linguistic system cannot be directly explained on the basis of individual acts. What happens is that individual acts of innovations ‘ramify, or spread, across many different contexts that the distributional characteristic of the system will, in time, alter’ (1997, pp.  92–93). It is worth noting that his reading offers a nuanced interpretation of Saussure’s distinction of langue and parole which goes beyond a simple dichotomy. Also, the relationship between individuals and the system is given a detailed and coherent account through reconstructing some of Sausssure’s own texts and references to the theory of thermodynamic systems (1997, p. 94). Furthermore, he highlights Saussure’s distinction between ‘the speaking subject’ (le sujet parlant) and ‘the individual’ (Thibault, 1997, p.  26). For Thibault, this points to an important understanding of the relation between individuals and the linguistic system, namely, what makes individuals relate to the linguistic system is not their individual consciousness, but the positions they as speakers and listeners ‘may or may not occupy in the typical language-using practices of the community’ (Thibault, 1997, pp. 26–27). With this clarification, he further leads us to see that the speech circuit could be treated as an entire psychoperceptual system in James J. Gibson’s sense in that it envisages individuals as speakers and listeners in a structured array of social places and positions6 (Thibault, 1997, p. 153).

 Thibault draws on Gibson’s (1979/1986) discussion of ‘ecosocial space’ and position as ‘point of observation’ and makes the point that ‘speaker and listener are not simply physical objects who 6

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Most significantly, Thibault treats Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole as a ‘metatheoretical category’ instead of a ‘descriptive category’. Harris (2000) disagrees with this: he thinks that Saussure by dividing langage, which is ‘multiforme et hétéroclite’ (‘multiform and heterogeneous’, my translation) into langue and parole as is evidenced in the statement that ‘La langue est pour nous le langage moins la parole’ (‘Langue for us is langage with parole removed’, my translation, Saussure, 1916/1931, p.112), intends for the distinction to be ‘real’. Referring to Saussure (1967), he further argues that Saussure takes great pains to drive home the idea that ‘la langue was not an abstraction or theoretical fiction but had a real existence inside the heads of its speakers’ (Harris, 2000, p. 280). When introducing the distinction between synchronic and diachronic perspectives, Saussure again emphasizes the correspondence between synchronic linguistics and language users’ own perspective (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 128). All these for Harris are strong proofs of Saussure’s awareness of making a real and necessary distinction concerning langue and parole. However, there are contradicting evidences in the Course which Harris did not mention. For example, at the very beginning of the Course, Saussure clearly states that the distinction creates a perspective from which the object of study for linguistics could emerge and become ‘real’ (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 23). For the purpose of this book, I will not go into further details about the status of this distinction and I agree with Harris that a more crucial question is deciding ‘whether this distinction does in fact resolve the langage problem’ (Harris, 2000), which is to say, whether Saussure’s distinction is a valid distinction to study the multidimensions of language as a phenomenon. From previous discussions, it is obvious that Harris’s answer is no. The reasoning is that, with this ‘real’ distinction made between langue and parole, it has to presuppose that language users possess identical copies of the linguistic system in order for communication to work. Only in this way can processes of parole access langue (Harris, 1987, p. 24). In short, this distinction directly sponsors a fixed-code telementational model of communication which in no way reflects how communication works among real individuals. Moreover, it remains a challenge ‘for the linguist to identify with any assurance the postulated entités concrètes de la langue (concrete entities of langue, my translation)’ (Harris, 1987, p. 235), though structural linguistics tends to see langue ‘as a describable system’ (Harris, 2000, p. 281). Another significant difference between Thibault’s and Harris’s reading of Saussure is about the speech circuit. Thibault does not agree with Harris’s reading of the speech circuit as a fixed-code telementional model.7 Rather, he thinks that the

emit and receive sound waves in an abstract physical space, as in the code model; rather, they are located at positions in an ecosocial space of actual and potential points of observation and points of action’ (Thibault, 1997, p. 153). 7  Joseph (1997) also criticizes Harris’s reading of Saussure as proposing a telementational model of communication. He points out that Saussure does not have a theory of communication and the word communication never occurs in the Course. For him, Saussure is best read as endorsing a

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linguistic system is not a code, but a meaning-making resource. There is no transmission or communication of meanings which takes place from a sender to a receiver. Instead, meanings are ‘jointly made or constructed by the ways in which interactants co-deploy the available social-semiological resources on a given social occasion of discourse’ (Thibault, 1997, p. 131). A sign is not merely a binary combination of sound image and concept, but ‘a psychic act’ which enacts a joint focusing on the phenomena of experience by both participants. Apparently Thibault would not agree with this reading of Saussure’s linguistic system as fixed codes, yet the following quotation from him proves problematic: The association of a concept and an acoustic image in the brains of the individual in the circuit does not mean that ‘thoughts are transmitted from one brain to another’. The fact that A and B in the circuit are able to form the same associations in their brains is a consequence of their being cross-coupled to the same higher-order social-semiological system. That is, both A and B share the same meaning system. (1997, p. 145)

This account begs the following questions: What is this shared system? Where is it located? How could it be shared between A and B? In the three definitions of Saussure’s system provided by Thibault, the third definition seems to be the one under discussion: it is ‘a system of social conventions which are adopted by the “social body”, rather than by individuals per se’ (1997, p.  77). Yet the question remains: how could the postulation of a social body ensure that the system is shared by individuals such as A and B in the speech circuit? Up to this point, the coherent account given by Thibault is confronted with difficulties in explaining how the individuals’ sign-making and the social body which owns the system are linked and how individuals produce ‘same’ signs. Harris, on the other hand, by dismissing Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole as misguided and the postulation of langue as the system for linguists to study, is free from these difficulties. Both authors have recognized the paradox brought about by langue–parole distinction: on the one hand, the linguistic system seems to be external to individual language users under whose gaze language exists as a state; on the other hand, this system has to be planted somewhere within individual users so that they could be said to be communicating in a certain language. However, the ways they explain this paradox greatly differ. For Harris, Saussure’s methodological decision of placing identical copies of langue in individuals is problematic and distorts the study of human communication while Thibault attempts to provide a coherent account of how individuals are dynamically involved in the workings of the system without being reduced to cogs. My purpose of carrying out this comparison is not to find out a truer or better reading of Saussure, instead, it is thought more important to present the complicatview in line with structuralist literary criticism: ‘the real meaning of a text inheres neither within the intention of the author, nor within the minds of readers, but within the texts itself’ (Joseph, 1997, p. 36). By locating meaning within texts, or more exactly, the linguistic sign, this reading renders individual speakers and hearers, their thoughts and intentions secondary. He further explains: ‘the goal of reading is not telementation between reader and author, but as rich a construction as possible of the meaning that is latent within the text’ (ibid.).

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ing arguments resulting from the theoretical decision made by Saussure, together with the difficulties of resolving the paradox between the social and the individual and of explaining the process of meaning-making on the individual’s part. To conclude, Saussure’s decision to establish an autonomous discipline of linguistics which studies the synchronic linguistic system as a state seen from speakers’ perspective has left issues unresolved concerning the legitimacy of the distinction between langue and parole. Despite reservations and hesitations on his part, this system view of language was taken as given and loomed large in some later developments of linguistics, the first of which is structural linguistics.

References Bouquet, S., & Engler, R. (2006). Preface. In F.  D. Saussure, Writings in general linguistics (S. Bouquet & R. Engler, Eds.) (pp. xi-xvi). New York: Oxford University Press. Culler, J. D. (1976). Saussure. New York: Fontana Collins. Genaust, H. (1976). Compléments à la “Bibliographia Saussureana”, 1916–1972. Histographia Linguistica, 3, 37–87. Gibson, J.  J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Original work published 1979) Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1987). Reading Saussure. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (2000). Saussure for all seasons. Review of P.J.  Thibault, Re-reading Saussure. Semiotica, 131(3/4), 273–287. Harris, R. (2006). Was Saussure an integrationist? In L. D. Saussure (Ed.), Nouveaux regards sur Saussure: mélanges offerts à René Amacker (pp. 209–217). Genève: Droz. Hutton, C. (1990). Abstraction and instance: The type-token relation in linguistic theory. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Joseph, J. (1997). The “language myth” myth: Or, Roy Harris’s red herrings. In G.  Wolf & N. Love (Eds.), Linguistics inside out: Roy Harris and his critics (pp. 9–37). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Koerner, E. F. K. (1972). Bibliographia Saussureana 1870–1970. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press. Rogger, K. (1941). Kritischer Versuch über de Saussure’s Cours générale. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 61, 159–217. Rogger, K. (1954). Langue-parole und Die Aktualisierung. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 70, 341–375. Saussure, F.  D. (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. English version: Saussure, F. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). London: Duckworth. Saussure, F.  D. (1931). Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1916) Saussure, F. D. (1957) Cours de linguistique générale (1908-9). IIe Cours. Introduction. (R. Godel, Ed.), Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure (Vol. 15, pp. 2–103). Saussure, F. D. (1967). Cours de linguistique générale. Edition critique par R. Engler. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Saussure, F.  D. (2002). Ecrits de linguistique générale. (S.  Bouquet & R.  Engler, Eds.). Paris: Gallimard. Saussure, F. D. (2006). Writings in general linguistics (S. Bouquet & R. Engler, Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press.

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Schuchardt, H. (1917). Review of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Literaturblatt für Germanische und Romanische Philologie, 38, 1–9. Spence, N. C. W. (1962). Langue and parole yet again. Neophilologus, 46(1), 197–201. Thibault, P.  J. (1997). Re-reading Saussure: The dynamics of signs in social life. London: Routledge. Toolan, M. (1996). Total speech: An integrational linguistic approach to language. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weinreich, U., Labov, W., & Herzog, M. I. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In W. P. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (Eds.), Directions for historical linguistics: A symposium. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Chapter 3

Bloomfield: A Grammar System

Broadly speaking, Saussure’s notion of the linguistic system is taken to be a ‘grammar system’ in structural linguistics. This system of grammar consists of three core parts: phonology, morphology and syntax. Commonly held to be the founding father of structural linguistics in America, Bloomfield developed in ‘A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language’ (1926),1 for the first time, an analytic system to provide a rigid approach of structural linguistic analysis. Since around 1930s, his works on descriptive methodologies have exerted extensive impact on the description of grammars. He initiated a golden period of linguistics which saw the publication of grammar books, documentation of diverse languages, opening of new university courses, and involvement of linguists in providing training for military purposes. At the very beginning of developing structural linguistics, Bloomfield was eager to sever the links of linguistics with other disciplines because he deemed it crucial to confer an independent scientific status upon linguistics. For example, in the manifesto for Linguistic Society of America, Bloomfield called for the establishment of a separate institution different from ‘the existing societies, Philological, Oriental, Modern Language, Anthropological, Psychological, and what not’ (Bloomfield, 1925, p. 1). By doing this, Bloomfield sought to confirm the scientific status of linguistics. His efforts of formulating linguistic methods in scientific terms and organizing them into a discrete body of practices were well received. Bloomfieldian methodology represented by himself and his successors (such as Bernard Bloch, George Trager and Charles Hockett) is largely a positive and taxonomic one, which features a bottom-up analysis moving from sound up to morphemes and syntax. For example, in an influential book on English grammar, Trager and Smith (1957, p. 53) describe the process of building up from phonological level to other levels (morphological and syntactic):

 It is modeled after Albert Paul Weiss (1879–1931)’s ‘One Set of Postulates for a Behaviouristic Psychology’ (1925). 1

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_3

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3  Bloomfield: A Grammar System When the phonological analysis of a language has been made, the next point to consider is what use one can make of it for further analysis. It is taken for granted that further analysis is necessary and possible: knowing the phonological system of a language does not tell us anything about the way the phonological units are used. Saying this does not, however, lead to the conclusion that we are then immediately to become concerned with ‘meaning’ of the linguistic material. It simply means that we have to look for further structural systems on levels other than the phonological.

The description of a single level such as the phonological system of a language is not enough and further descriptions of other levels are deemed necessary to account for how the phonological units are used. Bloomfieldian linguistics takes the ­description of different grammatical levels other than concern with ‘meaning’ as its priority. For example, influenced by behaviorism and positivism, Bloomfield tends to think that in order to determine meaning we need knowledge provided by other sciences or knowledge in light of the specific situations. He states: We can define the meaning of a speech-form accurately when this meaning has to do with some matter of which we possess scientific knowledge. We can define the names of minerals, for example, in terms of chemistry and mineralogy, as when we say that the ordinary meaning of the English word salt is ‘sodium chloride (NaCl)’, and we can define the names of plants or animals by means of the technical terms of botany and zoology, but we have not precise way of defining words like love or hate, which concern situations that have not been accurately classified—and these latter are in the great majority. (1933, p. 139)

In a similar vein, Bloch and Trager state that ‘the meaning of a linguistic form […] is the feature common to all the situations in which it is used’ (Bloch & Trager, 1942, p.  6). The belief is that unless we have knowledge of all the situations in which the words are used, we will not be able to crack the puzzle of ‘meaning’. On the other hand, the location and description of grammatical units need to be done before any quest into ‘meaning’: It is emphasized that all this [syntactic analysis] is done without the use of ‘meaning’: it is formal analysis of formal units. In fact, it becomes evident that any real approach to meaning must be based upon the existence of such an objective syntax, rather than the other way round. (Trager & Smith, 1957, p. 68)

Moreover, Trager and Smith argue that this formal analysis based on discrete levels is an essential feature of science and the amenability of language data to this kind of analysis accounts for much of the success of linguistics: The realization of the extreme importance of levels in the observation and classification of events in the whole field of human behaviour has been and will doubtless continue to be one of the most important criteria for scientific work in the social sciences. By the same token, failure to separate and classify data properly in the regard has been one of the main weaknesses of much of what has been done not only in linguistics but in all the social sciences to date. It is probably true that in linguistics, because of the extremely formal and handleable nature of the data, the greatest progress in organization on the proper levels has been made. (Trager & Smith, 1957, p. 81)

This quotation celebrates the great importance of structural linguistic description and the formal and handleable nature of linguistic data for linguistics to attain the status and success of a ‘science’. Yet, when linguists render language data amenable

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to formal scientific analysis in a structuralist framework, how do they conceive the status of speakers? Generally speaking, speakers do not get much attention in this line of theorizing besides the acknowledgement that they are users of a certain system. On the other hand, due to the influence of Sapir’s theory, another dimension of the speaker–language relation is developed, which is, the linguistic system can influence speakers’ behaviors: This leads further to the consideration of how the linguistic system affects the behaviour, both conscious and unconscious, and the world-view of the speaker, and governs or influences the interactions between individuals and between groups. (Trager & Smith, 1957, p. 82)

The above quotation recognizes the influences of the linguistic system on speakers while mentioning none of the opposite situation, such as the fact that speakers actually contest, negotiate and in some cases change the use of language. Generally speaking, Bloomfieldian linguists are not essentially concerned with the roles of speakers and they tend to believe that as long as empirical descriptions of grammar systems guided by scientific methodologies are vigorously carried out, linguistics remains a valid and useful science. In ‘Psychologistic Structuralism and the Polytect’, Nigel  Love provides a definition of linguistic structuralism in the broadest sense of the term, which is the study of ‘discrete, determinate systems of correspondences between forms and meanings, called “languages”, “varieties”, “dialects”’ (Love, 1984, p. 225). Saussure’s langue is taken as something waiting to be scientifically described; after the description, it is projected back onto the community as a system shared among individual speakers. In this account, languages exist ontologically as self-contained, systematic and countable entities which enable speakers to match a certain form with a certain meaning. In consequence, languages are seen as synchronic formal systems consisting of inventories of structurally inter-­ defining forms, just as Bloomfield (1926, p. 155) claims: ‘Every utterance is made up wholly of forms’. Linguists then seek to provide a hierarchical description of this formal system based on the identification and categorization of recurrent units. Generally speaking, there exist many levels of descriptions in a hierarchy. One end can be a single unit, for example, a discourse, a sentence or a phrase and the other end, words, morphemes, phonemes, or features. These different levels are translatable either from higher levels to lower levels or vice versa. In order to come up with a hierarchical description, an underpinning step is segmentation. It is only after utterances being segmented into linear sequences of sounds that they can be analyzed into components and constituents and still further into a hierarchical structure. Then the question arises: how do linguists segment a given utterance? Given the same utterance, experimental phonetics has proved that no two utterances are identical in their ‘phonetic substance’; the possibility of deriving a unique analysis of the underlying set of phonemes was also deemed impossible (Chao, 1934). Yet linguists do not see this as a hindrance to carrying out structural analysis, instead, they expect that in the ultimate analysis, the speech chain can be uniquely divided into constituents on every level of the hierarchical structure and once the hierarchy is located, it will be

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considered to be what speakers of that linguistic system are actually using. Harris (1981, p. 57) observes with insight: Competing phonemic analyses continued to proliferate, on the confident assumption that what now needed to be determined was which one of the analytically possible phoneme systems the speakers of the language were ‘really’ using.

This also explains the differences in epistemological assumptions between phonetics and phonology. While phonetics recognizes the impossibility of locating the same phonetic units, phonology believes in the sameness of utterances simply because there must be identical sound forms on a phonological level in a linguistic system. In other words, the logic of structural linguistics necessitates the a­ ssumption of sameness of form and meaning in phonological segmentation. Bloomfield, for example, states that ‘the fundamental assumption of linguistics’ is that ‘in certain communities (speech-communities) some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning’ (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 144). This logic also extends to the conception of a particular morpheme as the same across different contexts: ‘because when it has a different meaning, we have to do not with the same but with a different morpheme’ (Antal, 1961, p. 218). The move of distinguishing between phonetics and phonology and further excluding phonetics from linguistics proper has significant implications for the development of linguistics. To a certain extent, it directly enables linguists to continue to isolate on different levels more conceptual items, structures and relations. That is why John Ohala (1990, p. 162) points out that linguistics risks losing ‘an empirical rein on the tendency to reify’ by dismissing phonetics, which ‘looks at and seeks answers to a much broader range of phenomenon including speech behaviour’ (1990, p. 168). Moreover, one may ask, where does this presumed ‘sameness’ of form and meaning come from? In structural linguistics, it is simply taken for granted as the premises of the discipline. However, many authors (Harris, 1986, 1987; Hutton, 1990; Love, 1990) guide us to see the roles of the technology of writing, the presence of dictionaries and lay metalinguistic practices in giving rise to this ‘sameness’. They even argue that writing has already done linguistic analysis for linguists: with its visible, concrete marks, writing provides an abstract analysis in the identification and reidentification of particular sounds, which however are invisible and ephemeral. For them, by writing down a language, we already segment sounds into units. Moreover, this division provided by writing systems is culturally constrained (see Ong, 1982, p. 22). Writing technologies and cultural products such as dictionaries also contribute to our solid intuition that there are recurrent units in languages and words are repeatable. They argue that our  common sense notions about language units remain so entrenched that they already become an essential part in our understanding of how language works. Lastly, as they point out, our metalinguistic talk provides resources for us to identify linguistic units as the same and to make generalizations about words, to count words, to make requests of repetition, etc. Due to this failure to examine the historical and cultural complexities concerning identification of linguistic units, structural linguists take sameness of linguistic units as given and proceed to study linguistic systems in hierarchical terms. The system

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composed of discrete units made available by writing and printing technologies is then projected onto the speech and it is believed that different utterances at different times are identical in the sense that they are all tokens conforming to a type in langue as a system. The fact that linguistics can actually give an analysis in this manner about a certain language, in the logic of structural linguistics, further confirms the ‘real’ existence of an underlying linguistic system. Seen in this light, language use simply becomes a matter of deploying a predetermined system of types and tokens. Interestingly, Saussure, in the Course, actually recognizes the phonetic differences in different pronunciations of messieurs in the same context. He remarks that though we feel that in each case, the different messieurs are the same expression, there exist noticeable phonetic differences between them due to variations of delivery and intonation. He also notices that sometimes these differences are so marked that they can in other cases serve to differentiate one word from another (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 151). Yet the puzzling fact is that we still recognize them as the same expression. How does this happen? He offers the following explanation: We assign identity, for instance, to two trains (‘the 8.45 train from Geneva to Paris’), one of which leaves twenty-four hours after the other. We treat it as the ‘same’ train, even though probably the locomotive, the carriages, the staff etc. are not the same. Or if a street is demolished and then rebuilt, we say it is the same street, although there may be physically little or nothing left of the old one. (ibid.)

These identities, in Saussure’s conception, are not based upon any material identity as in the case of a suit found after it got stolen. For him, in every utterance of the word messieurs, the material being of the utterance is ‘renewed’ and it becomes ‘a new act of phonation and a new psychological act’ (ibid). He further clarifies, The link between two uses of the same word is not based upon material identity, nor upon exact similarity of meaning, but upon factors that the linguist must discover, if he is to come anywhere near to revealing the true nature of linguistic units. (ibid.)

Apparently, this attitude, which calls for the efforts of linguists to ‘discover’ the factors which contribute to the identity of words, is significantly different from that of Bloomfield (1926, pp. 154–155), who defines sameness of forms as a prerequisite for linguistic research: Similarly, The book is interesting and Put the book away, are partly alike (the book). Outside of our science these similarities are only relative; within it they are absolute.

By taking this similarity as ‘absolute’, structural linguistics ends up sweeping under the carpet one of the most essential enquiries in linguistic research. On the other hand, what structural linguistics fails to consider is the importance of lay talk. A close examination of lay talk reveals that the ‘sameness’ is actually an achievement of individual speakers from their constant decision-making in shifting contexts. For example, Love (1990, p. 100) points out that what constitutes ‘saying the same thing’ depends on the kind of sameness required. A relevant example is what counts as ‘saying the same thing’ in detecting plagiarism. Two sentences which do not have a single word in common can be counted as ‘saying the same thing’ and in

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consequence be labeled as plagiarism if no reference is made. To be sure, decision-­ making and evaluation have to be further embedded in specific legal, cultural and political circumstances. Hutton (1990, pp. 180–181) also makes the following analysis on lay practices of repetition and type-token relations: In order to repeat something or to carry it over from one context to another, we need to analyse it. Firstly, we remove it as an object from the surrounding (preceding, subsequent and simultaneous) action; secondly, we give it our voice, our accent, we may omit certain pausing, paraphrase to some extent, etc. If we say that someone used a certain word, we have segmented their discourse for a certain analytic purpose. There is therefore a (constructed or pseudo-) iconic relation holding between, for example, an utterance and the citation of an utterance. We are invoking the equation ‘cat’ = ‘cat’ by defining an utterance as an instance of cat. We create an ideal iconic triangle from type to token to repeated token in order to give coherence to the world. The perspective in time from one instance to another, plus the conflating (ideal orthographic) identity of ‘cat’ = ‘cat’ combine to give (the impression of) meaning. The meaning of ‘cat’ is ‘cat’. But this ideal meaning is both inside and outside the interactional discourse: inside since it is ‘constructed’ and applied within, outside since it is constructed to lie outside so as to be applied within.

This quotation demonstrates how complicated it can be to establish coherence between an utterance and citation or repetition of the utterance, a process which otherwise seems to be the most straightforward. It is worth noticing that in this account lay practices do not postulate any instantiating relation between types and tokens. Instead, types and tokens, together with other metalinguistic devices, are taken as a useful way of categorizing and generalizing. They create a sense of continuity and can be treated as fixed points of reference in meaning-making activities. Besides, it should be seen that these practices are further embedded in normative,  cultural and political contexts. In contrast, linguists, in seeking answers to questions such as ‘what linguistic units or categories did the participants use’ (Hutton, 1990, p. 1) fail to illuminate real-life language use which is much richer than hypothetical language activities made up by them. Moreover, the inability of structural linguistics to question the legitimacy of treating language as a system of types and tokens precludes the possibility of providing normative explanations about grammatical regularities. Taylor (1990, p. 147) observes: If the products of verbal interaction are amenable to formalization, this is because the context-­dependent activities of producing utterances are normative activities. The patterning of language is of our own making: to explain it we must examine it in the making.

This quotation further reveals the richness of lay normative practices which give rise to the patterned features of language. In fact, by deploying metalinguistic devices and drawing on various authorities, etc., language users are constantly negotiating notions concerning correctness and appropriateness. These linguistic activities are at the heart of ‘the moral and political struggle between individual creativity and freedom and the social expectation and imposition of conformity’ (Taylor, 1990, p.  148). Apparently, structural linguistics confined to the study of formal units is in no place to come to terms with these real-life struggles which often center on language.

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To conclude, we can see that the act of reification performed by structural linguistics is an important step in setting up linguistic analysis and developing descriptive metrics, yet its understanding of language severely precludes any reflection on the richly embedded nature of language use and how situated lay practices contribute to the ‘regularity’ of language forms. Their abstracting moves prove to be a misleading step in that the normative dimensions of language in use and lay metalinguistic practices, which can shed light on the significant processes of how individuals use language and negotiate meanings are hidden from critical attention.

References Antal, A. (1961). Sign, meaning, context. Lingua, 10, 211–219. Bloch, B., & Trager, G. L. (1942). Outline of linguistic analysis. Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America. Bloomfield, L. (1925). Why a linguistic society? Language, 1(1), 1–5. Bloomfield, L. (1926). A set of postulates for the science of language. Language, 2(3), 153–164. Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: Henry Holt. Chao, Y. R. (1934). The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems. In Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology (Vol. IV, pp. 363–397). Taipei: Academia Sinica. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1986). The origin of writing. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1987). The language machine. London: Duckworth. Hutton, C. (1990). Abstraction and instance: The type-token relation in linguistic theory. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Love, N. (1984). Psychologistic structuralism and the polylect. Language & Communication, 4(3), 225–240. Love, N. (1990). The locus of languages in a redefined linguistics. In H. G. Davis & T. J. Taylor (Eds.), Redefining linguistics (pp. 53–117). London: Routledge. Ohala, J.  J. (1990). There is no interface between phonology and phonetics: A personal view. Journal of Phonetics, 18(2), 153–172. Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Routlege. Saussure, F.  D. (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. English version: Saussure, F. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). London: Duckworth. Taylor, T.  J. (1990). Normativity and linguistic form. In H.  G. Davis & T.  J. Taylor (Eds.), Redefining linguistics. London: Routledge. Trager, G. L., & Smith, H. L. (1957). An outline of English structure. Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies. Weiss, A. P. (1925). One set of postulates for a behavioristic psychology. Psychological Review, 32(1), 83–87.

Chapter 4

Chomsky: System and the Ideal Speaker–Hearer

Trained as a structuralist linguist with Zellig Harris, Chomksy made his name as a revolutionary figure in twentieth-century linguistics by proposing a new model of linguistic description—generative grammar—and eventually a new model of doing linguistic science. While I believe that Chomsky (especially in his later phase) may have moved out of the structuralist camp, it will be argued that he still espouses a reified and systemic view of language1. I will in this part investigate how Chomskyan linguistics subscribes to a system view of language and how this view is closely linked to his advocacy of linguistics as a science. By placing language users’ competence at a central place, Chomsky draws attention to the role of human speakers; yet as will be made clear in the following discussions, his idealized scientific model gives rise to and sponsors a constrained and deterministic image of the human speaker. Aiming at developing a generative model of grammar which is expected to not only describe the grammatically correct sentences within a specific language but also to predict whether a new sentence is grammatical or not, Chomskyan linguistics impressed its readers as proposing a more scientific model than Bloomfieldian linguistics. Paul Postal, a former follower of Bloomfield, after knowing more about Chomsky’s works, remarks: The general views [Bloomfieldians held] were very primitive and silly—ideas involving rigorous collection of data and cataloguing, and all that kind of stuff. They took this to be science, very genuinely and kind of sadly. And, as far as one could see, this had no connection with what modern science was like. (Quoted in Harris, 1993, p. 34)

 As is observed by Martin Joos, ‘We must attempt to place this movement in relation to our neoSaussurean tradition, in which our neo-Bloomfieldian “discriptive linguistics” is the most conspicuous sect on the American scene. The Generative Grammar movement seems to flout this tradition; but it does not so much by denying or reversing any of its tenets as by disregarding some of them as irrelevant to the descriptive program. This makes it possible to attempt to describe the movement as a heresy within the neo-Saussurean tradition rather than as a competitor to it’ (1961, p. 17). 1

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It is thus worth investigating whether Chomsky’s model really better represents ‘true modern science’. Chomsky (1980, pp. 9–10) advocates the necessity of pursing scientific linguistic research in a Galilean manner, which is, to move beyond superficiality by a readiness to undertake perhaps far-reaching idealization and to construct abstract models that are accorded more significance than the ordinary world of sensation, and correspondingly, by readiness to tolerate unexplained phenomena or even as yet unexplained counter-evidence to theoretical constructions that have achieved a certain degree of explanatory depth in some limited domain.

Accordingly, Chomskyan linguistics largely idealizes language use by focusing on the study of speakers’ linguistic competence. For him, linguistic competence (the speaker–hearer’s knowledge of his language) has to be distinguished from performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations) because performance reflects competence only in ideal situations when, […] an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)

Considering that speakers in everyday situations are not speakers in ideal situations, Chomsky’s project of getting at the ‘underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance’ (Chomsky, 1965, p. 4) faces unavoidable difficulties. Now we will take a detailed look at his methods which  can be summarized as follows. He observes that for speaker–hearers of a certain language, they can easily produce or understand new sentences which they have never said or heard before; besides, they can make a distinction between grammatical and non-grammatical sentences in a straightforward fashion. This observation leads him to postulate that there exists in every speaker– hearer an innate language organ which endows them with such competence. Then the question arises: how can a linguist gain a better understanding of this innate capacity in each language user? Chomsky proposes that if linguists can work out a device which generates all and only the grammatical sentences in a language in a way corresponding to a native speaker’s intuitive judgments, they will uncover the mental reality underlying actual linguistic behavior. In Chomsky’s agenda, this device is called generative grammar. Thus conceived, speaker–hearers are portrayed as individuals who possess linguistic knowledge and can provide judgments concerning the grammaticality of certain sentences2 while it is generative linguists’ task to work out the system of rules that ‘expresses his [a native speaker’s] knowledge of his language’3 (Chomsky, 1965, p. 8). An interesting twist is, for Chomsky, the fact  In his later publications (Chomsky, 1986, pp. 36–37), even this role is diminished when Chomsky plunges deep into researching about the neural-biological basis of the language faculty. 3  Wise (2011, p. 16) points out that influenced by Chomskyan model of linguistic knowledge, primary school teaching in some parts of the USA sets one of its goals to be ‘allowing students to discover the unconscious knowledge they already possess with respect to language and language rules’. 2

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that every speaker of a language has ‘mastered or internalized’ a generative grammar does not necessarily mean that they are aware of this knowledge and can be relied upon to provide explicit answers to this question (ibid.). He writes: Any interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental processes that are far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness; furthermore, it is quite apparent that a speaker’s reports and viewpoints about his behaviour and his competence may be in error. Thus a generative grammar attempts to specify what the speaker actually knows, not what he may report about his knowledge. Similarly, a theory of visual perception would attempt to account for what a person actually sees and the mechanisms that determine this rather than his statements about what he sees and why, though these statements may provide useful, in fact, compelling evidence for such a theory. (Chomsky, 1965, pp. 8–9)

In this quotation, by analogizing between a theory of visual perception and a generative grammar, Chomsky highlights the difference between the system of rules which underlies a human capacity, be it speaking or seeing, and actual human beings’ reports and viewpoints about a capacity. With this distinction, Chomsky’s theory of linguistic knowledge boils down to a system of rules which generative linguistics sets to discover, while individual  speaker–hearer’s reports and views about their linguistic competence have nothing essential to contribute. In the part titled ‘language and unconscious knowledge’, Chomsky (1980) reasserts the aim of generative grammar to study innate mental structures which generate the grammar of language in each individual speaker. However, there is no discussion on why linguistic knowledge is unconscious4 and how that knowledge informs conscious language performance (see Dummett, 1981; Quine, 1972; Searle, 1972; Wise, 2011 for critique). What he does provide is only a certain understanding which qualifies ‘unconscious’ linguistic knowledge as ‘innate’, ‘pre-given in our minds’, adding that it ‘cannot be explicitly expressed by language users’ and that it is ‘waiting to be discovered by linguists’ (Wise, 2011, p.  170), just like in vision: while we may know how to use our eyes to look at something, we do not have conscious knowledge of how our organ of vision works, i.e. we cannot characterize the abstract mechanisms which govern the physical realization of this bodily function. On the other hand, in his usage of ‘grammar’, Chomsky explicitly equates speakers’ knowledge of linguistic rules with the hypothetical grammar theory linguists construct (Chomsky, 1968, p. 4). With this move, Chomsky on the one hand justifies the status of linguists as scientists discovering the objective truths concerning ­language behaviors, on the other hand he can legitimately dismiss the relevance of speakers’ actual linguistic behavior or their reports about linguistic rules (since they cannot access this ‘unconscious’ knowledge). Now we can see that by advocating a new model of linguistic science Chomsky continues to keep alive the notion of ‘system’: linguistics is a science studying ‘idealisations’ which include ‘an innate

 He touches upon this issue when talking about Cartesian linguistics: ‘That the principles of language and natural logic are known unconsciously, and that they are in large measure a precondition for language acquisition rather than a matter of ‘institution’ or ‘training’ is the general presupposition of Cartesian linguistics.’ (1966/2009, p. 101) 4

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system’ of linguistic competence. Moreover, language users’ roles are largely marginalized as bearers of the system whose workings are nevertheless beyond their conscious knowledge. Though Chomsky recognizes the ability of human beings to produce and understand new sentences and terms it as ‘linguistic creativity’ (Chomsky, 1962), his understanding of both new sentences and human creativity is so idealized that they have no bearing on specific cultural and historical contexts (see Part III for more details). It is true that science cannot proceed without constructing idealizations and it may seem unjustified to criticize the practice of idealization for its reductionist interpretation of data. However, the problem is, unlike idealizations in natural sciences, linguistic idealizations lack ‘operational status’ (Hutton, 1996). Generally speaking, in natural sciences, idealizations play a role in processes of calculation: once constructed, they will be used as a basis for calculation and if they are discovered to be misleading or unhelpful, they will be modified or abandoned. Moreover, as observed by Hutton (1996), scientists design replicable experiments to look for invariance and the concrete technologys produced by science further test the application of experimental results to practical ends. However no parallel practice exists in Chomskyan linguistics; what they have instead is the application of theory-­ internal categories (Hutton, 1996, p. 120). Lacking these parallel practices of continuously testing and modifying idealizations, an insistence of idealization in linguistics serves no other end than propagating the theory itself. On the other hand, some theorists lament that Chomskyan linguistics idealizes out what really needs to be explained in language behaviors. For example, G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker (1984, p. 286) observe that by treating ‘an ideal speaker’ of English in the same light as ‘a perfectly rigid lever’ in classical mechanics is to mix a normative phenomenon with a physical one. Unlike in physics, a contextless linguistic idealization, instead of illuminating, obstructs our understanding of language as a normative phenomenon, which is, first and foremost, grounded in contextual human activities. Moreover, linguists’ hope that contextual factors can simply be added back to the idealized model, as Hutton (1990, pp. 157–158) argues, is misguided. The reason is that we cannot simply ‘add ingredients back into the abstract structure’ assuming that we are adding back those elements which were omitted from the idealization based on the belief that idealizations are ‘descriptions of certain elements in the “real world”’ (ibid). In conjunction with promoting the need for idealizations, Chomskyan linguistics claims to have grasped the ‘real’ of language, which is, the native speakers’ intuition and presumes that it can be studied scientifically. For Chomsky, native speakers’ ability to tell grammatical sentences from non-grammatical ones is a universal fact which demands scientific study. However, the definition of grammaticalness is itself a political move, as remarked in Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 101): ‘it is an imposition of power in deciding which is a real/grammatical English sentence and which is not’. For Christopher Wise (2011), Chomsky’s call for a scientific study to provide evidence for the belief that there is an innate language faculty which dwells in human brains amounts to political violence. He argues that Chomsky has taken ‘a priori system’ to be biologically determined and invites readers to imagine human

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beings in the way ‘that we regard fruit flies’ (Wise, 2011, p. 8). Moreover, he notices that Chomsky always adopts a stance of ‘a Martian scientist’ looking at human inhabitants of the earth and making universal claims about their language competence. This stance, for Wise, fails to consider language use as embedded in human relationships which ‘entails problems, obligations, difficulties, and complications that no recourse to extraterrestrial life-forms can ever hope to solve’ (Wise, 2011, p. 104). Therefore, in a way, as these authors argued, by concentrating on the study of ‘grammaticalness’, Chomsky may have trivialized the conditions surrounding human language use. In a Chomskyan ideal situation, human beings can understand, for instance, a sentence composed of unlimited words as long as it is grammatical, regardless of the fact that these kinds of sentences are humanly unacceptable considering our limitations of memory, energy and lifespan. By putting the limitations down to inessentials of performance and considering ‘such limitations as immaterial to natural language and therefore as not really affecting the human condition as far as competence is concerned’ (Verhaar, 1973, p.  408), Chomskyan linguistics proves inadequate in addressing the real contexts of human language use. One may argue that it is not his intention in the first place to study these aspects of language use, as privileged by his critics, yet it is worth reflecting on the consequences of adopting this idealized perspective, which ends up abstracting away from linguistic study those essential circumstances underlying real-life language use, especially when individual speakers are concerned.

References Baker, G. P., & Hacker, P. M. S. (1984). Language, sense and nonsense: A critical investigation into modern theories of language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Chomsky, N. (1962). The logical basis of linguistic theory. Preprints of papers from the 9th International Congress of Linguists (pp. 509–574). Cambridge, MA. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian linguistics: A chapter in the history of rationalist thought. Cambridge, UK: New York: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1966) Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations (Vol. 3, p. 1). New York: Columbia University Press. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin and use. California: Greenwood Publishing Group. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. Dummett, M. (1981). Objections to Chomsky. London Review of Books, 3(16), 5–6. Harris, R. A. (1993). The linguistics wars. New York: Oxford University Press. Hutton, C. (1990). Abstraction and instance: The type-token relation in linguistic theory. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Hutton, C. (1996). Law lessons for linguists? Accountability and acts of professional classification. Language and Communication, 16(3), 205–214. Joos, M. (1961). Linguistic prospects in the United States. In C.  Mohrmann (Ed.), Trends in European and American linguistics 1930–1960 (pp. 11–20). Utrecht: Spectrum.

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Quine, W. V. O. (1972). Methodological reflections on current linguistic theory. In D. Davidson & G. Harman (Eds.), Semantics of natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel. Searle, J. R. (1972, June 29). Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics. The New York Review of Books (pp. 16–24). Verhaar, J.  W. M. (1973). Phenomenology and present-day linguistics. In M.  Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the social sciences (Vol. 1, pp.  361–451). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Wise, C. (2011). Chomsky and deconstruction: The politics of unconscious knowledge. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 5

Labov: Systemic Variation and Knowledge

As is made clear in previous chapters, both Bloomfieldian structural linguistics and Chomskyan generative grammar restrict the main object of linguistic study to either the hierarchical grammar or the linguistic device in the individual’s brain; other issues concerning language and language use are in turn dismissed as the remainder, the ghost, the noise, or the trash bin (Lecercle, 2002, p. 66). Against this backdrop, the founding father of sociolinguistics, William Labov can be seen to have made the first effort to investigate the ‘noise’ ignored by mainstream linguistics, that is, linguistic variation.1 His study of linguistic variation extends the Saussurean system into the field of ‘parole’ by mapping out the systematic correlations between linguistic features and social factors. One may read his work as an important attempt in linguistics to reconnect the system with the ‘outside’ noise. However, based on detailed analysis of his studies, in what follows I will argue that his theory is crippled by a problematic understanding of the individual speaker. In the 1970s, far from being satisfied with the situation of linguistics dominated by a Chomskyan model, Labov proposes a change, that is, a new way of doing linguistics: [W]e need a new way of doing linguistics that will yield decisive solutions. By enlarging our view of language, we encounter the possibility of being right […]. There are many linguists who do not believe that there is a right or wrong side to theoretic alternatives […]. It is reasonable to believe that they [his own solutions to observed sociolinguistic problems] are more than constructions of the analyst—that they are properties of language itself. (1972, p. 259)

Rather than relying on one’s own so-called native speaker’s intuition as Chomskyan linguists do, Labov encourages studying linguistic data as linguistic facts (which in turn are social facts) so that one can capture the truth about language in a realist sense and then decide whose theory is better than the other. Drawing on  It should be acknowledged though outside mainstream structural linguistics, there has always been an interest in linguistic variation, which can be traced back to no less than Charles Bally (1905, 1909/1951). I am grateful to Paul Thibault for pointing this out. 1

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Householder’s distinction between hocus-pocus view and God’s truth view (Householder, 1952), we may subsume Labovian linguistics in the latter camp considering its attempts to discover certain truths about language and the beliefs that language theories can be contested to be true or false. Behind this new vision of linguistics lies Labov’s strong dissatisfaction with Saussurean linguistics’s focus of studying a homogenous linguistic structure, of which Chomsky’s theory of linguistic competence was the newest example. For him, on the one hand this theoretical preference in Saussurean linguistics excludes the study of social behavior or the study of speech; on the other hand, attempts to locate a homogeneous linguistic system have led linguists to develop smaller and smaller objects of linguistic description, such as Bloch’s concept of the ‘idiolect’ (Bloch, 1948). For Labov, this represents ‘a defeat of the Saussurean notion of langue as an object of uniform social understanding’ (1972, p. 192). Moreover, this emphasis on structured homogeneity proves inadequate to explain language change. In a paper co-written with Weinreich and Herzog (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968, pp. 100–101), Labov argues that ‘if a language has to be structured in order to function efficiently, how do people continue to talk while the language changes, that is, while it passes through periods of lessened systematicity?’ All these considerations push Labov to propose a new understanding of language, system and variation, that is, ‘structured heterogeneity’. This understanding asserts that speakers’ command of various linguistic forms, which is treated in previous linguists’ hands in terms of either ‘multidialectalism or “mere” performance’ (Weinreich et al., 1968, pp. 100–101), actually constitutes their monolingual linguistic competence. Also, he thinks that with this notion we can explain how continuing communication within the speech community is possible during processes of language change because new forms and structures must at some stage have coexisted with the old forms and structures: In the origin of a change, it is one of innumerable variations confined to the use of a few people. In the propagation of the change, it is adopted by such large numbers of speakers that it stands in contrast to the older form along a broad front of social interaction. In the completion of the change, it attains regularity by the elimination of competing variants. (Labov, 1972, p. 123)

Moreover, during the time when varied forms and structures coexist, they acquire different social affects according to their association with a certain group of speakers (Labov, 1972, p. 251). In this sense, the study of linguistic data and their social significance will not only reflect the synchronic linguistic state but also provide clues to predict diachronic changes.2 In this new framework, linguistic variation can no longer be considered to be isolated from social contexts in a community. Instead, researchers set to carry out field work to prove hypotheses concerning the correlation between linguistic forms and social factors including social class, age and gender. For example, in his famous study of New York department stores published in 1972, the consonantal [r] in postvocalic position, which tends to be highly sensitive to social stratification, is defined  See Weinreich et al. (1968) for a detailed account of a sociolinguistic theory of language change.

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as a variable. Its two variants: (r–1) and (r–0) are found to be systematically correlated with social status factors: the more prestigious the department store is (correspondingly it serves more upper class customers), the more frequent usage of (r–1) is detected. This study provides a good example about the systematic nature of linguistic variation by considering linguistic-external factors. In another study on African American Vernacular English, Labov proposed the notion of variable rule (1972, p. 218) to further explain the possibility of systematically modeling ­linguistic variation. He defines variable rules as rules more or less applying depending on linguistic or social factors. For example, [-cont] → /[+cons] ___ ##

This rule states that a stop is only ‘variably’ deleted after a consonantal segment at the end of a word depending on whether a vowel follows this word or not; it will be deleted more often if a vowel does not follow. Postulation of variable rules enabled Labov to more formally describe the systematic interaction of linguistic and non-linguistic constraints. This need to formalize variation also suggests Labov’s hope to develop a new model of linguistic competence other than Chomsky’s which gives no place to speakers’ tacit knowledge of linguistic variation. He writes: The ability of human beings to accept, preserve and interpret rules with variable constraints is clearly an important aspect of their linguistic competence or langue. But no one is aware of this competence, and there are no intuitive judgments accessible to reveal it to us. Instead, naïve perception of our own and others’ behaviour is usually categorical, and only careful study of language in use will demonstrate the existence of this capacity to operate with variable rules. (1972, p. 226)

This is a very important quotation to consider Labov’s understanding of speaker’s competence in dealing variation. First, it is clear that consistent with his dec­ larations about a new way of doing linguistics quoted above, this statement again emphasizes the advantages of his research in that it captures a certain truth about speakers’ competence which ‘no one is aware of’ and ‘no intuitive judgments’ provides access to. Second, he contrasts variable rules which specify the frequency of the application of a certain rule with the categorical ‘naïve perception of our own and others’ behaviour’ and clearly endorses the former. In a footnote, he provides a detailed explanation about the ‘naïve perception of our own and others’ behaviour’. It states that in an experiment designed by him, a continuous range of frequency in the application of a rule is presented, for example, in the case of how often one drops the ‘g’ in pronuncing –ing. He notices that up to a certain point the subjects do not perceive the speakers dropping their ‘g’ at all and beyond a certain point, they perceive them as always doing so. For Labov, this is true of other human categorization activities, such as the perception of someone’s eating habits, for example, ‘she eats like a bird; he never knows when to stop’, etc. This categorical perception, according to him, is caused by strong social values associated with standards of role performance. However, he continues: ‘But note that even this sharp alteration of judgments requires the observer to be (unconsciously) sensitive to frequency’ (p.  226). Labov argues that human beings are unconsciously r­esponding to

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f­ requencies in a precise way as evidenced by the existence of ‘a certain point’ in a continuous range of frequency, though consciously we are only aware of the ‘sharp alteration of judgments’, which is, either ‘always doing so’ or ‘not at all’. In addition, he implies that it is due to our unconscious sensitivity to frequency that we are able to form categorical judgments. Upon closer examination, however, this view about categorization is very problematic. As speaking human agents, we make generalizations all the time and we consciously know that we are making generalizations. Sometimes when questioned about certain generalizing judgments, we will either make explanations or modify our judgments. By implying the existence of an unconscious yet sensitive-to-frequency human capacity, Labov is ‘constructing’ a real basis for his postulation of variable rules. The purpose is, given that variable rules are ‘an inherent and regular property of the system’ (Labov, 1972, p. 225), a corresponding human capacity as thus conceived will strengthen his argument that ‘the ability of human beings to accept, preserve and interpret rules with variable constraints is clearly an important aspect of their linguistic competence or langue’. Yet, this effort of his to systemize language variation puts the cart before the horse. Moreover, one may ask  what will this linguistic competence encompassing the capacities to use and understand variable rules look like? Very likely, it may look like one of Fasold’s hypotheses about the speaker’s knowledge, that is, the speaker must know ‘the precise frequency percentage they should have as the output of a variable rule in some environment’ (Fasold, 1978, p. 85). According to this hypothesis, speakers have to constantly adjust their linguistic output in order to contribute to a certain linguistic state when a certain frequency is expected. To use an analogy, this amounts to saying: Hong Kong residents with post-secondary degree unconsciously ‘make’ their decision to live in Wanchai or not to make sure that the percentage of residents with post-secondary degree in this district would be 36.3% for the year 2011. Clearly this is humanly impossible. In brief, Labov’s non-­Chomskyan model of linguistic competence which considers social factors and linguistic variations turns out to be highly problematic in its understanding of individual speakers. To quote the observations made by Suzanne Romaine: To describe the occurrences of utterances of speakers/groups in terms of probabilistic laws (which are said to be variable rules in a model of grammar) is one thing, but to project such rules on the competence of individual speakers of a language and then to suppose that speakers or their mental capabilities are in any way constrained by them is, in my opinion, methodologically inadmissible. (1981, pp. 105–106)

Based on earlier discussion of Chomsky in Chap. 4, it is not difficult to see the similarities between Labov and Chomsky: despite the fact that for Chomsky, linguistic competence is essentially idealized, i.e. irrelevant to language use, while Labov takes pains to subsume social knowledge paired with linguistic knowledge into the competence, both theorists attribute a system of rules to individual language users. Moreover, in their definitions, this system of rules is not always consciously known to language users yet accessible to linguists. When studying Black English, Labov remarks that:

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The appropriate use of the deletion rule, like the contraction rule, requires a deep and intimate knowledge of English grammar and phonology. Such knowledge is not available for conscious inspection by native speakers: the rules we have worked out for standard contraction have never appeared in any grammar, and are certainly not a part of the conscious knowledge of any standard English speakers. Nevertheless, the adult or child who uses these rules must have formed at some level of psychological organization clear concepts of ‘tense marker,’ ‘verb phrase,’ ‘rule ordering,’ ‘sentence embedding,’ ‘pronoun,’ and many other grammatical categories which are essential parts of any logical system. (Labov, 1969, p. 20)

This quotation captures with clarity how linguists’ terms are fed back into the unconscious knowledge of language users. This way of conceptualizing linguistic knowledge by granting privilege to linguists’ explanations and knowledge, in a way, reveals their aspiration to attain professional expertise.3 The following incident recounted by Labov (1997) provides a good illustration. In 1987, Labov was asked to make some testimony concerning two accents based on his linguistic expertise. One accent was of the man who made repeated telephone calls of bomb threats; another was of the suspect. The moment he heard these accents, he could tell that they were not of the same person. One was from New York City while the other was from the Boston area of Eastern New England. Having considered his testimony, the Judge immediately found the defendant not guilty because the linguistic evidence provided by Labov was ‘objective’ and ‘powerful’. At some point in the article, Labov proudly claims that as a linguistic scientist, he can lay his hands on the reality below the surface. It is true that linguists’ terminology of talking about linguistic features is, most of the time, opaque to language users, yet this in no way leads to the conclusion that ordinary people are not conscious of their linguistic knowledge and are not sensitive to how language is used. Returning back to Labov’s experience in court, we might ask to what extent is his judgment a linguist’s judgment? We can very well imagine that a lay man who has a keen sense of accents is capable of making the same judgment, if not being treated as having the same authority. On the other hand, is it possible that linguists’ postulation of unconscious knowledge on language users’ part is only a red herring which strategically invalidates any serious consideration of language users’ accounts of linguistic knowledge? Drawing on a personal example, I will argue in the following that this understanding of lay users’ linguistic knowledge fails to see how linguistic knowledge can be contextually built up in actual learning and living situations. My example is about learning ‘tones’. I used to agree with my Western friends that it must have been very easy for me to learn tones in Cantonese since I already spoke Mandarin Chinese until I found out that it was not the case. It is true that according to some linguistic description, in Cantonese there are more tones than Mandarin Chinese and their features are different. Yet I do not think that actually

 In Labov’s case, this expertise in systematically describing the structures and logic of languages, e.g. Black English, is urgently called for to correct the institutional racism against black school kids in the 1960s (see Labov, 1969). 3

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explains why I had difficulties learning tones in Cantonese. Somehow my ability to tell different tones apart in Mandarin Chinese cannot be transferred in the case of Cantonese. I came to doubt whether there is an abstract category of knowledge about tones stored away somewhere in my brain, which can be applied in learning another tonal language. I also remembered the moment when I first discovered a phonological description of my dialect which is also classified as a tonal language. Until that encounter, I actually never realized that there were tones in my dialect.4 However, by referring to the description, I then could match the words I know with the tones listed in the book by following the examples given for each tone. Upon further reflection, I came to believe that the ability to tell different tones apart and pronounce them correctly, instead of deriving from unconscious knowledge, is likely to be formed in learning contexts, for example, by learning to name different tones and matching them with different samples. In other words, it is not an ability unmediated by categories in a certain context. Linguistic terms such as tones, together with metaphors, comparisons, etc. serve as handles in facilitating the learning process. We can see that by linking linguistic knowledge with unconscious mental capacities, both Labov’s and Chomsky’s theories have difficulties addressing the complexity involved in language learning which include conscious efforts to generalize, perceive, and engage with categories, such as the category ‘tones’. Again, saying that these processes involve conscious attention and efforts should not be taken to mean that we are always aware of these layers and how they have shaped our conceptualization of speech and writing in general. Feyerabend (1993, p. 72) argues: The teaching procedures both shape the ‘appearance’ or ‘phenomenon’, and establish a firm connection with word, so that finally the phenomena seem to speak for themselves without outside help or extraneous knowledge. They are what the associated statements assert them to be. The language they ‘speak’ is, of course, influenced by the beliefs of earlier generations which have been held for so long that they no longer appear as separate principles, but enter the terms of everyday discourse, and, after the prescribed training, seem to emerge from the things themselves.

As language learners in a certain context, we never start from ‘zero’ and we are never free from the ways offered by a certain culture to talk about language and classify linguistic knowledge. In the words of Taylor (2011, p. 582): What we come to know of language—its forms, content, and properties, its powers and uses—is largely a culturally defined construct of our commonplace metadiscursive practices, in much the same way as is what we take ourselves to know about other sociocultural, moral and psychological domains. Our acquisition of linguistic knowledge, in other words, is informed by our developing ability to participate (receptively as well as productively) in the metadiscursive practices of our communicational community.

Seen in this light, one’s ability to identify tones is an outcome of familiarity with certain classificatory terms that are used, for example, in teaching contexts, to talk about words with different tones. As language users, we cannot always make a dis I have learned to speak the dialect growing up in a village. It was never taught to me in a classroom setting. 4

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tinction between the first reality of language and our ways of talking about language, not to mention that the so-called first reality of language is already shaped by meta-discursive practices. However, this ‘not-always-aware’ cannot be reduced to ‘unconscious’ because there is always a chance for language learners to become aware of these different layers involved or to become more aware of them. Moreover, it seems to be a mistake on the linguists’ part when they take the ease with which speakers master a certain language made possible by contextualized cultural ­training to be proof of the existence of a certain unconscious knowledge to detect certain distinctions, such as ‘tones’, that are ‘really there’ (Harris, 2012, p. 21).5 To conclude, Labovian sociolinguistics tries to map out the interrelatedness between linguistic facts and non-linguistic facts so that linguistic variation can be systematically explained. Labov also suggests that in a realistic sense individual speakers unconsciously orient to the structured nature of linguistic variation and correspondingly demonstrate patterned features in their own parole. In a sense, he fleshes out Saussure’s system by filling in details about how individual speakers, intuitively, share a system which designates how linguistic factors and social factors are correlated in a given community. It seems that his challenge of the Saussurean homogenous system by accounting for linguistic variation ends up postulating the existence of another version of system in each social member. In this picture, individual social members are constrained by the functioning of this system to respond to the distributional frequencies of certain linguistic features in certain ways. This understanding of individual speakers is dubitable especially with regard to its implications concerning linguistic knowledge. He tends to prioritize linguists’ theorizing of linguistic knowledge over the examination of learners’ real-life activities, through which their knowledge is formed. This tendency proves to be unhelpful in considering how linguistic knowledge is mediated with and shaped by multiple processes of contextualization, including both meta-discursive lay practices and linguists’ theorizing projects.

References Bally, C. (1905). Précis de stylistique: Esquisse d’une méthode fondée sur l’étude du français modern. Geneva, Switzerland: A. Eggiman. Bally, C. (1951). Traité de stylistique française (2nd ed.). Paris: Klincksieck. (Original work published 1909) Bloch, B. (1948). A set of postulates for phonemic analysis. Language, 24(1), 3–46. Fasold, R. W. (1978). Language variation and linguistic competence. In D. Sankoff (Ed.), Linguistic variation: Models and methods (pp. 85–95). New York: Academic Press. Feyerabend, P. (1993). Against method. London: Verso. Harris, R. (2012). Integrating reality. Gamlingay, England: Bright Pen.

 Or sometimes the fact that linguistic terms are used in lay talk is taken to be the proof that linguists’ terms have empirical basis, i.e. have captured the truth about language users’ behavior (see Prideaux 1999). 5

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Householder, F.  W. (1952). Review of “methods in structural linguistics” by Zellig S.  Harris. International Journal of American Linguistics, 18, 260–268. Labov, W. (1969). The study of nonstandard English. Washington, DC: National Council of Teachers of English. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W. (1997). How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it. Cogprints. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/HowIgot.html. Lecercle, J. (2002). Deleuze and language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Prideaux, G.  D. (1999). God’s truth’ and sturcturalism: A new look at an old controversy. In S. Embleton, J. E. Joseph, & H. Niederehe (Eds.), The emergence of the modern language sciences. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. Romaine, S. (1981). The status of variable rules in sociolinguistic theory. Journal of Linguistics, 17(1), 93–119. Taylor, T.  J. (2011). Language development and the integrationist. Language Sciences, 33(4), 579–583. Weinreich, U., Labov, W., & Herzog, M. I. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In W. P. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (Eds.), Directions for historical linguistics: A symposium. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Chapter 6

Bucholtz and Hall: System and Identity

Influenced by new constructivist social theories and responding to so-called post-­1960s late-modernity social changes, some branches of sociolinguistics have embraced a dynamic study of language and identity to see how identity is discursively constructed through individual choices of speech. Nikolas Coupland comments with the following words: Late-modernity makes social life more contingent and unpredictable, and the epistemology of social construction is a response to it. We might say that social life is more obviously amenable to being socially constructed in late-modernity, and this brings language and discourse more clearly into perspective. Language is a major resource through which we construct our social worlds and sociolinguistic approaches to local contextualizations of meaning are well attuned to this perspective. (Coupland, 2007, p. 30)

With social life being portrayed in constructivism as more contingent and unpredictable, the role of language and discourse then somehow comes to the foreground and they are seen as the forces which shape our various social worlds. It is also implied that sociolinguistics provides tools to study this newly discovered role of language and discourse.  This role is not about language users’ orientation to general normative tendencies in a given speech community as in Labovian studies; rather, it is mediated through the individual’s moment-to-moment linguistic practices in identity formation. Social theories such as Giddens (1991) also encourage seeing linguistic variation in relation to personal choice and identity. Thus conceived, identity becomes a personal ‘project’ consciously and reflexively negotiated through by people in their daily life which involves making linguistic choices. Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall’s proposal of sociocultural linguistics (2008), which draws upon variationist sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, symbolic interactionism, and the sociology of language, attempts to capture more effectively the ‘richly contextualized and complex reality of language as a sociocultural phenomenon’ (2008, p. 422). Overall, there is a strong social constructionist underpinning in their theorizing of the relationship between language and identity. In their research, instead of treating identity as a stable structure located in the individual mind or in fixed social categories, they intend to demonstrate the processes of how identity emerges and © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_6

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circulates in local contexts and they believe that ‘identity is discursively produced even in the most mundane and unremarkable situations’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 589). For example, after introducing two case studies about how innovative identities are constructed within the constraints of interactional dynamics, they comment: Such interactions therefore highlight what is equally true of even the most predictable and non-innovative identities: that they are only constituted as socially real through discourse, and especially interaction. (2005, p. 591)

A distinct feature of their analytic framework is the emphasis on the indexical relation between linguistic form and social meaning. Unlike variationist sociolinguistics which sees language use as reflective of social identities, they treat language as constitutive of social identities. This conceptualization of ‘indexicality’ is a central concern in their project, as exemplified by the following quotation: Regardless of how we want to classify any given set of socially meaningful linguistic practices, […] indexicality works the same way: in every case, language users both draw on and create conventionalized associations between linguistic form and social meaning to construct their own and others’ identities. (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, p. 478)

With this understanding of ‘indexicality’, they link up linguistic form and social meaning by identifying the association between them as essential to language users’ identity constructing activities. For example, in Bucholtz’s field work study of Californian high-school girls, she documents the process of how certain linguistic features index ‘nerdiness’ or ‘coolness’, etc. The following transcripts are taken from her field work (2005, pp. 592–593):

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In their analysis, the use of ‘quotative markers’ such as ‘be all’ and ‘be like’ is identified as one linguistic marker to index ‘youth’ identity. More nuanced differences are further  detected between these two speakers  in the transcripts (2005, p. 593): Christine and Josie both index their youth through their use of these innovative quotative markers, but their choice of different markers indexes more local dimensions of their identity. Christine is a self-described nerd, who values intelligence and nonconformity and, unlike cool students, is not interested in pursuing the latest trends, whether in fashion or language; Josie, by contrast, is one of the most popular girls in the school, and her exclusive use of the innovative quotative marker [the newer and more semiotically marked form ‘be all’] signals her trendiness.

For them, the nerdiness and trendiness indexed by the use of different quotative markers illustrated above are micro, local categories and ‘transitory interactional positions’ emerging in real-time discourse (ibid.). So instead of understanding identities in the traditional sense as confined to ‘more widely recognized constructs of social subjectivity’ (2005, p.  592), they recognize identities as micro categories concerning the interactional positions which social actors occupy and abandon in shifting contexts. Critics (Cameron & Kulick, 2003) take issue with their essentialization of social identities evidenced by direct links between social categorization and linguistic forms. However, for both Bucholtz and Hall, the mechanism of indexicality is not always as straightforward as demonstrated above. Building upon Elinor Ochs’s (1992) study of indirect social indexicality, Bucholtz and Hall defend against the above critique by making a distinction between indirect indexicality and the direct one: This kind of indirect indexicality allows for the creation of multiple indexical links to a single linguistic form. […]. The discovery that different groups may use similar linguistic resources for identity construction, far from vitiating the concept of identity, demonstrates the robust capacity to create new social meanings from existing linguistic practices. (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, pp. 475–476)

Furthermore, they introduced two examples of conventional associations between social meaning and linguistic forms being severed, e.g. when ‘a biologically male speaker uses feminine gendered pronouns or a speaker phenotypically classified as nonblack uses African American English’ (2005, p. 588). These examples for them subvert the essentialist notion of identity and support an emergent view of how identity is discursively produced instead of preceding ‘the semiotic practices that call them into being in specific interactions’ (ibid.). The underlying argument in their defense runs like this: as long as there is not a fixed one-to-one pairing of linguistic features and social identities, they are safe from accusations of being ‘essentialist’. However, upon closer study of their work (e.g. Bucholtz, 1999), we find them constantly linking linguistic features emerging in discourse with indexed social meanings. To use an example:

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(Bucholtz, 1999, p. 218) In her analysis of this episode, Bucholtz establishes links between linguistic forms and a certain identity practice or a refusal to participate in a certain practice: These questions display Bob’s nerd identity through her use of puns on the word crust (lines 85, 87). Punning, as a discourse practice that orients to linguistic form, is characteristic of nerd’s discourse style (see Table 1). Carrie’s refusal (line 88) to participate in Bob’s punning thus constitutes a negative identity practice—one which, moreover, indexes a rejection of nerd identity as it has been constructed through preceding interactional practices. The refusal is made more evident by her exploitation (line 86, 88–90) of Bob’s syntactic template. By conforming to the syntactic form of Bob’s turn, while failing to conform to the discourse practice of punning, Carrie separates herself from Bob at a point when the latter is fully engaged in nerdy identity practices. (Bucholtz, 1999, pp. 218–219)

It is true that in the above account, the relation between the linguistic form and an indexed identity might not be fixed in advance as it tends to be in an essentialist account, yet, as is sharply pointed out by Pablé, Haas, and Christie (2010), what is the researcher’s basis in making a statement about indexicality at a specific moment, namely, for a certain speaker at a certain moment, a certain linguistic feature is indexical of a certain value? What is the basis for presuming a certain relation between a linguistic feature and a social value? On the other hand, the demonstrated ability of the researcher in identifying these links which are meaningful to language users at a specific moment rests on a presumed linguistic system paired with social system shared between the researcher and subjects. That is to say, the argument that these links are created in the process of and treated as part of the interaction does not invalidate the presupposition of a certain abstract view of communication which is based on an intersubjectively shared system of meanings and values. It can be seen that this, together with other linguistic analysis based on intersubjectively shared systems, falls in the same ‘telementational fallacy’ as identified by Taylor and Cameron (1987, pp. 161–162). The study on language and identity as conceived by sociocultural linguistics claims to have rejected a codified view on language and meaning (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, p. 480) by observing how identity emerges from discursive construction in

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first-order communication. However, as discussed above, there still lurks a mistaken conception of the relationship between language and ‘reality’ in their studies due to a presumption of the existence of shared associations and meanings among language users and researchers. Seen in another perspective, Bucholtz’s project commits the error in trying to link up language and what is outside language after first separating language from non-language. Decontextualized utterances which are transcribed in their data are then claimed to index certain contextualized associations. According to Bucholtz and Hall (2005, p. 588), the emphasis on the emergent nature of identity provides an active response to other branches of research, such as, ethnomethodology’s notion of ‘doing identity’ (Sacks, 1984), the analysis of how identity is interactionally accomplished in conversation analysis, post-structuralist theory of performativity (Butler, 1990), etc.: What is shared between these lines of thought is a foregrounding of ‘action’, ‘performing’, and ‘behavior’. In Bucholtz and Hall’s study, we can see the difficulty encountered by this performative emphasis: by identifying language as one important form of social interaction which provides resources for the construction of identities, they tend to treat language as given and separate from other forms of interaction, which can then be held up as a mirror to reflect (though not in a fixed one-to-one manner) social meanings. On the other hand, as is revealed by Hacking’s (1999) critique of social constructivism, which underlies Bucholtz and Hall’s sociolinguistic accounts, linguistic terms do not always construct identities in a straightforward fashion, instead, it is people who become aware of the criteria of category membership of a given term (e.g. ‘asylum seeker’) and adjust their own behavior to fit those criteria in specific social, ­cultural and political contexts. A simplified social constructive account of language and identity cannot take into consideration these complicated processes of identity ­formation, self-presentation and negotiations, which, more than demonstrating the role of language in constructing reality, actually rely on social members’ situated, creative and reflexive use of language. On recognizing the limits of a Labovian probabilistic model of linguistic variation, Bucholtz and Hall’s theory challenges traditional sociolinguistic understandings of the speech community and moves to a social–cultural approach which emphasizes the community of practice. However, as demonstrated from the discussion above, this new trend endorses a problematic understanding of language and identity in that it presupposes a separation of linguistic and non-linguistic activities and it tends to foreground language more than other meaning-making activities as a reflection of social meanings. Moreover, in this picture, individual speakers are thought to have knowledge of the indexical meanings of language, which they apply in their identity-building discursive activities. In a  Saussurean linguistic system, meaning is strictly confined within the system and it depends on the value differences between signs. Bucholtz and Hall, though claiming to move beyond the system-­based, fixed-code view of language, to a certain extent, postulate a new system in its place linking up the domain of linguistic forms and the domain of social meanings with the concept ‘indexicality’. What remains unchanged is the paired relation between a certain linguistic (or paralinguistic) form and one or many social meanings. As I have tried to argue in this chapter, they seem to promote a view of

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individual speakers as active agents choosing linguistic resources to construct a certain identity while in fact endorsing a constrained understanding of both language and language users.

References Bucholtz, M. (1999). “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society, 28(2), 203–223. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2004). Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society, 33(4), 469–515. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2008). All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4), 401–431. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Cameron, D., & Kulick, D. (2003). Language and sexuality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Coupland, N. (2007). Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. In A.  Duranti & C.  Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp.  335–358). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Pablé, A., Haas, M., & Christie, N. (2010). Language and social identity: An integrationist critique. Language Sciences, 32(6), 671–676. Sacks, H. (1984). On doing “being ordinary”. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 413–429). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, T. J., & Cameron, D. (1987). Analysing conversation: Rules and units in the structure of talk. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press.

Chapter 7

Haugen, Mühlhäusler and Mufwene: System and Language Ecology

In recent years, there has emerged a distinct school of thought called ecology of language (also eco-linguistics) which calls attention to the links between biodiversity and linguistic diversity and highlights the need to study the ‘environment’ of languages. Three representative authors in this field, Einar Haugen, Peter Mühlhäusler and Salikoko Mufwene, despite some significant differences in their theories, all analogize language to a biological species. Briefly speaking, ecology of language, based on an ecological view of languages, has posed a challenge to the view that languages are autonomous, contained systems with clear boundaries; instead, it encourages a dynamic perspective to look at language contact and language change with special emphasis on the role of individual speakers. Furthermore, there is a strong awareness of linguists’ roles in shaping the linguistic landscape both during and after colonial periods. This field encourages a cross-disciplinary perspective in language studies and pulls the efforts of scholars from a range of disciplines including sociolinguistics, anthropology, biology, psychology and environmental studies. Moreover, the concept of linguistic diversity originated from this school has been taken up in endangered language movements both within and without academia.1 As to the usage of the biological analogy, their views differ. Both Haugen and Mühlhäusler treat the analogy more as a rhetorical strategy to build up a ‘predictive and even therapeutic’ science though they sometimes draw theoretical links between biodiversity and linguistic diversity (Mühlhäusler, 1996, p. 18), while Mufwene takes the metaphor seriously to develop a descriptive analytic tool based on macroecology, a branch of biology (Mufwene, 1994/2001, p. 153). Ecology of language as a concept was first developed in one essay in Haugen (1972). At the very beginning of this text, he states that this concept could encourage linguists to pay more attention to ‘the study of interactions between any given language and its environment’ (1972, p. 57) and move beyond the traditional field

 See Duchêne and Heller (2007), which offers a critique of discourses of language endangerment proliferating in international institutions, social media and academic programs. 1

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of linguistics, i.e. phonology, grammar and lexicon. Also, he distinguishes the environment of the language from that of its lexicon and grammar, i.e. the referential world which language indexes: The true environment of a language is the society that uses it as one of its codes. Language exists only in the minds of its users, and it only functions in relating these users to one another and to nature, i.e. their social and natural environment. Part of its ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers. Another part of its ecology is sociological: its interaction with the society in which it functions as a medium of communication. The ecology of a language is determined primarily by the people who learn it, use it, and transmit it to others. (ibid.)

At first sight, Haugen’s conceptualization of the psychological and sociological ecology of languages is reminiscent of Saussure’s emphasis on both the psychological and social aspects of langue: linguistic systems both exist in individual minds as a psychological phenomenon and in the society as a medium of communication. Yet, Haugen is more interested in the bi- and multilingual reality in speakers’ minds and he does not subscribe to the Saussurean view that each member’s mental copies of langue are approximately the same. For Haugen, every child in learning a language variety or several varieties he happens to be exposed to acquires it differently than any other child. However, this does not affect their communication among each other because they are able to understand certain varieties even when they cannot reproduce them. Haugen also notices that with maturation, children are further restrained in developing this passive competence of learning new languages due to the fact that their chances of getting exposed to different varieties are reduced. Among the factors imposed by societies are two partially independent factors called status and intimacy. By status he means ‘association with power and influence in the social group’. In consequence, the [+status] variety is normally used by the ­government, in schools or by persons of high social and economic rank, etc., while [−status] is not commonly used by any of the above groups. Intimacy on the other hand is associated with solidarity, friendship and shared values. Haugen believes that, generally speaking, all varieties can be located along a scale of [+status] and [−status] or [+intimacy] and [−intimacy] though the continuum formed by these two factors will be segmented differently in different cultures. One example is the status use of English and the intimacy use of Norwegian among Norwegian immigrants in America. He thinks that a choice between the standard language and creole can also be characterized with these two factors (as in Stewart, 1962). As to the effects of this distinction upon language speakers, Haugen observes that for those whose vernacular is closer to a status language, their learning burden would be smaller compared to those others, i.e. children in most other countries in the world, who face ‘a status ladder that increasingly removes them from their language of intimacy’ (1972, p. 62). Haugen also draws our attention to the effects of this ecology on languages themselves, for example, how Finnish and Hungarian were ‘Indo-Europeanized’ through their speakers’ borrowing from West European neighbors. Following this, Haugen challenges the structural view on language, which he terms as ‘false’, though it proved useful as a theoretical fiction in the development of linguistics. Instead, he

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highlights those situations of linguistic symbiosis where linguistic systems are ‘stretched almost out of recognition’ (ibid.) as in a language spoken with a strong foreign accent. In this development, language speakers’ accommodation efforts play a central role because they can switch and alternate among different languages. Haugen elaborates with the following words: Psychologists have been deeply interested in the problem of how languages are stored, whether as separate entities or as a single store of concepts to which words are attached. It does not appear that either of these possibilities is entirely true to the facts. Rather one can say that each item stored is somehow tagged as belonging to one or the other language and is called up by a common switching device that blocks out the items not so tagged. However, the similarity between items in different languages leads to confusion: the tags fall off, and the items become available in both languages. This reduces the speaker’s effort in switching, and in time it leads to the homogenization of the two languages. (1972, p. 64)

In this quotation, Haugen characterizes the processes of how different linguistic systems co-existing in speakers’ brains have undergone changes, which in turn lead to actual changes observable in languages used in societies. Through this homogenization of two or multi-languages, there arise ‘intermediate systems’ between the pure forms of these languages. Later, Haugen retracted with regard to the ‘purity’ of these forms ‘maintained either by monolingual populations or by rigid regulation’: However, even the pure systems are intermediate between the past and the future of their own language and intermediate between their neighbors on all sides. They just happened to get frozen for a time, either by governmental or by literary fiat. (1972, pp. 64–65)

Up to this point, we are able to gain a thorough understanding of Haugen’s view on linguistic systems and the individual speaker. It can be seen that though Haugen openly opposes the structuralist conceptualization of language as ‘systems’ by promoting an ecological view on languages, his version of linguistics is still structuralist in that languages are taken to be discrete systems which pair up forms and meanings. In this understanding, language changes are produced by the interaction of systems in individual speakers’ minds, for example through merging or homogenizing processes. However, for example in a multilingual community where intermediate systems exist and interact, how do child learners internalize any intermediate system? Do they treat it as one new system or change it back to two purer systems? Or a more fundamental question: why are languages conceptualized as systems in the first place (pure or non-pure)? This is taken for granted in Haugen though he gives space in his theories for these systems to interact just like different species interact in their shared ecology. His explanations for language variation have taken into account social, institutional and individual factors, yet the system view of languages remains an underpinning notion in his theory. This view largely constrains the roles played by individual speakers in that their efforts of accommodation and understanding are severely reduced to be the ability of alternating between different systems. The second linguist who has pursued an ecological program is Mühlhäusler. With the aim of promoting linguistic diversity, he highlights the urgency that we are losing minority languages and the cultures they encode, and thus we have to seize

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our last chance to learn from them. Compared to Haugen, he is more aware of the ideological impact exerted upon the local linguistic landscape by linguists in their field work and research activities. For him, there is no ideologically neutral linguistic research, which means linguists have to be more concerned with the effects of their research upon local language users. In his famous study Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region (1996), Mühlhäusler criticizes both structuralist and transformationalist linguistic studies in the Pacific region in that they either postulate a universally applicable descriptive apparatus or hold on to an implied denigration of linguistic diversity; moreover, in both schools, arbitrary signs instead of icon and index are taken to be the center of all communication activities (Mühlhäusler, 1996, pp. 330–331). For him, what is especially unsatisfactory is Chomskyan linguistics with its promotion of the metaphor of ‘speaker/hearer as a kind of rule-governed machine engaged in exchanging messages that can be converted into signals and back into messages by the decoder’ (Mühlhäusler, 1996, p. 331). For him, this Chomskyan model precludes linguists’ attention to language users’ efforts of accommodation. Haugen’s ecology of language is seen as one alongside many other efforts made by sociolinguists, integrationists, ethnographers of speaking, which have emerged since the 1970s to challenge Chomsky’s language theories. However, Mühlhäusler contends that Haugen’s views on language still suffer from a reification which ‘enables it to be studied in isolation, outside time, and allows one to distinguish between structure and use’ (Mühlhäusler, 1996, p. 4). For example with regard to Haugen’s practice of naming languages, he observes: [T]he identification of languages and their subsequent naming is far from being an act of objective description, and it can constitute a very serious trespass on the linguistic ecology of an area. (Mühlhäusler, 1996, p. 5).

However, Mühlhäusler acknowledges one great insight offered by ecology of languages—the recognition that linguistic diversity provides an invaluable resource which enables us to gain knowledge of the world. He explains: [M]ost perceptions of the world and parts of the world are brought into being and sustained by languages. Speakers of different languages, therefore, do not perceive the same world. Instead, different languages emphasize and filter various aspects of a multi-faceted reality in a vast number of ways. (Mühlhäusler, 2001, p. 160)

What runs behind this is a Whorfian model of language determinism based on a structuralist view that different linguistic systems divide up reality with different categories. In fact, many examples linking up grammatical features with speakers’ thought and behavior can be found in his works. For instance, he illustrates how languages affect our attitudes toward the environment: The combined propensity of Western languages to emphasize human causativity and control and their object-dominated character suggests that the best course of action is one of establishing control over a small bounded area and not, as other languages would suggest, learning to understand an undivided whole. (Mühlhäusler, 2001, p. 164)

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In addition, when documenting the ecological change that languages in the Pacific region underwent, Mühlhäusler enumerates many cases of linguistic change leading to change in thinking: A class of words that is rarely found in Pacific languages is that of abstract nouns derived from verbs or adjectives such as talk, idea, independent, virtue or love. Such abstract nouns suggest that what they refer to can exist independently of those who exhibit the characteristic referred to. They promote a shift from a transitive to an intransitive view of the world, thereby reducing agency or involvement of speakers. Abstract nouns such as independence, self-government, freedom, self-sufficiency, development, progress and numerous others that have been added to the lexicon of the languages of the area would seem to flood those speakers with conceptual clutter of the type that is difficult to accommodate into their traditional mode of thought, thus increasing for example irrational behaviour, word magic and misunderstandings. (Mühlhäusler, 1996, pp. 294–295)

These two cases provide a good illustration of Mühlhäusler’s fixed-code view on language, meaning and culture. In this view, words are taken to be encoders of certain cultural values which further determine the thinking and actions of individual speakers. It is presupposed that languages are form-meaning systems which reflect certain understandings of reality; speakers by speaking a certain language are then subjected to the influences of these understandings and values. On the other hand, it is worth pointing out, though Mühlhäusler calls our attention to disappearing languages and the knowledge they encode, his ultimate aim is ‘to enable the survival of a structured diversity rather than individual languages’ (Mühlhäusler, 1996, p. 322). The reason is, in the survival of individual languages, the role of supporting system, which constitutes the states of other individual languages, is very important (Mühlhäusler, 1996, p. 323). Despite his challenge to Haugen’s reified notion of languages as countable entities, we can see that Mühlhäusler’s theory still draws on a structural myth, as reflected from his discussions on the relationship between languages and speakers’ understanding of the world. Though there is a strong emphasis on the environments of languages, namely, how the supporting system contributes to the maintenance of languages, the underlying view is structuralist, which largely constrains speakers’ agency and understanding within the system. Moreover, Mühlhäusler’s strong awareness of the ideological influences of linguists should not prevent us from taking a critical look at the political implications of his own theory. That is, his arguments about protecting endangered languages and cultures suggest a problematic notion that the language of a people represents their characteristic nature or spirit. To a certain extent, this idea directly sponsored some radical European nationalist movements (see Cameron, 2007; Hutton, 1999). Compared to the previous two authors, Mufwene’s approach to studying the ecology of language is characterized by his taking the metaphor of language as species seriously and insisting on thinking of a language as a species. He states: [A] language is a Lamarckian species, whose genetic makeup can change several times in its lifetime. It is also a parasitic species, whose life and vitality depend on (the acts and dispositions of) its hosts, i.e. its speakers, on the society they form, and on the culture in which they live. (Mufwene, 1994/2001, p. 16)

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Thus conceptualized, idiolects of the same language are like members of the same species. Though different speakers possess a different idiolect, the fact that they can communicate means their idiolects belong to the same communal language. Moreover, Mufwene believes that individuals do not have to share a system in order to communicate: ‘all they need is familiarity with, and some ability to interpret expressions generated by, each other’s system, more or less like the algorithms of our computers and word processors.’ (Mufwene, 1994/2001, p. 148) Then the question is: what really happens in the communication process? For him, by ­communicating with different speakers, individuals contribute to the formation of a pool of linguistic features, which are further transmitted to new speakers. Unlike in biological species, linguistic features are passed on primarily horizontally and typically faster than in a species where changes are effected through vertical transmission of genes across generations. So just like interbreeding between different members of a species, communication takes place through language contact between different speakers who act like hosts of idiolects. Moreover, according to him, there is no systematic link between idiolects and languages, only family resemblances: ‘like a species, a language is an aggregating construct, an extrapolation from individual idiolects assumed to share common ancestry and several structural features (1994/2001, p.  150)’. For Mufwene, the fact that there is mutual intelligibility between different languages can be analogized to be the potential of members of a biological species to interbreed (p. 17). However, he does concede that differences exist between linguistic species and biological species. For example linguistic behavior involves conscious decisions to speak like, or differently from, some other specific speakers, for reasons of identity (p. 16). His paper ‘The Ecology of Gullah’s Survival’ (1997) provides an example of how conscious efforts to preserve a group identity helped to stabilize Gullah in changing ecologies even though it is stigmatized outside the community. Mufwene’s theory places individual speakers at the center of language contact: they are the invisible hand that executes change (1994/2001, p. 18). An important notion here is individual speakers’ ‘accommodation’ efforts. Similar to the term of ‘focusing’ in Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), ‘accommodation’ explains the process of how members come to communicate like each other. Through the accommodation of language users, some linguistic features gain more advantages than others so that they are selected and thus shape the language behavior of more members. According to Mufwene, a complete account of language change can be expressed as the following processes: While interacting with one another, speakers contribute features to a pool from which they make their selections that can affect the evolutionary trajectory of a language. The feature they contribute can be from the same language or dialect, or from different ones. The selections they make are not necessarily constrained by the origins of the features, and each idiolect reorganizes its selections on the model of blending inheritance in biology. (1994/2001, p. 18) [After the competition and selection] the language that prevails actually wins a pyrrhic victory, as it adapts itself to its new speakers and contexts of communication, i.e., to part of its changing ecology. (1994/2001, p. 162)

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Moreover, for Mufwene, this provides an explanation of how features of the individual idiolects are extended to be characteristics of a language as a communal system, that is, how linguistic features are transmitted from idiolects to languages. Behind this theorizing lies the author’s conceptualization of languages on two different levels: an I-language that is an idiolect possessed by an individual and an E-language, a communal language owned by a collective mind (Mufwene, 1994/2001, p.  2). This postulation of E-language  and I-language characterizes Mufwene’s understanding of language and its speakers as both Saussurean and Chomskyan: the former on the collective level, the latter on the individual level. Features of I-language compete through individuals’ efforts of accommodation for opportunities to become part of E-language. It is not difficult to see that in this biological model of language change made to explain how individual changes are translated to the collective ones, the experiences of language users are greatly reduced to the competition and selection of linguistic features. To conclude, in this new trend of ecological thinking about languages, despite their critical intentions to move out of a structuralist view on language and promotions of more awareness with regard to the ideological role played by linguists, there still exist problematic residues. It is difficult for these theories to address meaning-­ making experiences and activities of individual speakers, which do not always and necessarily translate to observable changes locatable on the level of languages as systems. It is true that these authors who have rich field work experiences in multi-­ lingual regions and communities offer precious critiques of armchair structuralist and generativist language theories through theorizing language in a dynamic and contextual manner, i.e. in an ecological perspective. Moreover, they foreground the status of languages including taxonomic documentation of languages, their ‘growth’ and ‘loss’, how they relate to the destiny of a certain culture, how they are taken up by new users, etc. Yet, against this backdrop, the roles of language speakers are still largely limited and only come into sight because of their use of or influence on linguistic systems, which are conceptualized as consisting of form-meaning units and linguistic features.

References Cameron, D. (2007). Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics. In A. Duchêne & M. Heller (Eds.), Discourses of endangerment (pp. 268–290). New York: Continuum. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (2007). Discourses of endangerment: Ideology and interest in the defence of languages. New York: Continuum. Haugen, E. (1972). The ecology of language. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hutton, C. (1999). Linguistics and the third reich. London: Routledge. Le Page, R. B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mufwene, S. S. (1997). The ecology of Gullah’s survival. American Speech, 72(1), 69–83. Mufwene, S.  S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1994).

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Mühlhäusler, P. (1996). Linguistic ecology: Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London: Routledge. Mühlhäusler, P. (2001). Babel revisited. In A.  Fill & P.  Mühlhäusler (Eds.), The ecolinguistics reader: Language, ecology and environment. London, New York: Continuum. Stewart, W. (1962). Creole languages in the Caribbean. In F. A. Rice (Ed.), Study of the role of second languages (pp. 34–53). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Chapter 8

Conclusion to Part I

What I have done in this part is to trace out important developments in linguistics after Saussure’s founding text. The Course, with its pioneering theoretical program of studying langue, is treated as the occasion when a ‘system’ view in linguistic study was initiated. The tensions inherent in the distinction of langue and parole have been analyzed in the light of two recent readings of Saussure. My analysis of these readings is intended to highlight some important issues in the theoretical study of language as a system, such as the relationship between the individual and the social, and how communication works.  The main section of this part  studies the notion of system in structural linguistics, generative grammar, Labovian linguistics, identity study in sociolinguistics, and ecology of language. What looms large in the picture is the incompatibility of the system view and the dynamic workings of language in social life, which involve culturally, socially, and historically situated individuals. It is observed that there has been an evergrowing tendency in linguistics, especially post-Chomskyan linguistics, to break away from a homogeneous notion of linguistic system and place the individual speaker at a more important position. Yet, as I have tried to argue, their efforts stop short of challenging the persistent belief that individual speakers share a certain pre-existing system, which remains largely independent of them. The image of language as an autonomous determinate system seems to confirm our common impression of language, which provides stability and reliability in our daily interaction. However, as I have argued throughout the part, this impression of language is actually an emergent product of the technology of writing, teaching practices, and how individuals engage with language and learning through lay practices of meaning negotiation, categorization, and reflection, etc.; failing to recognize this, linguists have excluded this diverse range of individual language use from linguistics and treated it as ‘noise’ lying outside the synchronic system. For example, Chomsky (1986, p. 26) says that languages in the common-sense meaning are not ‘real world objects’, but ‘artificial, somewhat arbitrary and perhaps not very interesting constructs’. On the other hand, this sanitized image of language projected by linguistics through its pursuit of scientific neutrality, objectivity and ­rejection of © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_8

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prescriptivism, in Hutton’s words, ‘obscures a key social fact’, that is, ‘all language use is potentially or latently monitored, contested or regulated by virtue of the fact that it can be represented as a form of behavior, a judgment, “making a statement”’ (Hutton, 2009, p. 34). Blindness to this fact has rendered mainstream structural linguistics incapable of engaging with everyday language use, which is always contextual and can always be further  contextualized in meaning-making activities. Moreover, Harris (1981, 1987), Pennycook (1994), Le Page and Tabouret-­Keller (1985) lead us to see that behind linguistics’s claim to be an objective ­universal science hides the fact that linguistics itself is a very particular cultural form. For Harris, linguistics, as a product of Western scholarship, embodies the biases and assumptions of a particular cultural tradition such as ‘the political psychology of nationalism, and an educational system devoted to standardizing the linguistic behavior of pupils’ in post-Renaissance Europe (Harris, 1981, p. 9). Again, the label of being a scientist working in linguistics cannot disguise the political implications of linguists’ work: as noted by Le Page, most Western linguists are strongly influenced in their theorizing of language ‘by their prescriptive education, by their concept of the relationship between national language and nation-states, by doctrines of correctness, and by monolithic grammars which seek always to represent all varieties of English as based upon a central English grammar’ (1985, p. 31). Joseph, Love, and Taylor (2001) echo this observation by pointing out that the so-­called culture-neutral­ science of language embodies ‘a conceptualization of languages that was already in daily use for purposes of formal linguistic education in the culture whose product that science is’ (Joseph et al., 2001, p. 218). To put it concisely, the failure to recognize these cultural, political and historical dimensions of linguistics as a discipline goes hand in hand with modern linguistics’s insistence of legitimizing its status as a Western science; the result of which, in the words of Pennycook, is that, ‘linguistics distances itself from questions concerning society, culture and politics […] and at the same time prescribes both a particular view of language (monolinguistic and phonocentric) and particular forms of that language’ (1994, p. 126). In formal linguistics, the system of language is implied to be a representation of the underlying order of language phenomenon, which enables social interaction in the first place. In this conceptual framework, social actors’ roles are largely ignored or relegated to the contingent part. Language users’ knowledge is thought to be ‘unconscious’ as they cannot articulate their understanding of language in linguistic terms. In this representationist picture, the system and the reality, or the noise, are isolated from each other and the tensions between them are always present. Is this the inevitable dilemma of constructing theories? What can we gain from this theorizing endeavor? Can we take language beyond this system? We might not go as far as Deleuze (in ‘L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze’, Boutang, 2004) to say that ‘linguistics has done a lot of harm’ through reductively representing language, and language should only be studied by literature because it captures the dynamics of language in motion. An  observation by Widdowson (2003, p.  7) on theories and language teaching might be helpful in understanding this dilemma. To remedy the general distrust of linguistic theories among language teachers, he proposes that the value of linguistic theories lies in the insights gained from what is revealed as unex-

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plainable within the theories. Linguistic theories, according to him, are what linguists’ accounts of language from a particular perspective; the very detachedness of these accounts and their differences from the way language is experienced in the real world are what make them informative. This reminds us of the short story about making maps in ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Jorge Luis Borges (1975). In order to represent the territory with great detail and precision, the cartographers end up creating an enormous map representing every geographic feature to an exact scale. And the result is—it becomes a map which is no longer useful as a guide to the territory. In the same vein, the merits of linguistic theories may be argued to be derived from the abstractions that linguists have made away from actual language behavior. From the linguists I have covered in this part, we can detect an evergrowing tendency to connect the system view with the reality of language use, be it society, identity or the ecological environment of languages. The result is either a more expansive system consisting of interrelations between language factors and non-­ language ones (as in Labovian linguistics) or ecology of many overlapping systems (as suggested in the ecology of language). However, dominated by a reified understanding of languages as a ‘system’, these linguistic theories are not well-positioned to promote thinking about language speakers in ways, which do justice to individual speakers’ meaning-making experiences. Speakers are either analogized to be highly idealized encoding and decoding language machines, or treated to be equipped with a statistical knowledge concerning the correlations between linguistic and social factors. In other cases, they are taken to be sharing certain intersubjective understandings with researchers in that they agree upon the indexical meanings of linguistic codes in identity construction. Overall speakers’ roles are largely restricted—it is only when their influence upon the system is perceived that they come into focus in linguistic analysis. Generally speaking, lay people’s problems concerning talking, ways of talking, the role of language in other everyday activities which arise from their immediate concerns cannot be addressed by these theories. Moreover, with its pursuit of an autonomous scientific status and portrayal of linguists as neutral specialists working in science, the ideological impact of modern linguistics as a discipline intimately related to European nationalism remains mostly unexamined (except in later developments). In the case of Chomsky, his belief that linguistics should work to discover the truth about certain innate faculties in the human mind within a scientific framework can be seen as a disguised will to power (Wise, 2011). More discussion of his politics will be carried out in Part III. Structuralist linguistics, in its heyday, was taken to be the model science for other social sciences to follow due to its systematicity in eliciting and analyzing linguistic data (Lévi-Strauss, 1945; Trager & Smith, 1957). However, after several decades during which other disciplines such as anthropology and sociology reconsidered their methodology in a crisis of representation, the landscape has changed to the effect that linguists are to learn from anthropologists and sociologists the precious lessons of thinking language in a more dynamic manner. Silverstein (1977) proposes a more function-oriented model of grammar and argues that ‘there seems to be no way to do a grammatical analysis, let alone to justify it, without making its cultural prerequisites explicit’ (Silverstein, 1977, p.  151). Faced with a changed

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intellectual landscape, it seems that linguistics as a discipline needs to be more aware of the limitations of this system myth and explore new ways of thinking and imagining language beyond the notion of system. Moreover, in the past century, important developments in philosophy and cultural studies have been motivated by a deconstruction of Saussure’s texts. For example, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari have questioned linguists’ efforts to scientifically study language: ‘Since everybody knows that language is a ­heterogeneous, variable reality, what is the meaning of the linguists’ insistence on carving out a homogeneous system in order to make a scientific study possible?’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). Instead, they propose an ‘assemblage’ or ‘rhizomatic’ theory of language to systematically supersede structuralism. According to them, language as a ‘rhizome’ constantly ‘establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles’ (p. 7). They do not believe in the existence of ‘language’ or ‘language universals’, instead they propose that there is ‘only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages’ used in heterogeneous communities (ibid.). On his part, Derrida’s reading of the Saussurean ‘sign’ aims to reveal the indeterminacy in the relational value system designated by the Course. For Saussure, each sign composed of the signifier and the signified gets its value from the relational contrast with other signs within the system. Derrida pushes this argument to its limit and concludes that the meaning of each sign is perennially delayed, namely, it is ‘deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces’ (Derrida, 1981). From this reflection, Derrida establishes his philosophy of deconstruction, which calls for a rethinking of the logocentric tradition in Western philosophy. According to deconstructionism, Saussure’s postulation of a shared system in individual minds begs the following questions: Where does this system come from? Why is it already and simply there issuing meaning while remaining unaffected by human control? This almost ‘animist’ picture is challenged by Derrida when he deconstructs a possible source of meaning to be a forever process of ‘deferment’, which creates traces of the real while there is not any given ‘real’ (Derrida, 1976). From these brief sketches, it can be noted that the strong influences of deconstructionism, together with post-­ modernism and post-structuralism on questioning the autonomy, stability and determinacy of the Saussurean system, can be helpful to reconceptualize linguistics beyond the ‘system’. Considering the silence of most linguists about the movement motivated by the above-mentioned thoughts, i.e. ‘the linguistic turn’, it becomes more urgent for linguistics to be open to this part of the scholarship and become aware of the inadequacies of taking meaning as given or fixed, individual speakers as united by a certain code, communication experience as reducible to instantiation of pre-coded messages. On the other hand, phenomenology as a philosophical school concerned with the examination of conceptual language offers a strong critique of modern linguistics in that the latter’s representation and objectification of ‘language’ are problematized. Merleau-Ponty’s evaluation of Saussure can serve as an example here. In his earlier

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works, he takes Saussure as an inspiration, in that he has totally challenged the representational theory of meaning. Merleau-Ponty (1973) even draws parallels between Husserl’s phenomenology of language and Saussure’s foundation of linguistics, both of which are thought to give priority to the experience of actual speakers. However, in Consciousness and Acquisition of Language (1979), he takes a more critical stance toward Saussure’s theory: [For Saussure] speech [parole] is what one says; language [langue] is the treasure out of which the subject draws in order to speak; it is a system of possibilities. But how can one arrive at this French ‘in itself’? In reality, each time that I speak, I allude to my language as a totality. It is difficult for me to delimit the frontiers of speech and language. The distinction cannot maintain itself. (1979, pp. 99–100)

By questioning this fundamental dichotomy in Saussure’s Course, MerleauPonty wields a strong critique of Saussure’s effort of delineating an object for scientific study. In his own philosophy of language, Merleau-Ponty develops an expressive theory of language which embraces the living body and its creative articulation; moreover, he highlights that language, as a ceaseless and excessive phenomenon of ‘singing the world’, cannot be reduced to ‘a system’ as in linguistics (1962, p. 187). Phenomenological reflections and critique on modern linguistics, for various reasons, have not reached linguistics proper though there are some encouraging works pushing toward this direction (see Zhu, 2011, 2013). To conclude, I believe that these lines of thought can help us regain an appreciation of the complexity of language which demands cross-disciplinary enquiries and needs to be reckoned with in contemporary discussions of language and linguistics. Seen in this light, our next part’s discussion of ethnomethodology can be instructional regarding the implications sociological/phenomenological ideas have for linguistics.

References Borges, J. L. (1975). A universal history of infamy (N. T. di Giovanni, Trans). London: Penguin Books. Boutang, P. (2004). L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Paris, France: Editions du Montparnasse. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin and use. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. Derrida, J. (1976). De la grammatologie [English version: Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.)]. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1981). Interview with Julia Kristeva. In Positions (pp. 28–30). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1987). Reading saussure. London: Duckworth. Hutton, C. (2009). Language, meaning and the law. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Joseph, J. E., Love, N., & Taylor, T. J. (2001). Landmarks in linguistic thought II: The Western tradition in the twentieth century. London: Routledge.

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Le Page, R. B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1945). Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology. In Structural anthropology (Vol. 1, pp. 31–54). New York: Basic Books. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phénoménologie de la perception [English version: Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.)]. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973). Phenomenology and the sciences of man. In M. A. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the social sciences (Vol. 1, pp.  47–108). Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1979). Consciousness and the acquisition of language. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Pennycook, A. (1994). The cultural politics of English as an international language. London: Longman. Silverstein, M. (1977). Cultural prerequisites for grammatical analysis. In M. Saville-Troike (Ed.), Linguistics and anthropology. Round table meeting on language and linguistics (pp. 139–151). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Trager, G. L., & Smith, H. L. (1957). An outline of English structure. Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies. Widdowson, H. (2003). Defining issues in English language teaching. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wise, C. (2011). Chomsky and deconstruction: The politics of unconscious knowledge. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zhu, L. (2011). Sound, body and writing: A phenomenological view of linguistics as representation of speech. In P.  Stalmaszczyk (Ed.), Turning points in the philosophy of language and linguistics (pp. 213–224). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. Zhu, L. (2013). Philosophy of linguistics: The phenomenological perspective. In History and philosophy of the language sciences. Retrieved March 2, 2019, from http://hiphilangsci. net/2013/04/17/philosophy-of-linguistics-the-phenomenological-perspective.

Part II

Social Order

1.1  Introduction Linguistic theories, informed by the notion of ‘system’ in studying the structure of language and conceptualizing its relationship with social collectivity and individual agents’ negotiation of identities, as analyzed in the previous part, have proved ­inadequate in addressing critical issues concerning the agency of language users. The notion of system, on the one hand, provides an answer as to the possibility of understanding and achieving communication order among social members; on the other hand, it severely constrains the possibilities of exploring individual members’ efforts in meaning-making activities and their creative negotiation of social roles. Seen in this light, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological program may provide some solutions to this dilemma. An underlying argument in ethnomethodology is that accounts of social order based on shared systems of communication are inadequate; instead, social order should be seen as produced through every member’s minute-tominute work. Ethnomethodologists try to document members’ methods and theorize the process of how order is produced and reflectively maintained. However, setting out to reveal the processes of order-production in social actors’ situated work, Garfinkel’s project comes across difficulties when accounting for the legitimacy of researchers’ proclaimed insights into social members’ methods. To substantiate the discussion of ‘social order’, I will examine alongside ethnomethodology SAT from the pragmatic tradition and its explorations of social order. Based on close readings of Austin and Searle’s works, I will offer a critique of SAT’s theorizing of speech acts, the rule-governed nature of language, and the moral dimensions of language use. In the end, a comparison between SAT and CA, two major efforts in locating ‘order’ within mundane and contextual language use will be conducted. Overall I will argue that while both schools have made extraordinary efforts in engaging with everyday language use outside an autonomous language system, their theoretical conceptualizations nonetheless effectuate an estrangement from that everyday world.

Chapter 9

From Durkheim to Garfinkel: Social Facts and Social Order

This chapter will position ethnomethodology in the praxis of sociology and phenomenology to trace Garfinkel’s theoretical heritage and highlight his intellectual innovation. With this historical investigation, I will outline the pathways along which individual social actor’s order-producing and -maintaining work (including but not limited to languaging and communicating efforts) comes to take center stage in Garfinkel’s thought. Ethnomethodology, even in its heyday, was never recognized as the mainstream of sociological thinking. However, as accounted by Garfinkel (2002), ethnomethodology claims to be the heir to Emile Durkheim—the father of sociology, and its project is to carry on with the study of ‘social facts’ which is famously contained in the aphorism by Durkheim (1895/1982, p. 60): ‘The first and fundamental rule [of sociology] is to consider social facts as things’.1 There are many different interpretations of Garfinkel’s program and its status in both sociology and philosophy; my view is that, despite that ethnomethodology represents a radical way to do sociology, its concern is still a sociological one though phenomenology fuelled its innovative power.2 I will explain this in the following. In his first published book on ethnomethodology Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967b), Garfinkel did not elaborate on his inherited legacy of Durkheimian sociology. In fact it was not until later in Ethnomethodology’s Program—Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism (2002) that he mentioned in a footnote: ‘I understand this  Earlier in the same book, Durkheim defines social facts in the following words: ‘A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting that is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations’ (1895/1982, p. 60). 2  I mainly follow Heritage’s (1984) interpretation, which sees ethnomethodology as a creative solution to the sociological problem of order by drawing upon phenomenological resources. Hilbert (1992) provides valuable insights concerning the roots of Garfinkel’s thinking: Parsons’s theory suppressed the very classical ideas in Durkheim and Weber’s theories; by correcting Parsons’s theory of social action, Garfinkel resurrected the very core of classical sociology. He offers detailed arguments that linked up classical ideas in Durkheim and Weber with empirical ethnomethodological studies. 1

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restatement of Durkheim’s aphorism to be EM’s center […] since 1954’ (2002, p. 118). Durkheim was introduced to American sociology by Talcott Parsons in his book The Structure of Social Action (1937), which took Durkheim to be the father of positive sociological thoughts. Drawing on Durkheim, Parsons developed his own framework of action. However, Parsons’s functional sociology, which aimed to provide macro guidelines to government decision-making based on a hegemonic framework and an abstracted understanding of the workings of society, in Garfinkel’s point of view, proved inadequate in addressing the rich details of social movements. In this context, Garfinkel’s reading of Durkheim, far from following the interpretation of Durkheim by Parsons, sprung from his dissatisfaction of the misrepresentation of Durkheim by Parsons and his followers who were dedicated to a formal analysis of society, as illustrated by the following quotation: It [ethnomethodology] is heir to Durkheim’s neglected legacy. Ethnomethodology has been working out Durkheim’s aphorism as a specifically incommensurable, inescapably accompanying alternate to the canonical teachings of the worldwide social science movement. That alternate is affiliated to formal analytic teachings. It accompanies them everywhere. (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 94)

Ethnomethodology, in the quest of a study of Durkheimian ‘social facts’, distanced itself from Parsonian formal social analysis, which characterized canonical social studies in that period. Yet, as is expressed in the quotation above, the relationship between them is not simply that of two independent readings, instead, there is a dialectical ‘accompanying’ and ‘affiliating’ link between them. It seems that the teaching of Parsons’s theory, with its positive and functional reading of Durkheim, pushed Garfinkel to seek a dialectic alternative. Parsonian sociologists believe that by adopting the policies and methods of formal/constructive analysis, objective knowledge ‘of the work of producing accountable, invariant, essential structures of practical action, the great recurring, immortal, comparable structures of ordinary activities’ (Garfinkel, 1991, p. 14) can then be achieved. On his part, Garfinkel does not think that Durkheim’s ‘things’ could be accounted for in formal analysis; instead, he argues that a phenomenon of immortal ordinary society could only be captured through ethnomethodological study with a focus on ‘material, content-­ specific, coherent workplace details of instructed actions’ (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 105). In consequence, it is defined as the task of ethnomethodology to ‘specify the naturally accountable work of making and describing the social facts of immortal, ordinary society’ (ibid.). Then what are these social facts? In Garfinkel’s reading of Durkheim, he takes the term ‘social facts’ as a ‘descriptive proxy’ for ‘every topic of logic, meaning, reason, rational action, method, truth, and order in intellectual history, specified in any actual case as a congregationally produced and naturally accountable, endogenous order-production, populational cohort’s concertedly witnessable and recognized, intelligible empirical phenomenon of immortal, ordinary society’3 (2002, p. 93). In other words, the study of social facts as thus will reveal

 Following Durkheim, Garfinkel defines ‘immortal, ordinary society’ as ‘the society that is there prior to and independent of the methods and discourse for describing it’ (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 143). 3

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the phenomenon of order as ‘lived, immediate, unmediated congregational practices of production, display, witness, recognition, intelligibility, and accountability of immortal ordinary society’s ordinary phenomena of order, its ordinary things, the most ordinary things in the world’ (ibid.). Thus, in redefining Durkheim’s term ‘social facts’ and relating it to the phenomenon of order, Garfinkel highlights the actual processes of order-production by social members. Moreover, by rewriting Durkheim’s aphorism, Garfinkel asserts ethnomethodology’s critical stance in documenting social members’ methods of producing social facts. Garfinkel takes further this emphasis on members and states that ‘phenomena of order are identical with [the] procedures for their endogenous production and accountability’ (2002, p. 72). That is to say, social orders are identical to the procedures members of a particular social group employ to produce and manage a particular setting of organized everyday affairs. These social orders are generated from within the particular setting and are thus made available for study through the demonstrable accounting practices of the group members. In the following the links and differences between Durkheimian sociology and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology will be made clear from a comparison of suicide study done by Durkheim and Ethnomethodologists (Atkinson, 1978; Garfinkel, 1967a). Durkheim’s Le Suicide (1897/1952) is a pioneering piece of sociological work based on the use of statistical data in establishing the causes of suicide. Durkheim defines suicide as the term ‘applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result’ (1897/1952, p. 42) and his study relies on official statistics. In order to coherently account for the observed correlations in the data, he came up with a sociological explanation: the more integrated a society is, the lower suicide rates will there be among its members, etc. This is taken in later sociological research as a classical case in which sociology can generate ‘laws’ about society just as natural sciences do about nature. For Durkheim, suicide is essentially a social phenomenon, for which only a sociological research can provide convincing explanations. The suicides committed in a given society during a given period of time, once taken as a whole, constitute a total, which is no longer a sum of independent units, but ‘a new fact sui generis, with its own unity, individuality and consequently its own nature—a nature, furthermore, dominantly social’ (1897/1952, p.  46). He writes: No description, however good, of particular cases will ever tell us which ones have a sociological character. If one wants to know the several tributaries of suicide as a collective phenomenon one must regard it in its collective form, that is, through statistical data, from the start. The social rate must be taken directly as the object of analysis; progress must be from the whole to the parts. (1897/1952, p. 148)

In a word, only description of suicide cases in the context of a collective phenomenon can reveal its sociological character. Moreover, the description is not only directed to the ‘collective’; instead, ‘the moral constitution of society’ as an index reflects ‘a collective force of a definite amount of energy’ which impels individual man to self-destruction (1897/1952, p. 299). Consequently, what appears to express

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the victim’s personal temperament in a suicide case is ‘really the supplement and prolongation of a social condition which they express externally’ (ibid.). By comparing the suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, Durkheim comes to the conclusion that the higher rate among Protestants is due to the fact that Protestant churches have less moderating effect upon suicide. Instead of attributing the moderating effect to the details of religious dogmas and rites, he points to another factor: If religions protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis; but because it is a society. What constitutes this society is the existence of a certain number of beliefs and practices common to all the faithful, traditional and thus obligatory. The more numerous and strong these collective states of mind are, the stronger the integration of the religious community, and also the greater its preservative value. (1897/1952, p. 170)

The strength of beliefs and practices lies in the effects they have in maintaining a strong community which in turn prevents individuals from committing suicide. By comparison, among Protestants, the fact that their beliefs are relatively weaker, their church less organized and their desire for learning stronger contributes to the further weakening of traditional beliefs and to the rise of moral individuation (1897/1952, p. 169). Suicide as a social phenomenon reflects the failure of social order. By locating social laws behind diverse cases of suicide, Durkheim believes that sociologists can provide solutions to reduce suicide rates and consequently ensure better social order. What is taken for granted by Durkheim—the categorization of suicide cases in statistical records, the ensuing treatment of these collected records as ‘social facts’—was, however, questioned by ethnomethodologists. For them, the very process of certifying ‘suicide’ as a social fact is questioned and taken as problematic; in other words, they seek to find out what makes a suicide case a social fact of suicide in the first place. For example, according to Garfinkel (1967a, p. 17), in officials’ enquiries, a death is treated: [a]s a precedent with which various ways of living in society that could have terminated with that death are searched out and read ‘in the remains’; in the scraps of this and that like the body and its trappings, medicine bottles, notes, bits and pieces of clothing, and other memorabilia—stuff that can be photographed, collected and packaged. Other ‘remains’ are collected too: rumors, passing remarks, and stories—materials in the ‘repertoires’ of whosoever may be consulted via the common work of conversations. These whatsoever bits and pieces that a story or rule or proverb might make intelligible are used to formulate a recognizably coherent, standard, typical, cogent, uniform, planful, i.e. a professionally defensible, and thereby, for members, a recognizably rational account of how the society worked to produce these remains.

In particular, in certifying a ‘death’ to be a case of ‘suicide’, officers are actually formulating coherent accounts based on the available ‘remains’. So cases of suicides, for certifying officers, do not simply lie there ready for accumulation; they have to be detected and established from a variety of remains; consequently, suicide as a social fact is not given but discovered and found through professionally accountable procedures. For ethnomethodological studies, these accounting practices of producing and establishing social facts themselves raise critical questions.

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Taking cues from this line of thought, Atkinson’s book on suicide argues that sociologists’ theorizing of suicide and its causes is made possible by common-sense theorizing done by lay people. For example, to quote a coroner who dislikes tape-­ recorders for the reason that the recorded interviews sometimes get in the way when he has to write up the statements: Normally I don’t think I could really take a story, even from you now, so that every word you said would be in story-book form, it would be impossible. I’ve got to try interviewing some people, they don’t know what I want so I’ve got to ask them, […]. The way these statements have been taken is question, answer—er—question then answer. Sometimes you get, particularly some elderly women, and they bloody go on and on, so I’ve got here— um—she was rambling on a bit, back and forwards, and he, I was taking the statement off him and she was chipping in. You get two sides of the tale then. And you think, ‘Well now, how do I play this?’ So rather than taking two statements—you’re only going to end up with two negative statements, one against the other. So you bring it all into like a proper perspective, as you think it is. It’s a nice, well to me it’s a nice story-book finish. Sometimes I get mixed up. I’ve read it through myself and then I’ll suddenly scrap it and say, ‘Well, that’s no flippin’ good,’ and start again. (1978, p. 173)

Confronted with the conflicting versions of stories from the interviewees, a coroner has to impose some kind of ‘order’ on what he has heard to give it ‘a nice storybook finish’. According to Atkinson, expert suicidologists including professional sociologists and psychiatrists are involved in the same process of consulting and constructing common-sense theories. These all constitute the efforts to provide for the construction of a plausible story of how and why the death occurred, without which uncertainty and disorder would prevail. By comparing these two studies of suicide, I intend to argue that they reflect two different understandings of social order. For Durkheim, sociologists’ theorizing can capture certain orderly patterns and laws behind social facts; consequently, these laws can be applied to strengthen social order when it is necessary, e.g. to reduce suicide rates. While in ethnomethodology, social order is perceived as the achievement of social members in their day-to-day living and theorizing activities, which include sociologists’ research activities. For ethnomethodologists, both researchers and lay members, to a certain extent, are all making sense of what has happened (a ‘disorder’ event such as suicide), coming up with plausible accounts to make order out of disorder and, by doing so, contributing to the sense of ‘order’. These different conceptions of social order are informed by two mutually exclusive theories of social reality, which are characterized respectively by Garfinkel as the ‘correspondence’ and ‘congruence’ theory. Atkinson clarifies in the following words: The correspondence theory seeks to maintain a distinction between the subjectively perceived object of the world and the concrete object, such that an analysis may differentiate between what ‘appears’ to be the case and what ‘really is’ the case. In other words, there is held to be a reality which is perceived and intersubjectively constructed by members. According to this view, the sociologists’ problem is to somehow cut through, or get behind, appearances in order to render some version of how it ‘really’ is in the world which corresponds with, or approximately corresponds with, the concrete objective reality that is held to be out there in the world. By contrast, the congruence theory proposes that the perceived object that is ‘out there in the world’ is the concrete object that is there and that the two terms are synonymous and interchangeable. That the subjective experiencing of an object in

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9  From Durkheim to Garfinkel: Social Facts and Social Order the world may involve doubt, ambiguity or uncertainty does not necessitate the revision of such a proposition, for these may be and often are features of the experienced object, in that what is being experienced is some doubtful, ambiguous or uncertain object. (1978, p. 176)

In documenting a suicide case, for example the congruence theory would argue that, every decision made conjures up a picture of reality, the legitimacy of which does not depend on a reality existing out there, instead, it serves as a link in a chain of decisions, which depends upon each other for coherence. In the face of a conflict between the new decision and previous ones, new explanations have to be given. The fact that pictures of ‘what has happened’ keep being revised does not mean that they are made to match more closely with the reality; instead, every perceived picture was ‘at the time and for all practical purposes no less, no worse, or less valid an object in the world than the second perceived object’ (1978, p. 177). In other words, according to the congruence theory, there are only multiple realities, as Schütz (1945) proposed. Now we can see that different from Durkheim’s careful study of social reality in order to get at the laws, which shape the reality, ethnomethodologists’ concern lies in demonstrating how reality is always in the process of being accounted for and constituted by the work of its social members. Despite his claims about inheriting Durkheimian legacies, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology actually puts forward radical claims about social research, which challenge traditional positive ways of doing sociology. However, it does not aim at providing alternative programs. In fact, ethnomethodologists have a reputation of refusing theoretical debates for the reason that carrying out specific studies about social facts serves a better purpose than focusing on programmatic arguments. Ethnomethodology embraces a radically different way of doing sociology and more than anything else, of answering the core question for sociology, ‘how is social order possible?’ Their creative insights into this, I will argue, are inspired by Garfinkel’s reading of phenomenology. In his Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel mentions that his works are influenced by Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schütz, Aron Gurwitsch, and Edmund Husserl. Being a student of Parsons, the leading sociologist in the USA during the 1940s, Garfinkel on the one hand followed Parsons’s interest in the study of social order and social action, on the other hand, he sought to challenge Parsonian framework based on his preliminary readings of Phenomenology by the latter three (See Lynch 1993, 2004; Sharrock 2004; Psathas 1989, 2009). In order to solve the problem of ‘social order’, Parsons (1937) drew on the legacies of both Durkheim and Freud to develop a notion of ‘internalization of norms’. In his theory of voluntary social action, actors are seen as pre-equipped with internalized norms, values and orientations, which will guide them through social activities though they are not always accessible to the actors themselves. For Garfinkel, here lies Parsons’s failure to consider reflexivity and actors’ perspective, the result of which is a largely abstract theory of social order, against which the actors’ real actions should be evaluated and explained. In this context, what Garfinkel needed was a new set of conceptual tools which would enable him to probe deeper into social actors’ perspectives.

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Phenomenology was precisely what was available at that time (Psathas, 2004, p. 2). In the following, I will give a sketch of some important concepts in Husserl and Schütz’s works, which I believe have significantly shaped Garfinkel’s project of studying members’ methods of producing social order. As observed by Merleau-Ponty (1973), by developing phenomenology, Husserl attempts to reassert the status of philosophy/rationality in the face of the crisis in both sciences and the sciences of man (psychology, sociology and history). A prevailing conclusion during that period claims that all opinions, in particular, all different philosophies were the result of external psychological, social and historical conditions working together in combination. For Husserl, the danger of this conclusion is that it will lead to irrationalism. Thus, Husserl seeks to give a new account of how philosophy, science and the sciences of men might be possible; his task is to affirm rationality ‘at the level of experience without sacrificing the vast variety it includes and accepting all the processes of conditioning which psychology, sociology, and history reveal’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973, p. 57). In this sense, phenomenology as a solution must, on the one hand, gather together all the concrete experiences of man in history and on the other hand discover a certain essence, order or spirit from the unrolling of facts. For Husserl, the key to satisfying these two tasks lies in the study of subjective consciousness. To be sure, Husserl’s thoughts have undergone several phases and based on his works, different strands of phenomenological thinking are developed in both Europe and America (Heritage, 1984, pp. 43–44). For the current discussion, I will highlight Husserl’s significant move of focusing on the subjective consciousness of ‘seeing’ and ‘living in’ the world. A very important concept, ‘natural attitude’, is crucial to understanding Husserl’s thoughts on subjective consciousness. He writes: I find continually present and standing over against me the one spatio-temporal fact-world to which I myself belong, as do all other men found in it and related in the same way to it. This ‘fact-world,’ as the world already tells us, I find to be out there, and also take it just as it gives itself to me as something that exists out there. All doubting and rejecting of the data of the natural world leaves standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint. ‘The’ world is as fact-world always there; at the most it is at odd points ‘other’ than I supposed, this or that under such names as ‘illusion,’ ‘hallucination,’ and the like, must be struck out of it, so to speak; but the ‘it’ remains ever, in the sense of the general thesis, a world that has its being out there. (Quoted in Natanson, 1973, pp. 9–10)

In this quotation, it is emphasized that the world which is ‘out there’ is not ‘out there’ in an isolated way from the perceiving and feeling subject ‘I’. This world is always in some relation to a subject, even in his denying or disbelieving of its existence. In this world perceived with the natural attitude, there is no separation of ‘the world’ from our believing (or disbelieving) in it; instead, they are a unity. Phenomenological thinking, as a philosophical practice, can be seen as a radical stance in terms of which this natural attitude itself is thematized. In the natural attitude, one simply ‘sees a cup’ while by adopting a phenomenological attitude one can analyze ‘the cup as it appears to oneself’ as an element in one’s stream of consciousness.

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Garfinkel’s major resources in phenomenology came from Schütz, who was a student of Husserl and taught at the New School in New  York until his death in 1957.4 An important development that Schütz made to phenomenology is the concept of ‘typification’5 which further adds texture to the Husserlian lifeworld. He explains: The factual world of our experience […] is experienced from the outset as a typical one. Objects are experienced as trees, animals, and the like, and more specifically as oaks, firs, maples, or rattlesnakes, sparrows, dogs. This table I am now perceiving is characterized as something recognized, as something foreknown and, nevertheless, novel. What is newly experienced is already known in the sense that it recalls similar or equal things formerly perceived. But what has been grasped once in its typicality carries with it a horizon of possible experiences with corresponding references to familiarity, that is, a series of typical characteristics still not actually experienced but expected to be potentially experienced. If we see a dog, that is, if we recognize an object as being an animal and more precisely as a dog, we anticipate a certain behaviour on the part of this dog, a typical (not individual) way of eating, of running, of playing, of jumping, and so on. Actually we do not see his teeth, but having experienced before what a dog’s teeth typically look like, we may expect that the teeth of the dog before us show the same typical features though with individual modifications. In other words, what has been experienced in the actual perception of one object is apperceptively transferred to any other similar object, perceived merely as to its type. (Quoted in Natanson, 1973, p. 17)

An object perceived is ‘novel’ yet at the same time constituted of sensory components resulted from previous activities of perceiving, comparing and contrasting. Put differently, every experience of the social actor instead of occurring in a social vacuum or initiating a new instance of an abstract type, actually takes place within ‘a horizon of familiarity and pre-acquaintanceship’ (Schütz, 1962, p. 7). In other words, it is always against a background composed of ‘sedimented’ images and perceptions that the utterly novel is seen, grasped and made sense of. As is mentioned in the quotation, social actors ‘expect’, ‘anticipate’, but they are still in the ‘natural attitude’ unless the world starts to conflict with expectations—then there will likely be a detached ‘testing’ of the adequacies of the typifications. However, he would argue that social actors do not test them like scientists test contextless categories; instead, the usefulness of typifications in making sense of novel situations is always assessed contextually for a specific purpose.6 These typifications include our use of ‘names’, ‘labels’, ‘categories’, ‘kinds’, ‘types’, ‘tokens’, ‘cases’, ‘examples’, etc. in natural languages. Overall, they are a set of tools for social members to navigate through day-to-day activities, which involve other fellow members.  Psathas (2004) gives a detailed documentation of their exchanges during 1950s–1960s.  It is based on Husserl’s two concepts called ‘and so forth’ and ‘one can always again’. (Husserl, 1969, p. 189). 6  Schütz makes a distinction between first-order constructs of lay people and second-order constructs of social scientists: ‘The thought objects constructed by the social scientist, in order to grasp this social reality, have to be founded upon the thought objects constructed by the commonsense thinking of men, living their daily life within their social world. Thus, the constructs of the social sciences are, so-to-speak, constructs of the second degree, that is, constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene’ (1962, p. 59). 4 5

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The determinacy of these typifications depends upon their precision in concrete situations and it is subjected to revision, change, explanation, etc. The other contribution made by Schütz is his critique of Husserl’s attempt at a transcendental derivation of ‘intersubjectivity’.7 Unlike Husserl, Schütz offers a very practical solution to this problem. For him, people do not have to have identical experiences guaranteed by some transcendental conditions; as long as they assume that their experiences are similar and can be treated as identical for practical purposes, it will do. According to him, social actors solve this issue by performing two basic idealizations: the idealization of the interchangeability of standpoints; the idealization of the congruency of the system of relevancies (Schütz, 1962, pp. 11–12). These two steps ensure that for the purpose at hand of each social actor, they will assume that their experiences are empirically identical. In this manner, a ‘common world’ which goes beyond each actor’s specific standpoint can be vaguely established and relied upon as a reference point. It has to be noted that for Schütz intersubjectivity is not a given premise but an accomplished intersubjectivity-forall-practical-purposes. Strongly influenced by Schütz’s phenomenological works, Garfinkel probes deeper into this intersubjectively constituted Schützian world and asks what kind of order there is and how it is achieved, namely, to work out ‘what are the conditions by way of the structuring of experiences and only of the structuring of experiences under which an experience experiences an order that shows these faces?’ (1952, p. 113) Furthermore, inspired by Schütz’s practical conceptualization of a lifeworld, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology attempts to pose a more concrete question: [H]ow men, isolated yet simultaneously in an odd communion, go about the business of constructing, testing, maintaining, altering, validating, questioning, defining an order together. (1952, p. 114)

The phenomenological emphasis on everyday human experiences from Husserl to Schütz has directed Garfinkel’s attention to the mundane social world where social actors carry out daily activities in a meaningful manner. The natural attitude of social actors acknowledges certain ways social activities are expected to be organized and carried out. There are ‘taken-for-granted’ presumptions guiding the interactions between social members. To put it in simple terms, in their natural attitude, social members live their lives in an orderly fashion. In ethnomethodology, the world is no longer the world which Parsons’s abstract framework of social action tried to explain and evaluate; neither is it the social world, whose hidden laws Durkheim had attempted to locate under a sociologist’s gaze. Instead, it is a world  The problem lies in Husserl’s understanding of ‘constitution’, a fundamental concept explaining how the objective world with its spatio-temporal conditions, which occupies a central place in our everyday lifeworld, is constituted intersubjectively. Schütz engages with the deep ambiguity in Husserl’s conception of ‘constitution’. He comments: ‘But unobstrusively, and almost unaware, it seems to me, the idea of constitution has changed from a clarification of sense-structure, from an explication of the sense of being, into the foundation of the structure of being; it has changed from explication to creation […]’(quoted in Natanson 1973, p.  28). For Schütz, this accounts for Husserl’s failure to work out his theory of empathy and resolve the problem of the other selves. 7

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shared by philosophers, sociologists and lay people, all of whom go about their lives constructing and revising categories, communicating with other members, and in a sense ‘creating’ a certain order for the situation which they find themselves in. Both Husserl and Schütz’s work furnish Garfinkel with powerful conceptual tools to study subjective experiences of social actors and enable him to think about social order in a creative manner.8 In the next chapter, I will try to demonstrate how Garfinkel, drawing on these conceptual preparations, sets up his own campaign to solve the core sociological problem.

References Atkinson, J. M. (1978). Discovering suicide: Studies in the social organization of sudden death. London: Macmillan. Durkheim, E. (1895). Les règles de la méthode sociologique [English version: Durkheim, E. (1982). The rules of sociological method (W. D. Halls, Trans.)]. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1897). Le suicide [English version: Durkheim, E. (1952). Suicide: A study in sociology (J. A. Spaulding, & G. Simpson, Trans.)]. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Eberle, T.  S. (2012). Phenomenological life-world analysis and ethnomethodology’s program. Human Studies, 35(2), 279–304. Garfinkel, H. (1952). The perception of the other: A study in social order. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Garfinkel, H. (1967a). Practical sociological reasoning: Some features in the work of the Los Angeles suicide prevention center. In E.  S. Schneidman (Ed.), Essays in self-destruction. New York: International Science Press. Garfinkel, H. (1967b). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H. (1991). Respecification: Evidence for locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order, logic, reason, meaning, method, etc. in and as of the essential haecceity of immortal ordinary society, (I)  – an announcement of studies. In G.  Button (Ed.), Ethnomethodology and the human sciences (pp.  10–19). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Garfinkel, H. (2002). In A. W. Rawls (Ed.), Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkeim’s aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Hilbert, R. A. (1992). The classical roots of ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Husserl, E. (1969). Formale und transzendentale logik. Versuch einer kritik der logischen vernunft [English version: Husserl, E. (1969). Formal and transcendental logic (D. Cairns, Trans.)]. The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Lynch, M. (1993). Scientific practice and ordinary action. Cambridge, MA: University Press. Lynch, M. (2004). Misreading Schutz: A response to Dennis on ‘lynch on Schutz on science’. Theory & Science, 5(1), 1–9. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973). Phenomenology and the sciences of man. In M. A. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the social sciences (Vol. 1, pp.  47–108). Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press.

 As to the status of ethnomethodology, namely, whether it is a phenomenological sociology or not, see Psathas (1977, 1989), Rogers (1983), Eberle (2012) for details. 8

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Natanson, M. A. (Ed.). (1973). Phenomenology and the social sciences. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Parsons, T. (1937). The structure of social action. A study in social theory with special reference to a group of recent European writers. New York: McGraw Hill. Psathas, G. (1977). Ethnomethodology as a phenomenological approach in the social sciences. In R.  Zaner & D.  Ihde (Eds.), Interdisciplinary phenomenology. The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus-Nijhoff. Psathas, G. (1989). Phenomenology and sociology. Theory and research. Boston: The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology: University Press of America. Psathas, G. (2004). Alfred Schutz’s influence on American sociologists and sociology. Human Studies, 27(1), 1–35. Psathas, G. (2009). The correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Harold Garfinkel: What was the “terra incognita” and the “treasure island”? In H. Nasu, L. Embree, G. Psathas, & I. Srubar (Eds.), Alfred schutz and his intellectual partners (pp. 401–433). Konstanz, Germany: UVK. Rogers, M.  F. (1983). Sociology, ethnomethodology, and experience: A phenomenological critique. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Schütz, A. (1945). On multiple realities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5(4), 533–576. Schütz, A. (1962). In M. Natanson (Ed.), Collected papers I: The problem of social reality. The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Sharrock, W. (2004). What Garfinkel makes of Schutz: The past, present and future of an alternate, asymmetric and incommensurable approach to sociology. Theory & Science, 5(1), 1–13.

Chapter 10

Garfinkel: Members’ Methods of Producing Order

Ethnomethodology, on the one hand, acknowledges the ambiguous, indeterminate, highly dynamic nature of social reality in which all of us live, on the other hand, it believes in the organized nature of social situations and the patternedness of social members’ methods. In a word, as is summarized by Atkinson and Drew (1979, p. 20), in order to provide an adequate theory of social order, ethnomethodology aims to be ‘neither so inflexible or rigid that it lacks any sensitivity to the potentially infinite range of contextual variation in the world, nor so inflexible or loose that nothing at all is held to be general across different contexts.’ In this chapter, I will first introduce some important conceptualizations in ethnomethodology such as the role of social members, intelligible meaning-making, indexicality and reflexivity, which are central to Garfinkel’s solution of the problem of social order. In particular, we will see how his linguistically charged accounts provide fruitful possibilities to conceptualize the languaging social actor beyond the system view as outlined in Part I.  Following that, I will analyze the methodological difficulties inherent in Garfinkel’s project. Ethnomethodology takes as its task to document and specify social members’ methods of producing, repairing and maintaining order and it does not conceptualize members as a concrete entity, a whole man, a ‘person’, not as ‘actual blood and bones’, ‘the thing within the skin and within the environment’, not as ‘self’, ‘ego’, ‘identity’, ‘organism’, ‘animal’, ‘role’, ‘functioner’ and ‘disfunctioner’ (Garfinkel, 2006, p. 108). In ethnomethodology, researchers invest social actors with ‘potentialities for activity’, with assumptions about ‘the kinds of experience he is capable of experiencing under specified conditions’ (ibid.). For him a social actor is always in a role or a cognitive style which includes six empirical specifications: epoche, a specific form of sociality, a specific mode of attention to life, a specific form of spontaneity, a specific mode of time consciousness, a specific way of experiencing the self (2006, p. 110). Originally used by Schütz, the concept ‘cognitive style’ for Garfinkel means a specification of actor-situation schemata. Garfinkel’s concern is to see how any given object acquires its particular significance for action within a finite province of meaning; how ‘order’ is minutely maintained through social © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_10

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actors’ shifting roles in attending to the world according to different cognitive modes from time to time. Actors are inseparable from actions, both of which in turn have to be seen as components of actor-situation schemata. These schemata, to a certain extent, count as the units of analysis in ethnomethodology. We can see that this model enables us to understand social actors and their acts without invoking the psychological representation of the symbol user. To illustrate with an example of the library guard discussed by Garfinkel (2006, p. 112): The world of guard is not an object of his thought, but is a field of things to be manipulated, dominated, changed, examined, tested. It is a world of things whose reality and objective character are unquestionably taken for granted, and every action is such that his hypothesis of the world’s ontological character is indubitably confirmed. The guard’s world—that is, the world of things recognized by this identity, ‘guard’,—is one in which his is absorbed, so to speak; he lives in his working acts; he deals pragmatically with the things that are meaningful in the ‘manipulatory area,’ to use Mead’s phrase. He does not reformulate the world; he takes it literally at its face value for what it ‘is’.

In this depiction of the guard’s world, Garfinkel leads us to see how this world is formed through the guard’s various activities. Recognizing that ‘he lives in his working acts’ instead of focusing on his political beliefs, general attitudes, etc., researchers will be ready to identify with the guard in his dealing of the world.1 To a certain extent, ethnomethodology places more emphasis on the actions than actors themselves, or more precisely, actors’ visible actions instead of their inner consciousness are thought to play a more crucial role as far as social order is concerned. Garfinkel criticizes the model of a man constructed in some social sciences theories, which is, ‘a judgmental dope of a cultural or psychological sort, or both’. He writes, By ‘cultural dope’ I refer to the man-in-the-sociologist’s-society who produces the stable features of the society by acting in compliance with preestablished and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides. The ‘psychological dope’ is the man-in-­ the-psychologist’s-society who produces the stable feature of the society by choices among alternative courses of action that are compelled on the grounds of psychiatric biography, conditioning history, and the variables of mental functioning. (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 68)

This solution to account for the role of social actors within a society of common understandings, for Garfinkel, leads to the result that ‘[c]ourses of common sense rationalities of judgment which involve the person’s use of common sense knowledge of social structures over the temporal “succession” of here and now situations are treated as epiphenomenal’. (ibid.)

 One may argue that Garfinkel’s emphasis on actors’ acts instead of their psychological dimensions verges on behaviorism. Yet, it can be seen that Garfinkel’s seemingly behaviorist tendencies are actually serving a theoretical purpose, which is, the witnessable acts demonstrated by social actors are the means through which intelligible social meanings can be made and in consequence order production by social members could be possible. This is distinctly different from behaviorism, which aims at a naturalistic study of observable behaviors in the manner of natural sciences. For Garfinkel, the emphasis on observable behavior serves to highlight social members’ activities of producing intelligible sequences of acts while behaviorism’s project is to qualify itself as a positive science through studying objectively observable human behaviors. 1

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What Garfinkel works to find out is this actors’ use of common sense knowledge over time in their order-producing ‘work’.2 Social actors are responsible for ­constructing a mutually intelligible world with recognizable boundaries of situations through the production of recognizable sounds and movements, which are passed back and forth between actors and which can be studied in detail. This process, instead of being accomplished through realization of beliefs or ideas, constitutes ‘work of ordering interaction in its material details, constrained by cultural institutions through moral accountability’ (Garfinkel, 2006, p. 7). Individuals who inhabit social situations, through their activities, make and remake social scenes, are treated as ‘local production cohort’, in the sense that they ‘staff’ the situations ‘to reproduce the coherence of a scene that was there before they came upon it and will be there after they leave’ (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 7), as in a traffic flow: Think of freeway flow in Los Angeles. For the cohort of drivers there, just this gang of them, driving, making traffic together, are somehow, smoothly and unremarkably, concerting the driving to be at the lived production of the flow’s just thisness: familiar, ordinary, uninterestingly, observably in and as observances doable and done again, and always, only, entirely in detail for everything that detail could be. In and as of the just thisness (the haecceities) of driving’s details, just this staff are doing again just what in concert with vulgar competence they can do, for each another next first time; and it is this of what they are doing, that makes up the details of just that traffic flow. That although it is of their doing, and as of the flow they are ‘witnessably oriented by’ and ‘seeably directed to the production of it,’ they treat the organizational thing as of their doing, as of their own doing, but not of their very own, singular, distinctive authorship. And further, for just this cohort, it will be that after they exit the freeway others will come after them to do again the same familiar things that they—just they—just these of us as driving doings are in concert doing. (Garfinkel, 1996, pp. 10–11)

As the example of the freeway flow shows, the coherence of a scene contributed by actors’ local activities instead of actors themselves (their singular, distinctive authorship, so to speak) is foregrounded. Unlike the contingencies caused by changes in social actors and actions, social scenes endure. It is exactly the formation and ‘texture’ of these social scenes that ethnomethodology aims to study. Actors’ work unfolds in sequential time and all actions are situated actions. Intelligent meaning comes to be developed through embodied interpretive acts carried out within ‘mutually engaged fields of practice’ (Garfinkel, 2006, p. 7). On their part, actors are situated actors in that their actions are placed into the developing order of sequences which the others can see and comment on, time in and time out, with no escape. In ethnomethodology’s theorizing of social order, it is presumed that there is nothing shared in advance between actors. Neither is there a determinate social reality to relate to nor a shared project or any shared belief which provides reference

 Lynch (2012, p. 232) points out that Garfinkel in his critique of the ‘cultural dopes’ does not aim at providing an alternative model of man which is ‘active, skilful, and reflexive’ social agent as some critics claim. Instead, Garfinkel’s concern is not about any cognitive, emotional, or other properties of a generalized person; the crucial issue for him is the practices of social actors, namely, ‘actions produced in (and productive of) contexts; organized sequences of interaction; embodied work with materials at hand; and the “working out” of sociological theories’. 2

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points, binds them together and guides them through co-operative activities. In consequence, it is compelling for actors to exhibit some intelligible orderliness, some sequences of recognizable acts—recognizable to both parties; only with this theoretic presumption is it possible to explain order. For Garfinkel, this recognisability and intelligibility of order is self-evident and obligatory. Moreover, there is a symmetry between production of actions on the one hand and their recognition on the other, as exemplified in this quotation: ‘the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of ordinary everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings “account-able”’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 1). Making one’s activities observable, tellable, reportable, that is, ‘accountable’, means making them recognizable for other actors. In contrast, when one’s actions are unintelligible, one is held accountable. Briefly speaking, the production of recognizable order depends upon the efforts made by social actors who supply and trust ‘one another to supply, an array of unstated assumptions so as to establish the recognizable sense of an action’ (Heritage, 1984, p. 180). Recognisability is set against the openness of interpretation concerning a given act in that an intended-to-be-friendly act could be recognized as otherwise. However, for ethnomethodologists, being recognized as so and so is less important than being recognized and made sense of at all. For example, being recognized as ‘unintelligible’, ‘non-sense’ is also a form of recognition. Actually, it is suggested in ethnomethodological readings that there is no running away from ‘recognizing’ and ‘being recognized’. To quote Garfinkel: The big question is not whether actors understand each other or not. The fact is that they do understand each other, that they will understand each other, but the catch is that they will understand each other regardless of how they would be understood. (Garfinkel, 1952, p. 367)

This has much to do with another important concept in ethnomethodology, that is, ‘reflexivity’. Reflexive properties of actions distinguish Garfinkel’s model from Parsons’s rule-governed model. In Parsons’s theory, actors, equipped with ‘need dispositions’, i.e. internalized norms and rules, are able to recognize and identify common situations in the same way as other social members, then apply common norms which enable the production of joint actions; consequentially, the actors’ capacity of reflexively manipulating the norms is seen as a threat to the social order. For Garfinkel, there is not any common norm that regulates the social actor’s conduct in predefined scenes of action, instead, even common norms are subjected to the reflexive properties of activities and the unfolding circumstances to which they are applied, and there are no rules, which can cover the full range of possible situations. Rules, for ethnomethodologists, do not have a special existence outside the specific situations; instead, they are treated only as practices embedded in certain situations. Individuals, by following or invoking rules, give coherence to their conducts. Parsons’s rule-governed cultural dopes are changed by Garfinkel to rule-­ using analysts in the sense that social members invoke rules to account for their conducts. Furthermore, in Parsons’s theory the situations of action are clearly marked off from each other and known in advance by social actors and can be

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matched with a package of rules, which are to be applied in it. Garfinkel, however, recognizes the transformable nature of situations in the contingencies of time, because it is the reflexive product of the work of actors.3 Moreover, specification of rules always takes place in particular contexts and involves considering the principle of indexicality. By this principle, Garfinkel intends to underline the equivocal and indeterminate nature of semantic expressions. In the use of language, meanings vary according to contexts; though social members recognize the words as being the same, their varied meanings in shifting contexts do not have a common core, which binds the instances together. Seen in this light, rule-following activities are actually ‘indexical’ activities in that there are no pregiven entities transcendentally guiding the activities; instead, rules are indexically interpreted and followed in specific situations, inseparable from members’ recognition and accounts. Now let us return to the discussion of ‘reflexivity’. What Garfinkel means by ‘reflexivity’ is, in a series of actions, what happens later has the potential to reflect back on the previous happenings and show them in a new light (Rawls, 2006, p. 34). To be clear, this notion does not refer to anything happening in the minds of the social actors, rather it is ‘a feature of the witnessable order of the conversation itself’ (ibid.).4 This reflexive property of actions can actually change the situations where actors find themselves in and compel themselves to make a choice, as illustrated by Heritage’s analysis of greetings: after being greeted to, ‘whether the recipient consciously “chose” to respond in a particular way, he or she was nonetheless placed in a “situation of choice”, because the fact that a greeting was addressed to the recipient has “reflexively” and “accountably” changed the scenes’ (Heritage, 1984, p. 107). He summarizes: Thus regardless of what our recipient does—of whether the greeting is returned or not—the scene will be reconstituted. The unfolding scene, in other words, cannot ‘mark time’ or ‘stall’ for a while; it will unavoidably be transformed. (ibid.)

Atkinson and Drew (1979, pp. 31–32) make similar comments: A speaker therefore has no choice but to leave those with whom he is interacting to find a sense in his activities from what he says and does in specific local sequences. In other words, for an utterance to be oriented to and treated by others as a ‘greeting’, ‘complaint’, ‘accusation’, ‘denial’, ‘excuse’, ‘justification’, ‘insult’, ‘expression of friendship’, ‘request’, ‘command’, or whatever, it does not have to contain any direct reference to the fact that it is doing one of those things. Nor does an utterance have to be (or could ever be) ‘definitely’, ‘unequivocally’, ‘exclusively’ or ‘certainly’ any one of those things for members to be able to treat it and have it treated by others ‘as if’ it were certainly a particular one for the situated practical purposes at hand.  Scholars such as Hilbert (1992) draw parallels between Garfinkel’s understandings of rules with that of Wittgenstein. More discussion about rules will be provided in Chaps. 14 and 15. 4  The same spirit is captured in the following quotation: ‘I shall exercise a theorist’s preference and say that meaningful events are entirely and exclusively events in a person’s behavioural environment, […] Hence there is no reason to look under the skull since nothing of interest is to be found there but brains. The ‘skin’ of the person will be left intact. Instead questions will be confirmed to the operations that can be performed upon events that are “scenic” to the person’. (Garfinkel, 1963, p. 190). 3

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These observations underscore an important feature of social actions, namely, social actors’ actions are condemned to be meaningful and members do not necessarily have control over what meaning will be indexed. Correspondingly, this demands an image of social actor as ‘an almost endlessly reflexive, self-conscious and ­calculative Machiavel’ (Heritage, 1984, p.  118) who works to detect the reflexive order of social actions yet remains embedded within it and subjected to its effects. However, Garfinkel argues that in their routine life, social actors are not interested in the essential reflexivity of accounts; but only in cases of breach or anticipated breach will they come to see the reflexive features of their actions. In normal situations, members ‘know’ the settings in which they are situated and what counts as observable and recognizable just like the guard in his world. Moreover, these members are able to demonstrate the ‘rational-adequacy-for-all-practical-purposes of their procedures and findings’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 8). To summarize, ethnomethodologists position themselves to study members’ own methods in order to catch the work of ‘fact production in flight’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 79); actors’ working acts, as reflexive products of the organized activities of participants, are expected to exhibit intelligible sequences, because only in this way can order be maintained, repaired and secured from moment to moment. Ethnomethodology emphasizes the production of visible, accountable and witnessable sequences of acts, which work like strands woven together in the fabric of everyday social life. The theoretical overview of ethnomethodology’s take on social order now leads us to tackle the methodological issues faced by researchers. Ethnomethodologists tend to give an impression that their research has many advantages over previous sociological analyses, one aspect being their terminologies are less reified, which in consequence enables them to more closely study members’ ways of doing things. However, I will dedicate the following discussion to unravel some of the dilemmas faced by ethnomethodologists. Instead of locating order as generated by apparatuses of large-scale, massive institutions, the formalization of which only hides the order in members’ daily lives, ethnomethodologists ‘carefully’, ‘faithfully’, with no time loss, follow every move of the social members as they are involved in activities of order-production in order to catch the ‘order’ of natural immortal society. It is believed that even the most mundane, local, everyday behavior will exhibit upon analysis ‘the properties of ­uniformity, reproducibility, repetitiveness, standardization, typicality and so on’ (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970, p.  166). Ethnomethodologists, in their field-work research, attempt to cling to participants’ moment-to-moment accomplishments and observe through the eyes of the observed the process of how practical knowledge is tacitly shared and applied; how order is minutely produced and accounted for. However, at the same time they claim that the orderliness is seen but unnoticed by participants and it is the job of ethnomethodologists to exhibit that order through analysis conducted in the spirit of ‘ethnomethodological indifference’ (Garfinkel, 1967). That is to say, in the end, researchers have to link the observed results of orderliness with the work of social members. What links can they make? The links are often characterized as members using certain methods/knowledge to produce

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orderly results. The question is: What does ‘using methods/knowledge’ mean? Is it a proxy to describe the social members’ varied, moment-to-moment work of co-­ ordinating with each other? Sometimes this wording is taken seriously to suggest an image of social actors ‘using certain knowledge’ to accomplish certain ongoing activities, such as explaining the process of how meetings are achieved by members, how institutions are talked into being (Heritage, 1984). How can we justify these links, namely, how to make sure that social members actually possess and use certain knowledge in the framework of ethnomethodology? These questions, I believe, point to the methodological crux of ethnomethodology, which, compared to other sociological theories, seems to be more vulnerable to this dilemma due to its central task of documenting members’ methods. Garfinkel, following Durkheim, studies the workings of the social world, which is, in the words of Giddens, ‘a pre-interpreted world’ (Giddens, 1976, p. 158): The mediation of paradigms of widely discrepant theoretical schemes in science is a hermeneutic matter like that involved in the contacts between other types of meaning-frames. But sociology, unlike natural science, deals with a pre-interpreted world where the creation and reproduction of meaning-frames is a very condition of that which it seeks to analyze, namely human social conduct: this is why there is a double hermeneutic in the social sciences (ibid.).

This pre-interpreted world which social actors live in and help to shape through their activities cannot be separated from these actors and their activities; in this sense, it is different from the object of study of the natural sciences. Durkheim by establishing sociology as a new discipline besides psychology and biology creates a sociologist’s account of society which cannot be produced by lay members themselves; he believes that the study of social practices provides a way out of the dilemma between idealism and empiricism by focusing on mediating categories, which emerge from social members’ practices and at the same time constrain and guide their thoughts—in a word, the discipline gives the sociologist a privilege to study social facts. In Durkheim’s project, lay people’s perspectives are largely ignored. In comparison, Garfinkel draws our attention to lay practices in embodied, situated, accountable procedures and sets it as the task of ethnomethodology to study the methods of members in carrying out practical activities and making accounts. In this manner, he has to face a bigger dilemma in terms of the relationship between the researcher and lay members. On the one hand, researchers are strongly recommended to identify with lay members and see the world through their eyes, so that they can document their minute moves which are intelligible to each member involved in the situation and to the researcher who does not impose any preconceived framework of analysis as in formal sociological studies; on the other hand, researchers are expected to see more than members can see and reflect upon the tactics members use to achieve order to the effect that they can at times manipulate the tactics to induce a breaching. That is why Habermas (1981/1984, p. 274) categorizes the ethnomethodologist as a ‘critical sociologist’. He observes, Thus the critical sociologist supposedly gives up the natural attitude that prevents layman, the conventional sociologists alike from treating the normative reality of society as ­appearance—that is, as produced consciousness. In doing so, he orients himself above all to

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10  Garfinkel: Members’ Methods of Producing Order the naïveté of his less enlightened colleagues because they reproduce the everyday naïveté of layman in a methodical form easier to grasp. But it remains unclear how this reflection on the general presuppositions of communication can be secured methodologically. (ibid.)

Ethnomethodologists as critical sociologists identify themselves neither with laymen nor other sociologists because neither of them has risen out of the ‘natural attitude’ which makes it impossible for them to see through the appearance of ‘normative reality of society’. Yet is this self-positioning well justified in ethnomethodology? It seems more likely the case that ethnomethodologists are stuck in a dilemma: they cannot justify their research with a framework that grants privileged access to the social world; neither can they give up the claim that ethnomethodology is offering insights into everyday interpretations by attempting a ‘reflection of general presuppositions of communication’ (ibid.).5 Having recognized this dilemma, some ethnomethodologists try to emphasize the importance of underlining social members’ reflexive knowledge of social workings from the very beginning. For them, this would make ethnomethodologists significantly different from researchers constructing idealizations in other human sciences. Instead of treating idealizations as methodological tools in theorizing, ethnomethodologists consider both scientific idealizations and common-sense typifications as a phenomenon for study. The following quotation attests to this line of argument: Ethnomethodologists would contend that these idealizations in the human sciences have ignored the fact that idealization occurs naturally within the domain of scientific theorizing (which is, after all, done from within the world) and takes place as well within the domain of everyday life—in the form of common-sense typifications […]. For ethnomethodology then, ‘idealization’ (of either scientific or common-sense form) is a phenomenon for study, not a resource […]. Though ethnomethodologists must themselves idealize their phenomena in some fashion when pursuing an analysis, their approach differs from current constructive theorizing in that their idealizations attempt to incorporate the view that, from the outset, societal members recognize and accomplish the orderly structures of their world […] via the use of idealizations. (Zimmerman, 1974, pp. 22–23)

Clear as it may sound, how to switch from members’ view to that of the researchers, and  how to integrate and reconcile these two views in real research are not specified. On the contrary, as will be revealed in later analysis of the methods employed by conversational analysts, speakers are always in the background; in the foreground, only the ‘products’, i.e. conversations, are examined to reflect members’ activities. So the question is: to what extent have members’ views been incorporated into the research, especially when taking into account ethnomethodologists’ general distrust of inquiring into the ‘motives’ of social members? In this light, we can see that ethnomethodology is confronted with greater difficulties in theorizing than other sociological theories because at its core, with radical

 This dilemma can be read in the light of the following works: ‘performative’ versus ‘discursive’ attitude in Giddens (1984); natural attitude of members versus scientific attitude of researchers in Schütz (1962). 5

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reflexivity, all efforts of empirically theorizing and constructing members’ pre-­ ­ theoretical activities are thwarted as formal reduction and reification.6 Garfinkel states, No inquiries can be excluded no matter where or when they occur, no matter how vast or trivial their scope, organization, cost, duration, consequences, whatever their successes, whatever their repute, their practitioners, their claims, their philosophies or philosophers. Procedures and results of water witching, divination, mathematics, sociology—whether done by lay persons or professionals—are addressed according to the policy that every feature of sense, of fact, of method, for every particular case of inquiry without exception, is the managed accomplishment of organized settings of practical actions, and that particular determinations in members’ practices of consistency, planfulness, relevance, or reproducibility of their practices and results—from witchcraft to topology—are acquired and assured only through particular, located organizations of artful practices. (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 32)

If the researchers’ activities (including those of the ethnomethodologists) are ongoing accomplishments like the activities of the laymen, then it holds true that in its most radical form, ethnomethodology is in no place to provide any superior alternatives to formal sociological thinking, instead, it insistently challenges any effort to settle down into any empirical program of social studies. This remains both the strength and challenge of ethnomethodological thinking. The tensions between this radical stance and the practical need of engaging with empirical data are reflected in some case studies and applications. The next two chapters will provide further discussions on this.

References Atkinson, J. M., & Drew, P. (1979). Order in court. Berlin: Springer. Garfinkel, H. (1952). The perception of the other: A study in social order. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Garfinkel, H. (1963). A conception of, and experiments with, “trust” as a condition of stable concerted actions. In O. J. Harvey (Ed.), Motivation and social interaction. Cognitive determinants (pp. 187–238). New York: The Ronald Press. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H. (1996). Ethnomethodology’s program. Social Psychology Quarterly, 59(1), 5–21. Garfinkel, H. (2002). In A. W. Rawls (Ed.), Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkeim’s aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Garfinkel, H. (2006). In A. W. Rawls (Ed.), Seeing sociologically: The routine grounds of social action. Boulder and London: Paradigm. Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical actions. In J. C. McKinney & E. A. Tiryakian (Eds.), Theoretical sociology (pp. 160–193). New York: Appleton-Century-Croffs. Giddens, A. (1976). New rules of sociological method: A positive critique of interpretative sociologies. London: Hutchinson. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. English version: Habermas, J. (1984). Theory of communicative action volume one: Reason and the rationalization of society (T. A. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

 Refer to McHugh, Raffel, Foss, and Blum (1974) for critique on the loss of this radical reflexivity in some ethnomethodological works. 6

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Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity. Hilbert, R. A. (1992). The classical roots of ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lynch, M. (2012). Revisiting the cultural dope. Human Studies, 35(2), 223–233. McHugh, P., Raffel, S., Foss, D. C., & Blum, A. F. (1974). On the beginning of social inquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rawls, A.  W. (2006). Introduction. In H.  Garfinkel (Ed.), Seeing sociologically: The routine grounds of social action (pp. 1–99). Boulder and London: Paradigm. Schütz, A. (1962). In M. Natanson (Ed.), Collected papers I: The problem of social reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Zimmerman, D. H. (1974). Preface. In D. L. Wieder (Ed.), Language and social reality: The case of telling the convict code (pp. iii–xxii). The Hague: Mouton.

Chapter 11

Case Study

Researchers in ethnomethodology have carried out, since the very beginning, a vast array of empirical studies on ordinary everyday activities in naturally occurring, mundane settings and institutionalized worksite practices such as legal studies (e.g. Atkinson & Drew, 1979; Burns, 1996; Lynch, 1982; Pollner, 1974, 1975); teaching practices (e.g. Cicourel & Kitsuse, 1963; Have, 2003; McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979); medical analysis (e.g. Fisher & Todd, 1983; Heath, 1986; Pomerantz, 2003; West, 1984); scientific work (e.g. Garfinkel, Lynch, & Livingston, 1981; Livingston, 1986; Lynch, 1985), etc. They are encouraged to acquire the skills of the field they are studying in order to see things in the members’ eyes and at the same time adopt a reflective stance. In the following, some earlier case studies by Garfinkel highly relevant to daily language use, naming, categorization and communicative order will be analyzed.

Agnes’s Case Garfinkel first introduced Agnes’s case in Garfinkel (1967) and it has since then become a famous case in ethnomethodology. Agnes is the pseudonym of a patient who presented herself at UCLA to obtain a sex change operation. Naturally born male with normal-appearing male genitals, she was generally recognized as a boy. Yet when she was interviewed by Garfinkel at UCLA, that is, at the age of 19, she appeared ‘convincingly female’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 119). For Garfinkel, Agnes’s case provides a good example to show the ways in which gender identity as an institutional fact is produced and managed as a ‘seen but unnoticed’ feature of ordinary social interactions. In the report, Garfinkel gives many details about Agnes’s gender management such as how she learns to talk and walk like a woman; how she manages to go to the beach with friends, etc. In order to pass as a woman, she has to learn many ways of dealing with the social routines of ‘being a woman’. Garfinkel argues that even when managing a certain impression with a certain project/goal in © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_11

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mind, things will not go all the way as planned. He tries to make the point that to pass as a woman is not simply following rules; instead, it requires minute-to-minute work throughout constantly changing situations. He puts it as follows: These phenomena consist of Agnes in on-going courses of action directed to the mastery of her practical circumstances by the manipulation of these circumstances as a texture of relevancies. (1967, p. 166)

The identity of being a woman is constituted of many relevancies. Being aware of these relevancies and manipulating them according to contingent situations that she finds herself in, such as changing with female friends before going to swim in the sea, Agnes is actually ‘reproducing’ a social fact of ‘being woman’. This project requires Agnes’s awareness of those social facts concerning ‘being woman’. For Garfinkel, social facts are: Every society’s locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work, with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buy-outs, is thereby sociology’s fundamental phenomenon. (Garfinkel, 1991, p. 11)

In a word, these facts are not given or located as packages of rules to be followed; instead, they are always being produced—Agnes, on her part, contributes her share by trying to pass as a woman. Originally placed outside the vague group of social members called women, she tries to fit in by acting on the basis of her observations about how women are expected to act in a society. This, however, should not mask the fact that her knowledge of being a woman comes from her experiences of living in a society ‘from within’ and she has to act out ‘being a woman’, again in that very same society. For Garfinkel, to acknowledge this point is important because it highlights the contextual nature of her knowledge of being a woman and her momentto-­moment decision-making in achieving her desired identity. Garfinkel goes on to suggest that Agnes’s case is just an extreme example of every social actor’s effort in producing a certain identity and order in everyday social life. The only difference is that ordinary people are not always paying attention to these processes. Garfinkel explains in the following words: Agnes’ case instructs us on how intimately tied are ‘value stability,’ ‘object constancy,’ ‘impression management,’ ‘commitments to compliance with legitimate expectancies,’ ‘rationalization,’ to member’s unavoidable work of coming to terms with practical circumstances. It is with respect to that phenomenon that in examining Agnes’ passing I have been concerned with the question of how, over the temporal course of their actual engagements, and ‘knowing’ the society only from within, members produce stable, accountable practical activities, i.e., social structures of everyday activities. (1967, p. 185)

In other words, Agnes’s unremitting work to achieve a desired gender identity makes it possible for us to see what the ‘seen but unnoticed’ parameters of being a woman are in terms of speech, ways of behaving, personal stories, etc. Moreover, her moment-to-moment work without a rule-governed program to follow gives us some ideas about the fact that gender as a natural and moral fact and a social institution is constituted of situated, minute and individually insignificant behaviors,

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which are interlocked and overlapping with each other. An analogy from Wittgenstein well illustrates this intricate task: ‘the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 32). Seen in this light, Agnes’s case serves as a special example where extra work is needed to spin more fibres to produce a thread of recognizable sexual identity as a woman in the fabric of everyday life.

Breaching Experiments Agnes recognizes the relevant expectations concerning ‘being a woman’ in her society and creatively realizes her project of producing a female identity. It is a different case in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments when social members deliberately challenge certain expectations concerning a specific situation. Confronting experimenters with these disruptions, Garfinkel expects to see ‘exhibition of bewilderment, uncertainty, internal conflict, psycho-social isolation, acute, and nameless anxiety along with various symptoms of acute depersonalization which are supposed to be responses directed to a senseless environment’ (1967, p. 55). Garfinkel devises a series of experiments to demonstrate the tacitly shared understandings in members’ everyday life through disrupting certain expectations of subjects in a given situation. For example, students are instructed to pose questions to acquaintances or friends and ask them to clarify the meaning of their commonplace remarks. The following cases are some of the reported accounts: Case 1 The subject was telling the experimenter, a member of the subject’s car pool, about having had a flat tire while going to work the previous day. (S) I had a flat tire. (E) What do you mean, you had a flat tire? She appeared momentarily stunned. Then she answered in a hostile way: ‘What do you mean, “What do you mean?” A flat tire is a flat tire. That is what I meant. Nothing special. What a crazy question!’ Case 2 (S) Hi, Ray. How is your girl friend feeling? (E) What do you mean, ‘How is she feeling?’ Do you mean physical or mental? (S) I mean how is she feeling? What’s the matter with you? (He looked peeved.) (E) Nothing. Just explain a little clearer, what do you mean? (S) Skip it. How are your Med School applications coming? (E) What do you mean, ‘How are they?’ (S) You know what I mean. (E) I really don’t. (S) What’s the matter with you? Are you sick? (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 38)

It is presupposed that in a given situation only certain forms of practice are expected to be recognizable. Therefore, anything else will create incongruities that have to be handled. Changing a tactic ‘wherever a practice, or tactic, is an expected

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feature of a situated practice’, or having nothing occur, will constitute an incongruity (Garfinkel, 2006, p. 28). Such incongruities present themselves as moments of confusion or ambiguity, and they can be produced only against a background of finely articulated expectations. For ethnomethodologists, our ‘attitude of daily life’ consists of ‘seen but unnoticed’ background expectancies, which lend commonplace scenes their familiar, life-as-usual character (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 37). Each of the expectancies makes up the attitudes of daily life and assigns an expected feature to the actor’s environment. In consequence, the act to breach the expectancy by ­modifying scenic events would disappoint these attributions; furthermore, it is expected that this breaching will reveal how structures of everyday activities are ordinarily and routinely produced and maintained. Besides this, it is expected that the more qualified the person is as a social member, the more surprise he would exhibit toward a breaching scene. As is shown from examples listed above, by insisting that the interlocutor clarify his/her words, the experimenter is in fact upsetting certain expectancies because our daily interaction relies upon a set of implicitly agreed-­upon ways of acting and doing things which for example includes ‘do not ask people to clarify what is taken to be already very clear’, etc. Failing to conform to these expectancies will put the situation into chaos, as is remarked by Garfinkel: the world on losing its known-in-common background should become ‘specifically senseless’ (ibid.). Sometimes, new negotiations have to be made to mend the situation. In another experiment (Garfinkel, 1967, p.  75), during a conversation, the experimenter suddenly opens his jacket to reveal a recorder (which was placed there before the conversation begins) and say, ‘See what I have?’ The reactions of their interlocutors include worries about what use the recorder will be put into. The breaching has created a disorderly situation where new agreements have to be made as to what to do with the recording, etc. Though sometimes Garfinkel seems to suggest that situations can be marked as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’, ‘unusual’ when he devises these breaching experiments, it should be noted that he is in no way suggesting that these distinctions should be treated as given.1 Instead, these experiments, designed out of ethnomethodologists’ reflection of the observed social facts, intend to discover certain implicit agreements held by social actors when they act, namely, a certain practical ethics. As Garfinkel explains, This process, which I shall call a method of discovering agreements by eliciting or imposing a respect for the rule of practical circumstances, is a version of practical ethics. Although it has received little if any attention by social scientists, it is a matter of the most abiding and commonplace concern in everyday affairs and commonsense theories of these affairs. Adeptness in the deliberate manipulation of et cetera considerations for the furtherance of specific advantages is an occupational talent of lawyers and is specifically taught to law school students. One should not suppose, however, that because it is a lawyer’s skill, that only

 As noted by Heritage (1984, pp. 98–99), though it was the aim of Garfinkel’s earlier experiments to create situations which were literally unintelligible or senseless, rarely did he achieve this aim. In the experiments, though the subjects do not always fully understand what is going on, seldom are they at a total loss or do they find the interchange senseless. Instead, they try to see the breaches as involving ‘“active”, i.e. “chosen” or “motivated”, departures from the normal which, reasonably enough, they viewed as illegitimate and offensive.’ 1

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lawyers are skilled at it, or that only those who do so deliberately, do so at all. The method is general to the phenomenon of the society as a system of rule-governed activities. (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 74)

For Garfinkel, this general understanding of rules, ways of doing and behaving, social categories and expectations cannot be deduced in advance, instead, they have to be worked through by each member in their day-to-day activities. However, this should not be taken as saying that there are not any vaguely ‘objective’ facts that guide and constrain social actors. For example, a queue is made up from actors’ practical and concrete behaviors, yet once it is formed, it will have certain objectivity. Each member’s decision to stand in the queue or not will be set against their understanding and acknowledgment of this ‘objectivity’, that is there is a queue. In Agnes’s case, a preliminary list of properties of ‘natural, normally sexed persons’ as cultural objects ‘from the standpoint of an adult member of our society’ is presented and it is believed that ‘a measure of the extent of the members’ commitment to the moral order of sexual types would consist of the reluctance to lend credence to a characterization that departed from the “natural facts of life”’ (1967, p. 124). To a certain extent, Agnes, despite all her efforts to breach or to change the order, has to subscribe to the objective reality of normal sexual identity—that may be why for Garfinkel (1967, pp. 177–178) she is no revolutionary but a practical methodologist whose ‘expertise’ consists of treating ‘the natural facts of life’ as true, relevant, demonstrable, testable, countable, etc. Garfinkel’s understanding of lay social members’ everyday communication activities, in particular regarding how implicit agreements are revealed upon breaching and how members go along with the situations and make new agreements lies at the core of his overall conception of social order. However, it seems to be the case that in its concern with social members’ local work of producing and maintaining social order, ethnomethodology tends to reify notions of ‘ordinariness’, ‘naturalness’, ‘moral order’, ‘normalness’ which are claimed to index the ‘real world’, the whole reality of social life. It is also implied that there exists a majority who intersubjectively subscribe to the understandings implied by these notions. In this picture, there is no absolute order, disorder or even ‘breaching’; instead, what persist are acts of ‘maintaining’ and ‘repairing’ order. In the words of Sacks (1984, p. 428), everyone is actually doing a job, a job of being ordinary, ‘a job that persons and the people around them may be co-ordinately engaged in, to achieve that each of them, together, are ordinary persons.’ In his critical examination of the foundational rhetoric of CA, Michael  Billig (1999, p. 556) unravels the rhetorical and sociological presumptions of this taken-­ for-­granted ordinary, everyday, mundane world: ‘“Whose everyday life”? “Whose mundane world”? Who determines what is to be classed as “ordinary” and “extraordinary”’? The same questions could be asked about Garfinkel’s program. It seems that in ethnomethodology’s insistent engagement with this mundane world, it also paradoxically draws on a profound rhetorical and psychological estrangement from that very world.2  I am grateful to Chris Hutton for making this observation.

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References Atkinson, J. M., & Drew, P. (1979). Order in court. Berlin: Springer. Billig, M. (1999). Whose terms? Whose ordinariness? Rhetoric and ideology in conversation analysis. Discourse and Society, 10(4), 543–558. Burns, S. (1996). Lawyers’ work in the Menendez brothers’ murder trial. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 7(1), 19–32. Cicourel, A.  V., & Kitsuse, J.  I. (1963). The educational decision-makers. New  York: Bobbs-Merrill. Fisher, S., & Todd, A. D. (Eds.). (1983). The social organization of doctor-patient communication. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H. (1991). Respecification: Evidence for locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order, logic, reason, meaning, method, etc. in and as of the essential haecceity of immortal ordinary society, (I)—an announcement of studies. In G.  Button (Ed.), Ethnomethodology and the human sciences (pp.  10–19). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garfinkel, H. (2006). In A. W. Rawls (Ed.), Seeing sociologically: The routine grounds of social action. Boulder and London: Paradigm. Garfinkel, H., Lynch, M., & Livingston, E. (1981). The work of discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 11, 131–158. Have, P. T. (2003). Teaching students observational methods: Visual studies and visual analysis. In M. Ball (Ed.), Image work, a special issue of visual studies, 18/1. Heath, C. C. (1986). The partnership: Essays in the social organization of speech and body movement in the medical consultation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity. Livingston, E. (1986). The ethnomethodological foundations of mathematics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lynch, M. (1982). Closure and disclosure in pre-trial argument. Human Studies, 5(1), 285–318. Lynch, M. (1985). Art and artifact in laboratory science: A study of shop work and shop talk in a research laboratory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McHoul, A. W. (1978). The organization of turns at formal talk in the classroom. Language in Society, 7(2), 183–213. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pollner, M. (1974). Mundane reasoning. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 4(1), 35–54. Pollner, M. (1975). “The very coinage of your brain”: The anatomy of reality disjunctures. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 5(3), 411–430. Pomerantz, A. (2003). How patients handle their lay diagnoses during medical consultations. Texas Linguistic Forum, 45, 127–138. Sacks, H. (1984). On doing “being ordinary”. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp.  413–429). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, C. (1984). Routine complications: Trouble with talk between doctors and patients. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). The blue and brown books. Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 12

Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson: Order in Conversation

Inspired by Garfinkel’s insights about locally produced order, Harvey Sacks, together with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, developed CA in the early 1960s to study order in casual conversation between peers through tape-recordings. Conversation analysis, since the very beginning, exerted widespread impact on the study of language and discourse. Sacks summarizes some major findings of CA as follows: The detailed ways in which actual, naturally occurring social activities occur are subjectable to formal description. Social activities—actual, singular sequences of them—are methodical occurrences. That is, their description consists of the description of sets of formal procedures persons employ. The methods persons employ to produce their activities permit formal description of singular occurrences that are generalizable in intuitively nonapparent ways and are highly reproducibly usable. (Sacks, 1984, p. 21)

It is believed that conversations, however fragmentary and casual they are, exhibit certain order and permit formal description. As mentioned in the above quotation, conversations as social activities are ‘methodical occurrences’. Why are they so? To put it simply, when people are engaged in conversations, they employ certain methods to produce conversation as an activity. A clear stance taken by CA researchers is that they are not very interested in studying language as signs or in how ‘meaning’ is communicated through talk, etc. Instead, participants’ competence in producing talk through recognizable sequences is emphasized. Heritage and Atkinson define the goal of CA in the following words: The central goal of conversation analytic research is the description and explication of the competences that ordinary speakers use and rely on in participating in intelligible, socially organized interaction. At its most basic, this objective is one of describing the procedures by which conversationalists produce their own behaviour and understand and deal with the behaviour of others. A basic assumption throughout is Garfinkel’s (1967) proposal that these activities—producing conduct and understanding and dealing with it—are accomplished as the accountable products of common sets of procedures. (Heritage & Atkinson, 1984, p. 1)

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In a word, the emphasis of CA is on the competence of language users and the process of how a conversation is produced through their employment of certain procedures. Understanding the words of other participants also requires certain methods. The orderly nature of conversation depends upon participants’ employment of certain procedures both in producing their own behaviors and understanding others during a conversation. The study of conversation in this light is expected to show the ways participants use to produce an ‘orderly’ conversation; upon analysis, conversations are demonstrated to be organized through a series of techniques such as turn-taking, interruption, repair, and question–answer positioning. For example, Schegloff and Sacks develop the term ‘adjacency pair’ to describe the paired actions in conversation. It is defined as follows: (1) A sequence of two utterances, which are (2) adjacent, (3) produced by different speakers, (4) ordered as a first part and a second part, and (5) typed, so that a first part requires a particular second part (or range of second parts). (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973, pp. 295–296)

For instance, an invitation is always followed either by an acceptance or a rejection; a greeting followed by another greeting; a question followed by an answer, etc.; these pairs, in CA, are defined as ‘adjacency pair’. However, this notion is not expected to be treated as an empirical invariance, instead, the authors are illustrating a normative framework, namely, when, for example an answer is not given by the second participant to the question posed by the first, this framework then can be accountably implemented, which means the second participant later would have to offer an account for the absent answer. They believe that conversation is organized in a certain manner to permit step-by-step ‘understanding’ between speakers without them feeling compelled to stop and question in order to be confirmed of the fact that the other participant is following the conversation, as is summarized in the following quotation: By an adjacently produced second, a speaker can show that he understood what a prior aimed at, and that he is willing to go along with that. Also, by virtue of the occurrence of an adjacently produced second, the doer of a first can see that what he intended was indeed understood and that it was or was not accepted. Also, of course, a second can assert his failure to understand, or disagreement, and inspection of a second by a first can allow the first speaker to see that while the second thought he understood, indeed he misunderstood. It is then through the use of adjacent positioning that appreciations, failures, corrections, et cetera can themselves be understandably attempted. (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973, pp. 297–298)

‘Adjacency pair’ seems to function as a certain metadiscourse so that speakers and hearers can orient to the activity without having to state explicitly certain rules which guide the activity. Depending on the observed fulfillment of an adjacency pair or not, participants can gain certain insights into the positioning of each other in an exchange. The concept of ‘adjacency pair’ captures certain orderly features of conversation, yet the question is, how far can we go to attribute functions such as guiding and organizing the conversation to this concept? Is it not true that these

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adjacency pairs as identified in CA first and foremost have to be recognized by specific speakers and hearers as, for example a question and an answer? In other words, it is not these adjacency pairs that organize conversations as an activity, but the fact that they are one form of linguistic resources that participants engage with. For participants, they expect an answer to a question and an answer of acceptance or rejection to an invitation without necessarily classifying this expectation as one function of the adjacency pair (see Billig, 1999 for critique on the difference between the analyst’s categories and the vernacular of the participants). To a certain extent, this emphasis on the organization, more precisely, sequential organization of conversation instead of participants’ active engagement in specific conversation gives rise to a strange picture of conversation—speakers’ roles are represented as filling in a certain position in sequences of sentences (as ‘operators of a speech exchange system’ (Sharrock & Anderson, 1987, p. 246)), which is made possible by the organization of conversations woven through implicit normative frameworks, of which ‘adjacency pair’ is an example. Another organizational feature of conversation studied by conversation analysts is the turn-taking system. It is asserted that understandings between speakers also benefit from the turn-by-turn character of talk by reference to its turn-within-­ sequence character. Actually, CA is not interested in finding out whether at a certain moment in conversation participants understand each other or not. Besides, for them, there is no way to know the answer except through observation of the incarnate ongoing of conversation displayed through the sequentially organized activities of the participants. Not only do they claim that understanding is produced moment-­ by-­moment through the realization of organizational features of conversation, but also the ‘agency’ of speakers is ensured by the system of turn-taking, which provides floor for everyone to speak. Comparing ethnomethodology with CA, Paul Atkinson (1988, p. 451) argues that the sequential organization of conversation as analyzed in CA exposes a simplified and reduced understanding of ‘temporality’. According to him, ethnomethodology, following Schütz’s works, emphasizes the retrospective-prospective properties of actions in contingent situations; while CA reduces it to ‘a stepwise, turn-by-turn construction of conversational order’, with no regard to the complex temporal relations and time consciousness of speakers (ibid.). In a very influential paper by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson titled ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation’ (1974), the authors propose a turn-taking system consisting of two components and a set of rules. They also suggest that conversation can be treated as ‘the basic form of speech-exchange system, with other systems on the array representing a variety of transformations on conversation’s turn-taking system to achieve other types of turn-taking systems’ (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 730). I will start with the process of locating the system as introduced in the paper. The authors point out that, through observation of an adequate amount of tape recorded data to locate some sequential organization, the turn-taking system, with its possible quality of ‘general abstractness and local particularization potential’ (1974, p. 700), has attracted researchers’ attention; its invariance across particular settings fits into the goal of finding a certain type of organization that has the twin features of

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‘context-­free’ and ‘context-sensitive’. The following quotation summarizes the argument for the existence of a certain ‘formal apparatus’ in organizing turn-taking: Conversation can accommodate a wide range of situations, interactions in which persons in varieties (or varieties of groups) of identities are operating; it can be sensitive to the various combinations, and it can be capable of dealing with a change of situation within a situation. Hence there must be some formal apparatus which is itself context-free, in such ways that it can, in local instances of its operations, be sensitive to and exhibit its sensitivity to various parameters of social reality in a local context. (Sacks et al., 1974, pp. 699–700)

This double requirement of being ‘context-free’ and ‘context-sensitive’ is echoed by Schenkein (1978, p. 3) when he describes an edited collection of conversation studies as ‘sensitive to the situated fit between abstractly organized structures and the particularities of local context’. He believes that the descriptions of conversation in CA offer a ‘promising movement towards an empirically based grammar of natural conversation’ (ibid.). However, this is exactly where problems come in. Stephen Cowley (1998) draws a parallel between the system described as ‘invariant to parties’, requiring ‘no reference to any particular context’ and the generative grammar system proposed by Chomsky (1965).1 To a certain extent, there is more danger inherent in this generalized and abstract model implied by CA than in Chomskyan linguistics for the reason that contextual conversations instead of isolated (grammatical) sentences are thought to be generatable from a certain device or mechanism. This sponsors a more reductive understanding of human communication. While it is true that CA does not intend to treat organizational features of conversation as invariant structures, the rhetoric of their works tends to give an impression that some ‘apparatus’, ‘machinery’, ‘technology’ or ‘system’ is working to generate the orderliness in naturally occurring conversations, as in the following quotation from Sacks: The gross aim of the work I am doing is to see how finely the details of actual, naturally occurring conversation can be subjected to analysis that will yield the technology of conversation. The idea is to take singular sequences of conversation and tear them apart in such a way as to find rules, techniques, procedures, methods, maxims (a collection of terms that more or less relate to each other and that I use somewhat interchangeably) that can be used to generate the orderly features we find in the conversations we examine. The point is, then, to come back to the singular things we observe in a singular sequence, with some rules that handle those singular features, and also, necessarily, handle lots of other events. (Sacks, 1984, p. 411)

As is put above, CA can be divided into several steps: first, certain sequences of conversation are torn apart in analysis in order to find rules, techniques, procedures, etc. Second, these rules, techniques and procedures, upon analysis, are treated to be  As observed by Murray (1994, p. 364), ethnomethodologists emulate transformational grammar instead of the linguistic views held by ethnographers of speaking such as Hymes. Quoting Garfinkel and Sacks’s words: ‘members are unanimous in their recognition of the ‘machinery’ they posit’ (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1968, pp. 356–357), he argues that their notions of interactional competence were based on analogies of Chomsky’s notions. Another parallel he draws is the feature of ‘ignoring history, geography and cultural variability to hover above the empirical world as a priori, invariant, universal structures’ in both schools. (Murray, 1994, p. 364) 1

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the mechanisms that generate the orderly features of the specific conversation being analyzed. Third, these rules, techniques and procedures are further tested to see if they can explain the orderly features of other conversation events. Moreover, it is sometimes implied that members who participate in conversations are actually using these apparatuses or rules. As Paul Ten Have (1990, p. 32) observes, the ultimate goal of CA is ‘to formulate the means used by the members in their situated interactions: ‘devices’, ‘the apparatus’ or ‘the technology of conversation’. Up to this point, we can locate an implicit working logic in CA which can be rendered crudely as follows: conversations exhibit order, thus there must be some technology that generates this order, and thus members must be using some methods based on these technologies. In this way, the orderly features of conversation are linked with the procedural methods used by social members and it is implied that these methods actually produce the order. This logic can be further reflected in other basic concepts in ethnomethodology, such as ‘witnessable order’, ‘sequentiality’ and ‘accountability’. The following quotation makes this link very explicit: We have proceeded under the assumption (as assumption borne out by our research) that is so far as the materials we worked with exhibited orderliness, they did so not only to us, indeed not in the first place for us, but for the co-participants who had produced them. If the materials (records of natural conversation) were orderly, they were so because they had been methodically produced by members of the society for one another, and it was a feature of the conversations we treated as data that they were produced so as to allow the display by the co-participants to each other of their orderliness, and to allow the participants to display to each other their analysis, appreciation and use of that orderliness. Accordingly, our analysis has sought to explicate the ways in which the materials are produced by members in orderly ways that exhibit their orderliness and have their orderliness appreciated and used, and have that appreciation displayed and treated as the basis for subsequent action. (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973, p. 290)

The orderliness exhibited by natural conversations upon analysis is thought to be first and foremost methodically produced by participants; secondly, if this order is observable to researchers, it must be so for participants who display the orderliness of their conversation for each other. Moreover, this display and appreciation of the display constitute the basis for further actions. So for CA researchers, there is an alignment of the perceptions of orderliness by participants and researchers; yet what remains unclear is whether the orderliness produced and perceived by participants engaging in natural conversation unfolding in contingent situations is the same orderliness analyzed and exhibited by conversation analysts. Furthermore, it is not explained why the analysis of conversation patterns will give us insights into members’ methods. How can the intelligibility exhibited by conversation as an activity to those involved be treated the same as the exhibition of certain patterning generated by the analysis? There is no evidence or plausible argument in favor of a transition from describing the orderliness of transcribed texts or supposed orderliness to speculating about members’ using certain methods in producing order. In addition to this logical inconsistency, other critics such as Searle (1992) question whether this turn-taking system consists of any rule and if there is, what kind of rule is it? Searle makes a comparison between a hypothesized rule for walking and the turn-taking rule postulated in CA. In the case of walking, we can postulate an

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imagined rule which describes most of the situations in walking such as one can keep walking in the same direction, or one can change direction, or one can sit down and stop walking altogether. Yet, the fact that this walking rule ‘could hardly be false’ in its ‘description of what happens when someone goes for a walk’ does not make it ‘a rule’ for walking (1992, p. 16), for the reason that this rule is ‘tautological’ and can hardly be a rule which anyone is actually following. Searle further argues: The walking rule is like the Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson rule in that it is almost tautological. It is not completely tautological because there are always other possibilities. When walking, you could start jumping up and down or do cartwheels. In talking, everybody might shut up and not say anything, or they might break into a song, or they might all talk at once, or there might be a rigid hierarchical order in which they are required to talk. (ibid.)

Searle makes a strong argument here about the tautological nature of these turn-­ taking rules, yet CA does not seem to always claim that speakers are actually following these rules. In fact, there is a good amount of literature in ethnomethodology arguing against the invocation of rules as explanations of or directives to behaviors. For example, Garfinkel is sceptical of treating social members as rule-­following ‘judgmental dopes’. In the following quotation he explains what ‘following rules’ means: When a person seems to be following rules, what is that that seems to consist of? We need to describe how it gets done. These practices of etc., unless, let it pass, pretense of agreeing, the use of sanctioned vagueness, the waiting for something later to happen which promises to clarify what has gone before, the avoidance of monsters even then they occur and the borrowing of exceptions are all involved. I am proposing these as practices whereby persons make what they are doing happen as rule-analysable conduct. (Garfinkel, 1968, p. 220)

So instead of explaining social members’ behavior as the result of following certain rules, Garfinkel draws our attention to the process of how members account for their behavior by invocation of certain rules, which is, by making their conduct analyzable under certain rules. Garfinkel (1967) argues that it is in linking rules with behaviors, i.e. in accounting practices, that every social member ‘makes familiar, commonplace activities of everyday life recognizable as familiar, commonplace activities’ (1967, p. 9). From another perspective, every accounting practice requires a new act of recognition in the sense that ‘on each occasion that an account of common activities is used, that they be recognised for “another first time”’ (ibid.). These arguments seem to provide a way out of the critique of CA’s postulations of rules. CA researchers can claim that they are only describing observed regularities of conversation upon analysis of natural conversations and proposing models that in turn explain these regularities without necessarily claiming that members are following certain rules. Actually, there are other arguments that run in the same line, such as, the observed ‘patterning’ in conversation is produced even when no one is following any explicit rule in talking. For example, instead of characterizing participants’ activities as rule-following, Heritage emphasizes the normative effects of conversation on participants. He provides the following data from Pomerantz (1980):

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A: Yer line’s been busy. B: Yeah my fu (hh)! hh my father’s wife called me… ((continues)) (Heritage, 1984, p. 127)

He observes that in this conversation, the first speaker asserts ‘limited knowledge’ of a ‘known to the second speaker’ event, upon which, the second speaker gives an extended description of the event. Even though first speakers in this sequence always expect a response from the second speaker and will treat the outcome when there is no looked-for information coming from B as a kind of ‘withholding’, there is no rule that we can learn running to the effect: if someone asserts ‘limited knowledge’ of a ‘known-to-you’ event, tell them what you know. According to Heritage, knowledge of such actions is ‘characteristically tacit, taken for granted and rarely, if ever, raised to consciousness’ (ibid.) though people can invoke them as ‘accountability’ inferences because they are strongly patterned. It seems that Heritage gives more weight to the role played by norms in members’ formulation of accounts instead of the determining power of rules in governing human action. Norms, for him, are resources that people develop an orientation to; he suggests that the strong patterning exhibited in conversations has something to do with their normative power. It seems clear that the aim of CA is not to postulate or discover rules, as Searle may have believed. By proposing a concept like ‘adjacency pair’, CA does not claim that questions should be answered. As Levinson (1979) (quoted in Heritage, 1984, p. 128) observes, there is no determinate set of overt cultural rules available for us to recognize a question, still less how to answer it. The underlying rule systems CA claims to have uncovered are not explicitly formulated or codified within the culture, though they are taken as known in common by references to ‘reasoning procedures which draw upon complex, tacit, and inductively based arrays of “considerations” and “awareness”’ (Heritage, 1984, p. 128). In Atkinson and Drew (1979), they make similar observations concerning the absence of the second part in an adjacency pair: [B]ut the fact that such absences may be complained about, and may support certain inferences about the person who has been selected by a first speaker, attests to conversationalists’ orientation to the constraint that, on the completion of a first part of an adjacency pair, the second part of that pair is a relevant next action on the part of the selected speaker. (1979, p. 55) [T]he occurrence of an absent, delayed or dispreferred second part is not merely noticeable, but that very noticeability provides a basis for inferences to be made about the motives and moral character of the speaker who failed to do a projected second turn. Were this not a recurrently present possibility, it is not clear either that there would be any constraints on speakers to answer questions, return greetings, respond to accusations, etc., or how question-­answer sequences could work at all efficiently in doing the kinds of things referred to above. (1979, p. 227)

The strongly patterned behavior such as complaint after a delayed response or no response is taken to be evidence of participants’ awareness and orientation to the

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constraint implicated by an adjacency pair.2 All these arguments seem to present a stance adopted by CA, which is, to show the ‘strong’ patterning and the constraining power of normative frameworks. It is implied that the reasoning procedures of social members in orienting toward normative frameworks are connected with the patterning as exhibited in conversation. Or to put it in other words, the more patterned a certain organization of conversation is, the more normative power it imposes on participants. Somehow, CA cannot stop at the claim that these rules only describe certain patternings in a conversation; eventually links have to be made between the features of conversation and behaviors of participants in a conversation, no matter whether it is ‘participants produce orderly conversation’ or ‘the order in conversation inflicts normative constraints on participants’. However, once again, are these links justifiable? While allotting a considerable amount of emphasis on the orderly nature of conversation produced by methodical procedures, conversation analysts dismiss participants’ actual feelings or intentions at any given point of conversation as unimportant. Pomerantz (1975) demonstrates that  answers of [Rejection] are delayed compared with that of [Acceptance] for invitations. Commenting on this feature of turn-taking in conversations, Atkinson and Drew (1979, p. 59) make the following remarks: Of course, the fact that speakers may attend to the preferred character of some actions over others in the design of turns containing these actions should not be taken as exhibiting, or as proof of, participants’ ‘actual feelings’ or intentions at the time. It is quite familiar that rejections to invitations are formed very like the one in extract (14),3 even though the speaker might have wished that the invitation had not been forthcoming, though the account was ‘made up’ for the purpose of rejecting it (accounts which are sometimes called excuses), and though the speaker has no intention of accepting any such invitation in the future, despite the account having been formed for this occasion. Thus the term ‘preference’ in this context does not refer to a speaker’s psychological predisposition: instead it describes the systematic features of the design of turns in which certain alternative but non-equivalent actions are taken, as well as aspects of the sequential organization of such actions.

The above quotation explains why an account of speakers’ behavior based on the systematic features of turn-taking is favored over an intentional account. However, as I will show in the following, this argument relies on a simplistic reading of ‘inten Atkinson and Drew proceed from asserting the significance of turn-taking in organizing court proceedings to demonstrate the ways in which the form of question-answer effectively exerts control in court and facilitates the practical work involved. Their analyses reveal how much the ‘form’ of proceedings (more like examination than conversation) shape the way court interactions appear and eventually the way moral inferences are made. 3  Extract (14) quoted in Atkinson & Drew (1979, p. 58): B: Uh if you’d care to come and visit a little while this morning I’ll give you a cup of coffee. → A: hehh Well that’s awfully sweet of you, I don’t think I can make it this morning. hh uhm I’m running an ad in the paper and-and uh I have to stay near the phone. B: Well all right A: And uh B: Well sometime when you are free give me a call Because I’m not always home 2

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tions’. In this reading, speakers’ deferred rejection or rejection prefaced with [Agreement] type components can be taken to reflect an intention to accept future invitations, etc.; yet this contradicts with their answer being a [Rejection]; thus, the intentional account does not stand. However, a more nuanced account of intentions can actually explain such behaviors. For example, deferring a rejection or softening the rejection with agreements or excuses is not simply showing the speakers’ intention to refuse or to promise future acceptances, instead, they are intended to be a softened rejection which well considers the situation after weighing the possible consequences of all the alternatives including, for example a straightforward rejection. In other words, an excuse is not intended as a promise for future acceptance, it is intended, simply, as an ‘excuse’, which leaves possibilities open for the future. By proposing a possible account of intention, I am not suggesting that intentional accounts are not without defect; instead, I want to point out that conversation analysts in their emphasis on the publicly visible nature of members’ work are eager to dismiss the role played by other factors. This, in consequence, leaves their stance in a precarious situation. On the one hand, it is not enough for them to just study the patterns of conversations and describe them as governed by certain systems; on the other hand, their dismissal of actors’ intentions and feelings makes it impossible for them to anchor the observed order in the intentions and motivations of social actors. Their solution then is to chart out a so-called ‘public’ ‘witnessable’ field where many methodical procedures, systems, technologies of conversation are seen produced by social members and can be pointed out by researchers and recognized by others.4 This field does not belong to the invisible mental, nor is it unreflexively material. To a certain extent, it is presumed to be intersubjectively ‘real’, in the sense that as long as it is public, it can be rendered seeable and further accountable among social members. Also, it is presumed that social actors are intersubjectively aware of these normative constraints; they can reflexively conform to or diverge from them—for example in cases of breaching, accounts are expected to be provided. To use the example in the introduction, in explaining a 2-year-old child’s utterance, ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’, Sacks (1974, p. 216) highlights the intersubjectively shared knowledge people bring to understand it: When I hear ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’, one thing I hear is that the ‘mommy’ who picks the ‘baby’ up is the mommy of that baby. […]. Now it is not only that I hear that the mommy is the mommy of that baby, but I feel rather confident that at least many of the natives among you hear that also.

He further explains that these analyses should be treated as explications of intelligible features of the story that anyone should be able to understand: ‘to recognize that some form of words is a possible description does not require that one must first inspect the circumstance it may be characterizing’ (Sacks, 1974, p. 217). Moreover, he emphasizes the ‘real’ nature of these shared understandings: ‘the sentences we are considering are after all rather minor, and all of you, or many of you, hear just  That is also the reason why CA emphasizes the importance of keeping recorded data so that it can be located and verified by other researchers and lay members. 4

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what I said you heard, and many of us are quite unacquainted with each other. I am, then, dealing with something real and something finely powerful.’ (Sacks, 1974, p. 218). From another perspective, this vision of order-production represents a very dynamic picture of rendering the invisible visible, the unsayable sayable, of accounting for the not-accounted-for, etc. In other words, the public visible field where accounts are produced and recognized represents the real happening of ‘order’. This view does not presuppose any shared transcendental basis beforehand; instead, members’ ongoing activities are taken to be the seminal field where moral order comes to be established. Here I touch upon ethnomethodology’s possible political program, which places central emphasis on the public and moral nature of social actions. Due to its emphasis on the mundane details of daily life and its dismissal of reification,5 for example the reification of social class, ethnomethodology is often criticized by Marxist scholars (and critical discourse analysts) for its inability to tackle any substantive political issues. However, as pointed out by Hilbert (1992) and Dingwall (1975), ethnomethodology does suggest certain political projects which in the end do not necessarily contradict Marxism. For example, Hilbert (1992, p. 213) argues, If conflict and power allocations can be understood as internal to conversations or other kinds of members’ methods and if occasions of these artful practices are ‘linked’ in empirical space-time, then it could conceivably turn out that most of the political dynamics that Marx spoke of happen as he said they do but that the analyst would not require Marxian macronotions such as social class.

Ethnomethodology with its study of detailed human interaction including conversations provides certain ways to get under the terms such as class and reveal the methods and practices employed by social members in a particular time and place. On the other hand, Hilbert suggests that by adopting an ethnomethodological perspective we will be able to reduce big power games in society and class conflict to ‘empirical instances of impression management, reification of structure and ideas, social manipulation, conversation, data gathering, memo passing, career building, storytelling, news production and editing, poll taking, fashion selling, and so on’ (ibid.). For example, some studies in CA document the methods used by social members in organizing and carrying out conflicts (Maynard, 1984, 1985; Molotch & Boden, 1985; cited in Hilbert (1992, p. 215)). In the end, one can argue that politics is composed of social actions and social actions are made by social members

 As is made clear by Lynch and Bogen (1994, p. 84), this reflection on reification is also evident in ethnomethodology’s studies of natural scientists’ and mathematicians’ practices. By respecifying such topics as rationality, evidence, facts, methods, rules, measurement, representation and proof which constitute classic themes in intellectual history (Garfinkel, 1991), ethnomethodology demonstrates how these themes are achieved as practical phenomena, e.g. how a medical proof or scientific experiment is constituted through ‘a temporally elaborate assemblage of activities, equipment and literary residues’ (Lynch & Bogen, 1994, p. 84). They further comment that this reflexive tendency converges with the rewriting of the history, philosophy and sociology of science inspired by works of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Polanyi, Foucault, etc. 5

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using ethnomethods. This observation is in line with Dingwall’s comments on the moral nature of daily interactions as ethnomethodology demonstrates: But we are also moral citizens. The understanding which may be afforded us by ethnomethodology makes available deeply moral consequences. It underlines the fundamental equality of all people and their ideas and their right to be taken seriously. There are no mentally retarded, no mentally disturbed, no culturally deprived. There are, rather, people who get by in a different way from us but who are essentially human with a range of human possibilities. There is the emphasis on communication between human beings as the root of social order and on the continual possibility of change as that order is re-created anew in every encounter. […]. Conversely, responsibility for the present state of affairs cannot be shrugged off to some impersonal ‘they’. We play our part in creating it and the responsibility must in part be our own. Finally, there is the importance of keeping communication open, of defending the free dissemination of ideas. The ideal world involves a free market in ideas with continuous argument and debate between moral citizens. (Dingwall, 1975, p. 496)

Obviously, this reading represents a very optimistic interpretation of the politics of ethnomethodology (CA as well). It envisages a picture of moral citizens creating social order together through every encounter and being responsible for their actions. Moreover, this interpretation underscores the importance of open debate and free exchange of ideas in that this openness ensures the production and maintenance of social order. It is also in this sense that ethnomethodology espouses a dynamic picture of social order that depends on the constant work of rendering the invisible visible, the unsayable sayable and keeping the equal communication open. One may draw on Billig’s (1999) problematization of this presumed ‘equality’ to highlight the consequences of not recognizing the diverse realities each and every unique individual instead of a participatory social ‘member’ find themselves in, which could be the total opposite of an ordinary and everyday reality that ethnomethodologists like to invoke. To conclude, in this chapter, with a detailed analysis of the founding texts of CA, I have demonstrated the working logic of conversation analysts concerning  the ­identification of intelligible order produced and followed by participants and that observed by researchers. They locate systems such as turn-taking system which guides and constrains conversation as an activity and they strongly imply that social members are not only aware of these systems but are also subject to normative influences exerted by them. The question is: how far can we go to link these systems with work done by participants? In other words, how can we feed conversation analysts’ discoveries back into the first-order activities of social members? Lynch and Bogen’s observations articulate this problem as well: Although conversation analysts do take account of ‘participants’ orientations’ when deriving analytic structures from close study of singular fragments of conversation, their analytic practices and technical criteria are no longer grounded in an unexplicated mastery of conversation. Instead, they take their point of departure and return from a specialized corpus of analytic models and findings. (Lynch & Bogen, 1994, p. 92).

To a certain extent, the problems faced by CA are an extension of the inherent tensions in ethnomethodology itself (as discussed in Chap. 10), which is only made

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more explicit in CA when a radical reflexive ‘ethnomethodologist’ tries to settle into organized empirical research.

References Atkinson, J. M., & Drew, P. (1979). Order in court. Berlin: Springer. Atkinson, P. (1988). Ethnomethodology: A critical review. Annual Review of Sociology, 14(1), 441–465. Billig, M. (1999). Whose terms? Whose ordinariness? Rhetoric and ideology in conversation analysis. Discourse and Society, 10(4), 543–558. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Cowley, S.  J. (1998). Of turn-taking timing and conversations. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27(5), 541–571. Dingwall, R. (1975). Correspondence: Ethnomethodology and marxism. Sociology, 9(3), 495–496. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H. (1968). Discussion: The origin of the term “ethnomethodology”. In R.  Hill & K. Grittenden (Eds.), Proceedings of the purdue symposium on ethnomethodology (pp. 15–18). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University. Garfinkel, H. (1991). Respecification: Evidence for locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order, logic, reason, meaning, method, etc. in and as of the essential haecceity of immortal ordinary society, (I)—an announcement of studies. In G.  Button (Ed.), Ethnomethodology and the human sciences (pp.  10–19). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1968). On formal structures of practical action. In E.  Tiryakian & J. McKinney (Eds.), Theoretical sociology (pp. 337–366). New York: Appleton. Have, P.  T. (1990). Methodological issues in conversation analysis. Bulletin of Sociological Methodology, 27(1), 23–51. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heritage, J., & Atkinson, J.  M. (1984). Introduction. In J.  M. Atkinson & J.  Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 1–16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hilbert, R. A. (1992). The classical roots of ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Levinson, S. C. (1979). Activity types and language. Linguistics, 17, 365–399. Lynch, M., & Bogen, D. (1994). Harvey Sacks’s primitive natural science. Theory, Culture & Society, 11(4), 65–104. Maynard, D. W. (1984). Inside plea bargaining: The language of negotiation. New York: Plenum Press. Maynard, D. W. (1985). How children start arguments. Language in Society, 14(1), 1–29. Molotch, H., & Boden, D. (1985). Talking social structure: Discourse, domination and the watergate hearings. American Sociological Review, 50(3), 273–288. Murray, S. O. (1994). Theory groups and the study of language in North America: A social history. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pomerantz, A. (1975). Second assessments: A study of some features of agreements/disagreements. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California at Irvine, California. Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling my side: “Limited access” as a “fishing” device. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 186–198. Sacks, H. (1974). On the analyzability of stories by children. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology. Harmondworth: Penguin.

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Sacks, H. (1984). Notes on methodology. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 21–27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735. Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8(4), 289–327. Schenkein, J. N. (1978). Sketch of an analytic mentality for the study of conversational interaction. In J. N. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction. New York: Academic Press. Searle, J.  R. (1992). Conversation. In J.  R. Searle et  al. (Eds.), (On) Searle on conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Sharrock, W., & Anderson, B. (1987). Work flow in a paediatric clinic. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organization (pp. 244–260). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Chapter 13

Social Order, Rationality and Modernity

Having analyzed in detail the empirical work done by ethnomethodologists, I will in this chapter situate Garfinkel’s theoretical conception of social order and individual members in the praxis of modern societies. Some recent publications (Hilbert, 1992; Kim, 2003; Pollner, 2012; Rawls, 2001) point out that the ethnomethodological view of man responds to the blessings and woes brought by modernity. Pollner’s article (2012) posthumously edited by Emerson and Holstein provides fresh readings of Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology’s Program (2002) and ethnomethodology in general. Garfinkel was born in a Newark lower middle class Jewish family. When it came to deciding what profession would best suit him, his parents consulted a non-­Jewish relative because for them who lived in a shtetl-like community the outside world was both strange and foreign. Drawing on this biographical information and following John Cuddihy (1974), Pollner attempts to read Garfinkel as a Jewish intellectual sensitive to the boundaries between the insider and outsider. He writes, The transition to this larger world was reckoned not only in economic terms but in ethnic terms; the outside world beyond was conceived as a gentile world. John M. Cuddihy (1974) has characterized this process as ‘the ordeal of civility’: as the ghetto dissolves or is abandoned the Jewish intellectual, ‘like some wide-eyed anthropologist—enters a strange world, to explore a strange people observing a strange halakah (code). They examine this world in dismay, with wonder, anger, and punitive objectivity’ (1974, p. 68). The encounter with the strange ways of another community produces a distinctive ordeal. This new world is unintelligible and yet makes demands, shaping the inside of the outsider. Cuddihy suggests that the very content of intellectual frameworks were deeply shaped by the ordeal or the reaction to it. One might conjecture, […], that Garfinkel’s abiding analysis of rationalization—his recognition that it could be other than made out by formal requirements—is born of a sensibility cultivated between and betwixt Newark on the one hand and the more formal rationalized world on the other. The classic insider/outsider, Jewish trajectory provides the constitutive insight and incentive to see formalization and rationalization as distortions of, and distractions from, ‘the people’ as the real foundation. (Pollner, 2012, p. 38)

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This quotation suggests that Garfinkel’s critique of Parsons’s formal sociological model is consistent with his doubts over ‘the more formal rationalized world’. This critique against rationalization also puts Garfinkel in the same line as thinkers such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. Pollner even draws parallels between Garfinkel’s teaching style and Zen masters in that both push reason to its limits. Yet, an inadequacy was detected in Garfinkel’s reasoning, namely, his failure to consider the sources which fuel a ubiquitous effort to formalize social life. Pollner draws our attention to the histories of formal analysis and local knowledge: But local knowledge and formal analysis do indeed have histories. Things have happened which have given formal analysis the prominence it has today in sociology and elsewhere. Connections can be made to the rise of rationalization and bureaucracy, and to Weber’s iron cage1 (mediated by ethnomethodology into something like ‘cageyness’). (2012, p. 51)

It is true that Garfinkel, unlike Max Weber, does not probe into the historical emergency of rationalization and bureaucracy, or formal analysis; yet Garfinkel’s works are very enlightening in terms of these issues highlighted by Weber. Hilbert (1992, pp.  152–156) provides convincing discussion on how ethnomethodology bears upon these two Weberian themes.2 He argues that for ethnomethodology, the reason why rational ideas can be sustained on their own is not because of the rationality behind these ideas; instead, what makes them believable is what is actually done to make them believed. The study of ‘ethnomethods’ foregrounds the examination of members’ actual deeds in local settings upon which rationality depends. These local practices work to generate and sustain an impression of ‘formal rationality’ as in bureaucratic settings which is indexed empirically, for example by ‘the proliferation of documents, files, specialized job descriptions, criteria for success, paperwork, special jargon, tables, schedules, pre- and post- tests, reports, presentations, cost/benefit analyses […]’ (1992, p. 156). However, as is noted by Hilbert, there is no ‘end’ to bureaucracy because on discovering the discrepancies between the idealizations of ‘rationality’ and the reality, bureaucrats will try to come up with new policies to overcome these problems: the maintenance of the impression of rationality is an endless process sustained through repairs and remedies. To illustrate, I quote his analysis of Garfinkel’s experiment on ordinary conversation (1967, pp. 25–31): He [Garfinkel] asked students to write next to a conversational transcript what had been ‘really meant.’ In effect he was asking for literal rendition to it; he was asking students to document the rational clarity of what they had said. When they complied, he asked them to clarify the clarity of what clarification, and so on. As we saw, absolute clarification was never reached; the import here, however, is that the task produced progressively longer and longer versions of the conversation, multiplying whatever remained to be clarified. (Hilbert, 1992, p. 155)

 This term comes from the following quotation in Weber: ‘In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage’ (Weber, 1904). It means the increased rationalization experienced in everyday social life in Western capitalist societies. 2  See Zimmerman (1970) and Bittner (1965) for ethnomethodological research on bureaucracy. 1

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For Hilbert, this example serves as a ‘prototype model’ of ‘rationalization as an endless process’ (ibid.). The pure existence of rationality, as suggested by the impossible regression involved in producing absolute clarification, cannot ground itself outside of ever-going practical deeds. Seen in this perspective, Garfinkel’s works point to the essential concerns of modern societies in that he draws our attention to members’ works in maintaining the impression of rationality. Modern societies, according to Durkheim (1893/1933), featuring a high division of labor and increased specialization, are bound together by ‘organic’ solidarity instead of the ‘mechanical solidarity’ of traditional societies that rely greatly on shared belief systems. Also, a new collective morality is experienced by social members, which include principles that sustain rational contracts (1893/1933, pp.  200–229). Durkheim, in his later book on religion, emphasizes the importance of enacted practices in religious rites for developing shared categories of understanding among clans. According to Rawls (2001), Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology is consistent with this shift of emphasis from religious belief to enacted practices. She explains, The notion that practices, and not representations or beliefs, actually provide the form that intelligibility has to take transforms the arguments significantly. One is no longer trying to explain the relationship between voluntaristic actors and an external constraint system (and the possibility of knowledge in a system where experience is individual while concepts are cultural). The result is something more on the model of a game of chess (only without the rules). In order to be playing the game one must make recognizable moves. Thus, on this version of the practice model, order is actual and not approximate. If there is order, in the form of the recognizable reproduction of practices, then there is intelligibility. If there is no order, or recognizable practice, then there is no intelligibility. (2001, p. 64)

In this quotation, Rawls draws a link between intelligibility of meaning and order. As defined by her, order is not necessarily a result produced at the end of an activity, but the actual activity itself. Garfinkel’s emphasis on members’ activity of producing intelligible sequences of acts is clearly in the same line. The goal of ethnomethodology in studying members’ methods is not to ‘represent’ or ‘interpret’ social order, but to ‘exhibit’ it. In his study of three sociologists—Parsons, Goffman and Garfinkel, Kwang-ki Kim (2003, pp. 89–90) offers an optimistic reading of Garfinkel’s emphasis on the witnessable locally produced order against a general disillusioned modern background. According to him, the implicit understanding of modernity in Garfinkel’s works provides a new stability for modern man, who suffers from ‘permanent reflection’ (Schelsky, 1959/1987, 1965), and ‘de-institutionalization’ (Gehlen, 1956). This understanding informs a new concept of order, which, according to Kim, is ‘in some ways more basic and more important than traditional conceptions of order’ because it is ‘immanent in man’s ordinary practical activities, an order which could provide modern man with the desired predictability, stability and certainty’ (2003, p. 89). Rawls (2006, p. 90) echoes these observations. She demonstrates the inadequacy of previous theories of social order that are based on typifications and individual motives since Hobbes, while emphasizing the advantage of Garfinkel’s theory, which lies in its emphasis on ‘mutual reciprocity with regard to the details of situated orders of action’. For Garfinkel, social order does

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not require that members share a certain belief or belong to a certain community. In the end, she states that the essential question of modernity Garfinkel has been addressing is, ‘What happens when “society” as we knew it is gone?’ Furthermore, Kim highlights Garfinkel’s ‘basic and idiosyncratic approach to agency’ (p.  102), which is exemplified by his study of Agnes’s case. He quotes Garfinkel’s comments on the practices of ‘passing’: Agnes’ case instructs us on how intimately tied are ‘value stability,’ ‘object constancy,’ ‘impression management,’ ‘commitments to compliance with legitimate expectancies,’ ‘rationalization,’ to member’s unavoidable work of coming to terms with practical circumstances. It is with respect to that phenomenon that in examining Agnes’ passing I have been concerned with the question of how, over the temporal course of their actual engagements, and ‘knowing’ the society only from within, members produce stable, accountable practical activities, i.e., social structures of everyday activities. (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 185)

This quotation crystallizes the intimate link between rational order and members’ minute work carried out within the society. Agnes’s passing is just one case among many practices concerning social roles and identities—one may see that Garfinkel himself was trying to pass with Agnes as if he had an adequate medical knowledge (Kim, 2003, p. 102). Kim suggests that this dynamic understanding of agency embedded in practical activities is particularly relevant to modern societies. With ‘the open-endedness of modern identity,’ and the ‘convertible quality of modern identity’ (Berger, 1974, p. 173), modern man finds himself in diverse sectors that call for the alternation between different roles, which in turn implies new prospects of freedom. Though Garfinkel himself never discusses the issue of modernity, we can see from the discussions above that there are certain threads in his theories which seem extremely relevant in the context of modern societies. Ethnomethodology provides new ways for us to think about rationality and bureaucracy. The focus on enacted practices, the distinction between lived order and conceptual reflections, the shiftiness of social roles, etc.—all these important themes which underpin Garfinkel’s thinking bear a strong connection with modern man’s circumstances. On the one hand, this picture suggests an exhilarating image of freedom made possible by locally managed alternation between different roles; on the other hand, the temporal and local negotiation of meaning in social practices demands a high sense of reflexivity. Concisely, it is an image of man in modernity with both blessings and dilemmas.

References Berger, P. L. (1974). Modern identity: Crisis and continuity. In W. S. Dillon (Ed.), The cultural drama: Modern identities and social ferment (pp.  158–181). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Bittner, E. (1965). The concept of organization. Social Research, 32(3), 239–255. Cuddihy, J. M. (1974). The ordeal of civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish struggle with modernity. New York: Basic Books.

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Durkheim, E. (1933). The Division of Labor in Society (G.  Simpson, Trans.). New  York: Free Press. (Original work published 1893). Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Garfinkel, H. (2002). In A. W. Rawls (Ed.), Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkeim’s aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Gehlen, A. (1956). Urmensch und spätkultur. Bonn: Atheneum. Hilbert, R. A. (1992). The classical roots of ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kim, K. (2003). Order and agency in modernity: Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel. New York: State University of New York. Pollner, M. (2012). Reflections on Garfinkel and ethnomethodology’s program. The American Sociologist, 43(1), 36–54. Rawls, A. W. (2001). Durkheim’s treatment of practice concrete practice vs representations as the foundation of reason. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1(1), 33–68. Rawls, A.  W. (2006). Introduction. In H.  Garfinkel (Ed.), Seeing sociologically: The routine grounds of social action (pp. 1–99). Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Schelsky, H. (1987). Sociology as a science of social reality. In V. Meja, D. Msgeld, & N. Stehr (Eds.), Modern German sociology. New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1959). Schelsky, H. (1965). Ist die dauerreflexion institutionalisierbar? In Auf der suche nache wirklichkeit. Düsseldorf: Diederichs. Weber, M. (2001). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1904). Zimmerman, D. H. (1970). The practicalities of rule use. In J. Douglas (Ed.), In understanding everyday life. Chicago: Aldine.

Chapter 14

Pragmatics: Order in Speech Acts

Similar to ethnomethodology (and CA), the pragmatic tradition in the philosophy of language and linguistics, especially SAT, also seeks to study the ‘order’ instead of formalistic representations of the language system in language use. In this chapter, I will examine how order is represented in the pragmatic tradition. The intellectual roots of the pragmatic tradition can be traced to the philosophical school called ordinary language philosophy, which in turn is associated with late Wittgensteinian thoughts. According to Cavell, what Wittgenstein and some other so-called ordinary language philosophers aim to do is ‘put the human animal back into language and thereby back into philosophy’ (1979/1999, p. 207). These schools of thought seek to investigate the particular use of particular sentences by ‘examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it’ (Austin, 1956–1957, p. 7). By adopting this contextualized perspective, they disregard any distinction between semantics and pragmatics, between the literal and intentional meaning of words. Ordinary language philosophy represented a significant break with traditional philosophical investigations dedicated to generalization and theory building by shifting our attention to the ordinary language, which is thought to constitute the source of confusion and create muddled philosophical problems in the first place. By examining ordinary language use, it is believed that confusions surrounding philosophical problems could be dispelled. Major works from authors such as J. L. Austin, Paul Grice and John Searle then exerted strong influences on linguistics, especially the branch of pragmatics. To a great extent, these theories can be seen to have turned away from investigating the relationship between language and the world, instead they sought coherence and order in the everyday social contract that underlies communication. In the following two chapters, I will focus on studying order in SAT developed by Austin and Searle as an example of the pragmatic tradition. It is commonly believed that Searle gave substance to Austin’s idea of a general theory of speech acts, which he only set up the preliminaries for.

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Excuses, Abnormal Situation and Communicational Order I will preface the discussion of SAT with Austin’s 1956 presidential address ‘a Plea for Excuses’, which articulates some nascent thoughts concerning order in ordinary language. Austin believes that excuses provide a perfect field work for philosophers due to the following reasons: (1) Excuses by nature are embedded in human actions/ conducts, thus can throw light on fundamental matters concerning human action, such as responsibility, accountability and ethics. (2) The study of excuses is not yet polluted by philosophical discussions. One can see here that the first point reflects a similar take by Garfinkel, who believes that unusual situations in communication render visible what is normative and taken for granted, as in breaching experiments. These experiments, as I discussed earlier, reveal and shed light on the fine-textured knowledge social actors bring into and rely on in each and every communication scenario. Austin, in a similar way, emphasizes that ‘the abnormal will throw light on the normal’ as it helps us to ‘penetrate the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act’ (1956–1957, p.  6). Thus by studying excuses, we expect to find out how ‘the breakdown signalized by the various excuses are of radically different kinds, affecting different parts or stages of the machinery, which the excuses consequently pick out and sort out for us’ (ibid.). The second one reflects a certain belief characteristic of ordinary language philosophy, i.e. ordinary language offers refreshing insights and opportunities to solve thorny philosophical problems. As Austin claims, they are ‘clean tools’ and ‘our first word’, encompassing ‘the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men’ (p. 11). Then where shall we start? Austin suggests first imagining the varieties of situation in which we make excuses, and then examining the expressions used in making them. Not yet having corpus linguistics to aid this research, Austin has to resort to imagining excuse-making situations. The question is, how can it be guaranteed that the imagined examples reflect truthfully ‘real language use by ordinary people’? In his answer, Austin emphasizes that if we, in our imagination of the situation, make it as detailed as possible, we would mostly agree on the kinds of things people say (p. 10). Austin’s confidence in relying on his own imagined situations to illustrate the general conditions governing or constraining the speech act of making excuses derives from the belief that there is a shared language (in this case, English) among the readers, who would agree with him on the use of this language, which is ‘derived from such various civilisations as ours is’ (p. 29). Following this methodology, Austin summarizes several significant results from the study of excuses. These findings illuminate some unnoticed aspects in our use of language. For example, by examining the modification we insert with the action verb when making excuses (such as ‘unwittingly’, ‘spontaneously’, ‘impulsively’), he notes that some actions can be excused in a particular way but not others—from these differences, we expect to ‘elucidate the meaning of the excuse’, and at the same time ‘illuminate the characteristics typical of the light on some detail of the machinery of “action” in general, or on our standards of acceptable conduct’ (p. 5).

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One example he investigates is the use of ‘voluntarily’ and ‘involuntarily’—though both can be used to modify actions, it is difficult to find ‘any verb with which both adverbs are equally in place’. ‘Break a cup’ voluntarily or involuntarily are two actions so different that they belong to totally different classes (to the point that ‘they are about breaking a cup’ is not at all relevant) (p. 17). This brief account of Austin’s study of excuses serves to illustrate the distinct method of ordinary language philosophy, which seeks to shed light on philosophical discussions by studying ordinary use of language. Though ‘order’ is not explicitly put under the spotlight here, we are led to believe that our everyday use of language is not arbitrary—the examination of which (especially in ‘abnormal’ situations) can actually illuminate why we think some conducts are acceptable, excusable, or vice versa. In fact, the delineation of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ itself implies a strong concern with ‘order’.

Speech Act, Convention, Intention and Rules How to Do Things with Words, a collection of the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955 by J. L. Austin, was where SAT was first developed. In contrast to the positivist view which studies the truth values of sentences with the goal of devising a theory of meaning, Austin argues that these sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. Instead, he draws attention to a group of utterances, i.e. ‘performative utterances’ or just ‘performatives’, which are characterized by two features: they have no truth-value; to utter one of these sentences in appropriate circumstances is not just to ‘say’ something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action (Austin, 1962). The action which is performed when a ‘performative utterance’ is issued belongs to what Austin calls an ‘illocutionary act’ (Austin, 1962, p. 98). In SAT, seemingly indicative utterance such as ‘I am angry’ is not just describing my anger; by uttering this sentence, one is performing ‘being angry’. According to this new theory, language does not merely represent states as true or false; language performs socially significant acts such as promising, apologizing, advising, etc., which through establishing mutual obligations and relationships, change the state of the social world. He devised a taxonomy of speech acts, which were then further developed by John Searle, who also contributed original discussions on the contractual nature of language by coining terms such as ‘constitutive/regulative rules’ (Searle, 1969). Instead of focusing on how speech acts reflect speakers’ inner thoughts, another set of terminologies (such as ‘force’, ‘effect’, ‘order’) is introduced to highlight how speakers, through their speech acts, exert changes on the external world (including the hearers, the community, and a certain ritual). The examples he gave include speech acts in the sphere of social institutions or of activities governed by a definite set of rules such as various games. For example, in uttering ‘I do’ in the course of a marriage ceremony, the speaker’s speech act is not to report on any inner activities; it is simply doing the act of ‘getting married’ and has the effect of building legal,

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social relations. On the other hand, the community recognizes the speech acts which take place at an appropriate time and place as, first and foremost, having external social functions, rather than reflecting social actors’ inner thoughts (Austin, 1962). Rather than ‘meaning’, Austin is more concerned with ‘force’ and ‘effect’, which capture how speech acts are not merely physical sounds uttered and heard. For Austin, the ‘leap’ from the physical sounds to the ‘force’ is a matter of conventions. It can be seen that by drawing on conventions, Austin represents speech acts in quasi-contractual terms and sets them against a set of felicity conditions. To give an example, for the ‘happy’ functioning of a performative, one of the necessary conditions or rules to be satisfied is: There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, […]. (1962, p. 26)

However, there are problems with this account of convention and effects, as pointed out by Strawson (1964, pp. 443–444): I do not want to deny that there may be conventional postures or procedures for entreating: one can, for example, kneel down, raise one’s arms, and say, ‘I entreat you.’ But I do want to deny that an act of entreaty can be performed only as conforming to such conventions. […]. But to suppose that there is always and necessarily a convention conformed to would be like supposing that there could be no love affairs which did not proceed on lines laid down in the Roman de la Rose or that every dispute between men must follow the pattern specified in Touchstone’s speech about the countercheck quarrelsome and the lie direct.

In his critique, Strawson tries to separate these two kinds of conventions and implies that a range of linguistic expressions can be employed to fulfill a certain illocutionary force—in other words, as long as certain linguistic conventions are fulfilled, the conventions governing an illocutionary act do not have to be followed. He states, ‘It seems clear, that is, that there are many cases in which the illocutionary force of an utterance, though not exhausted by its meaning, is not owed to any conventions other than those which help to give it its meaning’ (p. 442). One example he provides is to issue a warning with the force of a warning with the utterance ‘The ice over there is very thin’ though this utterance does not fulfill any statable convention of an illocutionary act of warning. So instead of conventions, Strawson emphasizes the role of speaker and hearer—in particular, their intentions. He explains: For the illocutionary force of an utterance is essentially something that is intended to be understood. And the understanding of the force of an utterance in all cases involves recognizing what may be called broadly an audience-directed intention and recognizing it as wholly overt, as intended to be recognized. (1964, p. 459)

At this point, it may be useful to introduce Searle’s take on this, as presented in Speech Acts (1969). Similar to Strawson, Searle proposes that speaker’s intentions are the main source of the meaning of utterances, but he adds a further condition: these intentions must accord with the meanings of the expressions we use, where this is fixed by community-wide conventions and the rules of the language from which the expressions are drawn. He uses an imaginary example to illustrate:

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Suppose that I am an American Soldier in the Second World War and that I am captured by Italian troops. And suppose that I wish to get these troops to believe that I am a German solider [and in order to get them to release me, I try to fool them by] address[ing] my Italian captors with the following sentence: Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen Blüben? (Adapted from Searle, 1969, p. 44)

The purpose of Searle using this example is to emphasize the importance of community-­wide linguistic conventions—the ‘rules of language’—in constituting the meaning of an utterance. That is why in the above example, according to him, it would not have worked despite the speaker’s intention, because the German s­ entence does not translate to ‘I am a German soldier’ without overstretching the linguistic conventions. With this example, though Searle is not saying we should always mean literally what the words mean (it is true that there is a certain space for speakers to mean what they intend to mean with certain words), he does emphasize the need for us to ground our meaning in some ‘conventional’ linguistic forms because ‘what we can mean is at least sometimes a function of what we are saying. Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a matter of convention’ (p. 45). In the following, I will examine closely Austin’s example and unravel some of the problematic presumptions concerning ‘convention’ and meaning-making acts. What he postulates with linguistic conventions relies on the assumption that the community which shares a certain language (in this case, German), of which they possess a certain knowledge, are always present in passing ‘silent’ judgments on whether the utterances conform to the conventions. However, what is actually happening in every communication scenario, instead, seems to be, the partial, limited knowledge each participant draws on, brings to bear upon the situation, often suffices. The perfect, complete knowledge is not only non-existent, but also unnecessary. With the linguistic resources available to us at a particular moment, we try to cope with the demands—sometimes we fail, but we also succeed on many occasions. Just like in this example, it is not entirely impossible that the soldier would end up making the Italian soldiers believe that he was indeed German. Given the dire situation he was in, it was definitely a viable meaning-making act for him to make: he was using whatever semiotic resources available to make a sign about his ‘Germanness’. Maybe we can modify the situation by imagining that he could not speak any German—not even one word; however, in the same vein as argued above, he could still utilize other means to make this ‘sign’, such as pretending to be mute and taking out an object which only German soldiers possess. My point of ‘reimagining’ this example is to underline Searle’s misplaced emphasis on linguistic conventions and the presumed presence of a language community across all contexts, and to draw attention to the process of how meaning is created in moment-to-­ moment orienting to the changing situations, by making use of whatever is available to the meaning-maker. To further illustrate, I will draw on the example provided by Jan  Blommaert’s discussion of ‘Nina’s Derrière’ (2010, p.  29), the name of an upscale chocolate shop in a department store in Central Tokyo. He makes useful distinctions between ‘linguistic sign’ and ‘emblematic sign’: ‘So in all likelihood, the French word “derrière” does not function as a linguistic sign. It is not there to

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say “this is Nina’s Bum”’ (ibid.). Instead, as he further explains, it functions as an emblematic sign: rather than ‘French’, it stands for ‘Frenchness’—the complex of symbolic associations of French with ‘extreme sophistication, European chic and exclusiveness’ (ibid.). Similarly, returning to Searle’s example, the soldier’s sentence in German, instead of being a linguistic sign, may be better interpreted as an emblematic sign, the meaning of which does not rely on following any linguistic conventions. Apart from this strong emphasis on conventions, Searle also highlights the concept of ‘rules’ when further developing SAT. He puts forward the hypothesis that ‘speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of behaviour’ (Searle, 1969, p. 12) and introduces a distinction between regulative and constitutive rules (though both are prescriptive or normative rules). According to him, the former merely sets out a list of rules to regulate a certain activity while the latter constitutes the activity itself and relates to institutional facts. For example, the rules of football do not simply describe football as an activity, but are indispensable for the activity to even take place; in addition, these constitutive rules back concepts such as ‘touchdown’, ‘offside’, ‘game’, ‘points’, ‘first down’ and ‘time out’ concerning the game of football in terms of institutional facts. This difference essentially justifies that language is not a conventional device used in a stimulus-response fashion as in behaviorism, neither can it be explained as ‘a brute fact’ (defined as ‘simple observations recording sense experiences’, p. 50), but an institutional fact constituted of, governed by rules, and relying upon speaker and hearers’ ‘following the rules’ (or recognizing the breaking of rules and holding each other accountable). Every institutional fact, for example the fact that John promised to mow the lawn, according to Searle, is underlain by a rule of the form ‘X counts as Y in context C’—that is also how making a promise can count as undertaking an obligation. A good summary of these interlocking concepts is provided in Searle (1969, p. 186): institutional facts exist within systems of constitutive rules; some systems of constitutive rules involve obligations, commitments, and responsibilities. For Searle, the importance of drawing on these distinctions between constitutive and regulative rules, institutional and brute facts, and eventually, highlighting language as an institutional fact consisting of constitutive rules are essential in underlying the moral dimensions of speaking a language. For instance, they can explain ‘how can making a promise create an obligation?’ This consists of four logical steps: (1) Jones uttered the words ‘I hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars.’ (2) Jones promised to pay Smith five dollars. (3) Jones placed himself under an obligation to pay Smith five dollars. (4) Jones is under an obligation to pay Smith five dollars. (5) Jones ought to pay Smith five dollars. (1969, p. 177)

This listing of steps is designed to capture the way how a brute fact of uttering a series of sounds can bind us morally and institutionally within systems of constitutive rules. Here we have a more complete picture of how SAT anchors communicational order in a series of concepts such as ‘conventions’, ‘constitutive rules’, and ‘institutional facts’ to underline the moral dimensions of speaking a language, which is ‘permeated with the facts of commitments undertaken, obligations

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assumed, cogent arguments presented, and so on’ (pp. 197–198). Both Austin and Searle criticize the stance of a detached neutral observer in favor of a committed participant who starts in the middle of ordinarily using the ordinary language. However, as I have briefly touched upon earlier, it seems that there lurks a tension between acknowledging the importance of context in shaping the force of speech acts and the need to ground the meaning, forces or effects in a determinate entity such as the language system shared by a community. This tension can be further reflected from the way Searle classifies speech acts and linguistic rules. At many places, Searle is seen making a clear distinction between rules for performing speech acts and rules for uttering certain linguistic elements in a specific language. He says, ‘an utterance of a promising device (under appropriate conditions) counts as the undertaking of an obligation is a matter of rules and not a matter of the conventions of French or English’ (1969, p. 40)—investigating the former type of rules falls into philosophy, and the latter into linguistics. At the same time, he emphasizes how they can be related to each other. For example, he construes ‘the principle of expressibility’ as ‘whatever can be meant can be said’ and elaborates one of its ramifications as follows: It will […] enable us to equate rules for performing speech acts with rules for uttering certain linguistic elements, since for any possible speech act there is a possible linguistic element the meaning of which (given the context of the utterance) is sufficient to determine that its literal utterance is a performance of precisely that speech act. (1969, p. 20)

He further explains, due to this principle, when studying the speech acts of promising or apologizing, we need to only study ‘sentences whose literal and correct utterance would constitute making a promise or issuing an apology’ (pp. 20–21). Here we can see that in highlighting speech acts as institutional facts, he ‘frees’ language into the open field where ethical discussions are possible and necessary; yet the temptation to ground it in the language system still exists as manifested in the above quotation where he retreats from talking about ‘acts’ to ‘sentences’ and their ‘literal and correct utterance’. This undoubtedly limits the potential to explore the ethical dimensions of speech acts. As stated above, for Searle, speech acts are governed by constitutive instead of regulative rules. Statements such as ‘he was rude/polite yesterday’, for him, would be appraisals of behavior made possible by the existence of regulative rules concerning social etiquette—these are not the kind of rules that govern speech acts. Speech acts, such as making a promise, ‘is a matter of convention … that the utterance of such and such expressions under certain conditions counts as the making of a promise’ (p.  37). However, it seems that in underscoring how speech acts are governed by constitutive rules, he leaves no scope to explore how they are also subjected to regulative rules. Speech acts are human acts and by definition, humans orient to various rules including both regulative and constitutive rules. It is not difficult to imagine situations where regulative rules can be pertinent in speech acts. For example, on some occasions, it is forbidden to swear in the name of God; in some situations, among a particular group of people, some people are not given the right to ‘give  order  to’ others. Unsurprisingly, these excluded situations seem to

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provide more fertile possibilities to discuss moral dimensions in the use of language. We cannot help but ask, if it is true that as argued by Hutton (2009, p. 61), the characterization of rules as regulative or constitutive can be understood as dependent on the particular point of view and time frame of relevance adopted by the observer, what does this intensive focus on ‘constitutive rules’ actually serve us in understanding language and ethics? Maybe I am asking the wrong question—the purpose of Searle in emphasizing speech acts as governed by constitutive rules seems to be exactly the opposite: to move language away from the messy, ­unstructured, and contingent social realities, and to ‘zoom in’ on the ‘constitutive’ conditions within which speech acts count as speech acts. Moreover, in Searle’s definition, it is emphasized that constitutive rules give rise to new forms of behavior which otherwise do not exist. This seems to be a simplified understanding of rules. From another tradition, Benjamin Gregg (1999) unravels this understanding of rules as a somehow ‘naive attitude’; for him, neither are rules giving rise to our behaviors, nor are they simply being followed. Instead, as explained by Gregg, when we are seemingly following rules, we are actually ‘changing’ them: We modify rules unconsciously to render them applicable to contingency and experience. We do so in a naive attitude that rules are guiding our behaviour when in fact our behaviour is guiding our use of rules. In turn, those rules define that behaviour, thus allowing us to maintain a naive attitude towards those rules, believing that we are simply applying them when in fact we are changing them. (1999, p. 359)

By directing a closer look at what is really happening when we follow rules—we actually change them to ‘render them applicable to contingency and experience’ by drawing on our contextual observations and evaluations, Gregg makes a strong point here concerning the nature of rule-following behaviors. If we subscribe to this view of rules, the distinction held between constitutive and regulative rules also needs to be reconsidered: to what extent are constitutive rules really producing the rule-following behaviors as in a football game? After revealing the potential weakness in Searle’s definition of ‘rules’ and the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, I will take a closer look at the other important pair of concepts in the domain of facts: institutional and brute facts. One example of brute facts Searle provides is, ‘I have a pain’ (1969, p. 50). It is true that as he argues, we do not need to account for any kinds of institutions to understand these kinds of facts such as ‘having a pain’, yet they are far from being ‘brute’ in the sense that it is readily understandable without drawing on any  agreed-on background assumptions. Building on Garfinkel’s insights that even to explain a simple sentence is an endless task (see Garfinkel, 1996, p. 26), we come to see how ‘I have a pain’ can never be a straightforwardly brute fact—we can easily imagine the inquiring voices, especially from those ‘Martians’: ‘What do you mean by “pain”?’ ‘What kind of pain is that?’ etc. Also, as the breaching experiments of Garfinkel illustrate, we rely on a large amount of background information to make sense of many mundane, everyday utterances and the fact that they appear ‘mundane’ and even ‘automatic’ in some ways actually depends on our easy access to, and possession of this shared fabric of embedded knowledge and assumptions.

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This also explains why despite the impossibility of giving an exhaustive account of why we recognize a social situation as it is, or what we mean by a certain sentence, as competent social members, we get by perfectly well, most of the time, without being able to fully articulate what we are doing or the meaning of our words. In brief, these so called brute facts also rely upon a host of taken-for-granted knowledge and information—not in the sense of Searle’s institutional facts, yet they are not just simply ‘brute’ either. Underlying the distinction between Searle’s institutional facts and brute facts are the presumed differences between a Martian’s view and a human speaker’s point of view. As Searle explains, the former can observe the regularities in some human behaviors such as language, yet they do not have the concepts enabling them to understand language as a rule-governed behavior constituted of conventions and rules. The reason is, it is social members’ intentional rule-following activities, which give rise to the observed regularities and that part of knowledge belongs to institutional facts. Now an interesting question to consider is: Do these two views have a definitional rift? Put it differently, is it possible to shift from a Martian’s view to a human’s view? What is the moment when brute facts can be rewritten as institutional facts? To a certain extent, to follow Searle’s terminologies, human babies can be seen as slowly moving from a Martian’s view to a human’s view, shifting from the state of accumulating brute facts to having a knowledge of institutional facts. For example, there are moments when fragments of information, observations start to take on conceptual frames: putting some objects in the mouth is eating, which takes place in a cultural context of sharing a meal—an important institution in maintaining family relations, building friendships, conducting holiday rituals, etc. When it comes to language, it seems that the same process of shifting from uttering meaningless sounds to forming contextualized understandings of language also takes place. On the other hand, through learning the languages and its lay meta-languages, interacting with other humans around him/her, institutional facts can be directly taught, felt and slowly retreat into the shared background, to the point that they may appear to be unrelated brute facts (for example telling people what one’s name is, saying hello and goodbye). With this comparison, I attempt to show that there may not be any fundamental differences in these two kinds of facts. Instead, it depends more on our perspective: do we adopt the view of the baby/Martian or adult/human? More importantly, we can shift between these two views by ‘deliberately’ adding or removing ‘shared’ layers of knowledge. The purpose of setting up this dichotomy for Searle is to highlight the institutional, constitutive, conventional nature of language, i.e. language is not simply stimulus and response. Instead, speaking a language is rule-governed, order-­ maintaining behavior which  involves moral obligations; language, different from other means of communication, enables unfolding of a moral life. Yet as is discussed above, by accentuating constitutive rules as defining speaking activities, Searle presents an image of speaking a language as governed by, enabled by or even produced by conventions and rules. As I tried to argue above, this somehow simplified understanding of rules cannot adequately account for speakers’ local interpreta-

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tion of, orientation to rules, and the nature of these rules. On the other hand, the distinction of constitutive and regulative rules, especially the attempt to accentuate speaking a language as governed by constitutive rules rests on a somewhat arbitrary distinction, which only serves to remove language further and further from the local, contextualized, physical and moral practices. Apart from this problematic understanding of rules, institutional facts and conventions, as I will show in the following, another reason why both Austin and Searle’s explorations of the moral order are far from being adequate lies in their theoretical agenda which exclusively focuses on the ‘speech act’. For example, Austin asks, how far can uttering certain speech acts make certain subsequent conduct in order and other conduct out of order (1962, p. 44): I give you advice and you accept it, but then I round on you: how far is it obligatory on me not to do so? Or am I just ‘not expected’ to do so?: or is part of asking-and-taking advice definitely to make such subsequent conduct out of order? Or similarly, I entreat you to do something, you accede, and then I protest—am I out of order? Probably yes.

Austin’s answer ‘probably’ reveals that it is hard to give a definitive answer and draw the boundary concerning the binding power of words and the contractual, moral dimensions of language. Obviously, Austin’s focus here is not trying to consider why people behave in these unexpected, even aberrant manners. In his theorizing of speech acts, he somehow puts more emphasis on acts rather than ‘the acting person’. Instead of aiming to understand specific speakers’ speech acts, he ventures to study the binding power of speech acts, in and of themselves. In his eagerness to break away from the mentalist, psychologistic account of meaning, it seems that Austin actually removes the very important ‘human’ dimension in his study of ‘speech act’. What he is really concerned about is how to put in place a systematic account of speech acts, more than considering speech acts as embedded in the life and history of particular human beings. Searle goes further in developing a systemic account of speech acts through drawing on constitutive rules and institutional facts, as discussed above. This also further directs his attention to the ‘internal’ dimensions of speech act as an institutional fact. He explains: It is internal to the concept of promising that in promising one undertakes an obligation to do something. But whether the entire institution of promising is good or evil, and whether the obligations undertaken in promising are overridden by other outside considerations are questions which are external to the institution itself. (1969, p. 189)

In other words, what SAT is interested in is how the institution of promising (effected by the illocutionary act of promising) binds every speaker morally. Questions as to the ‘external’ aspects of this institution (whether it is good or evil, the obligations one undertakes in making a promise (e.g. to conduct some ‘immoral’ acts) should be fulfilled or not) are not what speech act theorists are concerned with. To conclude, we can see that SAT, though highlighting the contractual nature of communication as exemplified in how some conventional, obligation-inducing speech acts relate to institutional facts, to a great extent, are only touching upon very limited moral dimensions of human use of language. It resonates with the concern

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of ‘order’ in Western tradition starting from Hobbes’s Leviathan and is colored more by ‘a legalistic understanding of discourse as establishing mutual obligations and relationships’ (Hutton, 2009, p. 58). As I tried to argue in this chapter, the theoretical priority of systematizing speech acts toward a taxonomic analysis of an exhaustive list of speech acts potentially precludes meaningful discussions of language, communicational order, and morality focusing on the acting person instead of rarefied ‘speech acts’ presumed to be grounded in constitutive rules. Searle ­follows the tradition of SAT as espoused by Austin to continue to investigate the speech not as representation, but as socially meaningful acts with illocutionary forces; it seems that he frees language into the open field where ethical discussions are possible and necessary. Yet the temptation to ground it in the language system still exists where he retreats from talking about acts to the literal and correct utterance of sentences, which undoubtedly limits the potential to explore the ethical dimensions of speech acts. On the other hand, though he acknowledges a certain extent of indeterminacy, his strong belief in the rule-governedness of speech acts prevents him from seeing meaning as indeterminate, and social interactants as constantly shaping and negotiating the meaning-making processes. The importance of emphasizing this indeterminacy against which speakers and hearers interact is to highlight, like ethnomethodology, their ‘work’. Without this acknowledgment, it is difficult for speech act theorists to see speech acts beyond rule-governed behavior— as acts conducted by concrete human actors in concrete situations, who instead of being obligations-bearing individuals subjected to the power of ‘rules’, creatively orient to them locally. In the next chapter, I will explore the differences between SAT and CA to further develop these thoughts.

References Austin, J.  L. (1956–1957). A plea for excuses: The presidential address. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 57, 1–30. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, S. (1999). The claim of reason: Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1979). Garfinkel, H. (1996). Ethnomethodology’s program. Social Psychology Quarterly, 59(1), 5–21. Gregg, B. (1999). Using legal rules in an indeterminate world: Overcoming the limitations of jurisprudence. Political Theory, 27(3), 357–378. Hutton, C. (2009). Language, meaning and the law. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strawson, P. F. (1964). Intention and convention in speech acts. The Philosophical Review, 73(4), 439–460.

Chapter 15

Comparison of Conversation Analysis and Speech Act Theory

Having dedicated the main section of this part investigating how order is conceptualized in ethnomethodology (CA) and SAT, in this chapter I will compare SAT and CA in order to highlight their different theoretical perspectives and emphases in terms of their study of the order. From previous discussions, we have noted their similarities in the following aspects: (1) Both turn to the ordinary language as objects of study; (2) Both see human language communication as taking place against a certain shared background; (3) Both see speakers’ use of language as contributing to the maintenance of communicational order; and (4) Both emphasize the moral dimensions which characterize language activities. Overall, they all carried out extraordinary efforts to anchor and locate order in the most mundane (and disorderly) domains of language: speech and conversation. CA’s answer lies in members’ turn-by-turn order-building activities while SAT highlights the orderly, rule-governed nature built into speaking a language. Indeed, as an attempt to locate common grounds, leading authors in each camp have once exchanged ideas on conversation (Searle, 1992), specifically, whether conversations are subject to (constitutive) rules. From their exchanges, we can gain a better understanding of where these two schools stand concerning some subtle issues. The first one is understanding of rules. Searle puts the challenge to conversation analysts: could we get an account of conversations parallel to our account of speech acts, in the sense of identifying constitutive rules for conversations? (Searle, 1992, p. 7). After reviewing both Grice and CA’s work in studying conversation, he concludes that these efforts will not yield constitutive rules for conversation. After having conducted a focused discussion on the nature of rules located by CA researchers, he reaches the conclusion that they cannot be called rules of any kind. As discussed in Chap. 12, Searle draws parallels between turn-taking rule and ‘walking rule’, not only because it is tautological, but also, as he further argues, these rules have no explanatory power in the sense that rules explain rule-following behaviors. The example he gives is, traffic rules can explain drivers’ driving behaviors, while the turn-taking rule in CA only describes the phenomenon of turn-taking without giving the evidence that people are actually following these rules. He goes on to suggest © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_15

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that this failure to locate rules is unavoidable since conversations, unlike speech acts, do not have ‘a particular purpose or point’ (p. 20). To this objection, Schegloff makes the following responses: (1) Turn-taking rules proposed by them are ‘followable, and are followed’ (Schegloff, 1992, p. 118). He also suggests that these rules can be called ‘practices’, which he observes to be employed by speakers and hearers in a conversation, ‘although not necessarily with the same articulatable self-consciousness as characterizes some rules or practices’ (ibid.), such as driving rules as Searle mentions. (2) Searle’s definition of rules is problematic in that it simplifies the complexity concerning rule and rule-following behavior as a causal relation, that is, rules play a causal role in the production of rule-following behaviors. He also points out that rule-followers take many factors into consideration when complying rules, so rules do not directly, unequivocally cause behaviors. Searle further responds and insists that CA does not contribute explanations ‘in terms of intentional causation’ in accounting for conversational behaviors as in SAT and pragmatics. Drawing on discussions in previous chapters, we can see that neither school provides a satisfactory understanding of rules: SAT suffers from a simplistic understanding of rules, while CA, despite its critical awareness that rules are not causal, risks  positing observed regularities by researchers as being actually produced by conversation participants’ rule (or norm)-orienting behaviors. Here we can see that the understanding of rules is not just a matter of different definitions of rules—it actually implies a certain understanding or model of the nature of human language activity and the mechanisms of order production. Are there rules in language activities? Do people follow them? How do people follow them? And how can order be accounted for? CA’s answer is less direct and straightforward than SAT by suggesting that people more or less follow and there are alternatives and options, instead of just one or one system of rules, to achieve same outcomes. Another significant difference interlocked with the understanding of ‘rule’ is their understanding of ‘intention’. As made clear in previous discussions, SAT seeks to ground communicational order in the speaker and their intentional rule-following speech acts while CA tends to downplay the role of intention when they study what each participant says during a conversation. Austin’s treatment of ‘intention’ sometimes presents it as not based on speakers’ inner state of having certain intentions. For him, as observed in Fish (1980, pp. 203–204), intention is a matter of ‘what one takes responsibility for by performing certain conventional speech acts’. This means that when speakers invoke the proper (publicly known and agreed upon) speech acts, intentions are publicly available to be seen, and it also means that anyone who invokes those procedures takes responsibility for having that intention. For instance, in saying ‘I am sorry’, one takes responsibility for having the intention to apologize, regardless of what the speaker’s ‘inward performance’ is. Yet, at other times, he does emphasize how having certain inward thoughts, feelings and intentions when performing speech acts makes the speech acts ‘happy’ instead of ‘unhappy’ utterances in cases of ­infelicities (1962, p. 14). For example, saying ‘I congratulate you’ without feeling at all pleased,

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or saying ‘I find him not guilty—I acquit’, when I believe that he was guilty, or saying ‘I promise’ without having the intention to do what I promise. It seems that Austin was caught in the difficulty of treating intention as dependent on invoking the proper, agreed upon procedures or as a purely inner state. Searle, at a later stage, offers a systematic account of intention and intentionality to resolve this difficulty. For him, the central concern of the theory of intentionality is to grasp the unity of, or the interaction between, the natural and the mental. It seeks to address the following questions: What makes physical emission of sound as in speaking an illocutionary act an ‘intentional’ act? And where does the physical sounds acquire their intentionality? Basically, how do we get from physics to semantics? He provides the following explanations (1983, pp. 27–28): the mind imposes intentionality on the physical sounds; the utterance derives its intentionality from one’s ‘intentionally’ uttering it ‘with a certain set of conditions of satisfaction, those that are specified by the essential conditions for that speech act’; by making the utterance intentional, one also necessarily expresses ‘the corresponding psychological state’. With this explanation, he links the ‘internal’ speakers’ intentional states (a psychological state) with the external intentionality of the utterances: on the one hand, the mind imposes intentionality on the utterance through the performance of the uttering act with a certain set of intentions that convert the act into an illocutionary act (Searle, 1983, p. 28); on the other hand, these illocutionary acts express our intentions. For example, according to him, commissives, as one type of speech act, would be ‘expressions of intention for the purpose of creating stable expectations in others about the future course of one’s own behaviour’ (p. 178). Several questions can be raised about this process: How does this happen? What is this mysterious process of an internal intentional state imposing intentions on a publicly observable behavior such as speaking? The concept of ‘intention’ and ‘intentionality’ seem to provide a convenient aid in developing a coherent account of the meaning of speech acts, yet the detailed workings remain unclear. Later Searle proposes a new term ‘collective intentionality’ to further theorize the connections and interactions between the mental and the social (1990, 1992). Collective intentionality is thought to be underlining shared collective behavior such as conversation. He even claims that in these collective activities, individual intentionality is derived from the collective intentionality (Searle, 1992, p. 22). The idea is that collective intentionality is not a combination of individual intentionality and reciprocal attitudes, but irreducibly collective (Searle, 1995, p. 27). In his recent book, Searle (2010) further develops the theory of collective intentionality to account for the creation and maintenance of social institutions. It is defined to be a mechanism related to collective attitudes such as collective acceptance, through which social and institutional facts and practices such as money, social institutions, public offices, conventions and cultural sites are generated and maintained. However, the precise structure of this concept is not worked out and we are left pondering: How does intentionality work both individually and collectively? Do we possess both a collective and individual intentionality when engaged in collective behavior? How can we define collective behaviors? And to what extent does collective behavior necessitate the postulation of a collective intentionality?

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This strong emphasis on intentionality in SAT, as Louch (1966) observes, shows that Searle’s account is clearly aligned with a long tradition of philosophical argument to the effect that understanding the meaning of action must necessarily involve grasping the intention that lies behind it. Compared with SAT, in which intention, together with intentionality, remains an important, underpinning concept, CA, following from ethnomethodology, insists on not subscribing to intentional­ ist accounts. As discussed earlier, CA tends to distrust mental descriptions and dispositions, which are thought to be irrelevant in discussing publicly observable turns of conversation. Adopting the standpoints of conversational participants, they argue, since we can never be sure of the intentions of our conversational partners, our conversational input could not be based on our knowledge of their intentions. Heritage (1990, pp.  327–328) lists three reasons explaining why conversation analysts do not subscribe to an intentionalist account: 1. it is not always easy to discern ‘intent’ in contexts where such intent maybe designedly ambiguous or invisible. 2. it is difficult to determine the point at which such an ‘intention’ was formed and thereby to determine its range or scope. E.g. which turn did it arise. 3. it cannot capture the depth of unconscious skill and mastery of conversational procedures in talk which is deeply opaque to intentionalist attributions.

In explaining the third point, he also criticizes Searle’s account, which according to him seems to render intentionality transparent at the price of ‘disengaging them from the unconscious procedural infrastructures through which their particular character as actions is produced and apprehended’ (p. 326). The ‘unconscious procedural infrastructures’ are further invoked to explain the unconscious rule-­ following and orienting activities by the participants. He argues that, though the content of the rules may be opaque to them, they orient to the normativity of these rules when they are departed from. For Heritage, it is exactly this aspect that cannot be accounted for with the concept of intention or intentionality, because they are held to be always ‘transparent’ to the agents. Instead of consciously intending to express certain meanings by using certain utterances, according to him, conversational participants do not have any conscious control of the language they use and how they will be understood, though they can hold each other accountable in a normative sense (p. 330). Drawing on other works (Heritage & Atkinson, 1984; Jefferson, 1989; Sacks, 1967a, 1967b, cited in (Heritage, 1990)), he concludes that CA has sought, wherever possible, to avoid a terminology of social action that invokes mentalistic predicates and thereby anthropomorphizes processes that may be less anthropomorphic than we conventionally believe; furthermore, it problematizes the practice of treating intention ascription as a global interpretive resource as in SAT (pp. 329–330). Instead, as also made clear in the works of many other scholars (Duranti, 1988; Ochs, 1982, 1984; Ochs & Shieffelin, 1984), CA recognizes that intentionality is locally occasioned and determined within the vernacular reasoning practices of particular cultures. For example, as the object of vernacular practices, it can be analyzed as a locally produced object of interactional analysis. In Duranti (1988), it is

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demonstrated that in the Somoan fono—a traditional politico judiciary arena—the speaker’s original intentions and understanding of certain events at the time of the speech act seem at times irrelevant for those who interpret his words and assess his responsibility. We can see that these differences in conceptualizing rules and intentionality further relate to their different understandings of and approach to study the order. SAT studies various cases of speech acts to account for the creation and maintenance of social institutions by accentuating individuals’ following constitutive rules, while CA takes ‘naturally-occurring’ conversation (involving more than one participant) as its data to demonstrate how conversational order is minutely negotiated, repaired, and maintained in publicly intelligible methods and ways. While the latter takes pride in studying ‘repeatably insepectable occurrences in this domain of natural events that we refer to in speaking of our work as “empirical”’ (Schegloff, 1992, p. 119) and closely anchoring researchers’ analysis of conversational data by following social actors’ perspectives and order-producing activities, the former relies on imagined examples and introspection (as in Austin, 1956–1957) and emphasizes the importance of subjecting collected data to the native speaker’s screening: they have to find them acceptable or at least possible conversations (Searle, 1992, p. 19). These divergent approaches and positions also endorse two different images of human actors. SAT projects an understanding of the human actor as a native speaker of a given language, who has already a knowledge of the language and follows the rules even without an explicit knowledge of them, and through speaking activities imposes his/her intentions on an otherwise purely physical event of uttering sounds to make them ‘meaningful’ and ‘moral’ for his/her interlocutors. On the other hand, in CA, the conversational participant is theorized to be an operator of various systems and mechanisms in conducting (ordinary) conversations by taking up different positions and following his/her turns. Overall we can see that neither school is well positioned to delve into truly meaningful discussions concerning the moral dimensions of human languaging activities: the former is constrained by a legalistic mindset regarding the contractual maintenance of ‘order’ to fully explore a richer understanding of speaking as firmly embedded in individuals’ moral life, while the latter’s exclusive emphasis on locating the mechanism generating conversation precludes direct engagements with each interactant’s situated efforts in making conversations, their concerns and assumptions, which may not be reflected from mere analysis, however detailed it may be, of their recorded words.

References Austin, J.  L. (1956–1957). A plea for excuses: The presidential address. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 57, 1–30. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duranti, A. (1988). Intentions, language, and social action in a Samoan context. Journal of Pragmatics, 12(1), 13–33.

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Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heritage, J. (1990). Intention, meaning and strategy: Observations on constraints on interaction analysis. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 24(1–4), 311–332. Heritage, J., & Atkinson, J.  M. (1984). Introduction. In J.  M. Atkinson & J.  Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 1–16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jefferson, G. (1989). Letter to the editor re: Anita Pomerantz’s epilogue to the special issue on sequential organization of conversational activities, Spring 1989. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 53, 427–429. Louch, A.  R. (1966). Explanation and human action (Vol. 17). Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Ochs, E. (1982). Talking to children in Western Samoa. Language in Society, 11(1), 77–104. Ochs, E. (1984). Clarification and culture. In D. Shiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, form and use: Linguistic applications. Georgetown University roundtable on languages and linguistics (pp. 325–341). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Ochs, E., & Shieffelin, B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications. In R. Shweder & R. LeVine (Eds.), Culture theory: Essays on mind, self and society (pp. 276–320). New York: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1967a). Unpublished lecture. Spring 1967, Lecture 4. Sacks, H. (1967b). Unpublished lecture. Winter 1967, March 9. Schegloff, E. A. (1992). To Searle on conversation: A note in return. In (On) Searle on conversation (pp. 113–128). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. (1990). Collective intentions and actions. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. E. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in communication, Bradford books. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Searle, J.  R. (1992). Conversation. In J.  R. Searle et  al. (Eds.), (On) Searle on conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: The Free Press. Searle, J. (2010). Making the social world: The structure of human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 16

Conclusion to Part II

In this part, I examined the notion of social order in two main schools of thought: ethnomethodology (CA) and SAT. Both schools seek to theorize how order is produced and maintained through every speaker/hearer’s mundane language activities, while exhibiting divergences in their conceptualization and understanding of rules and intentions. At the beginning of this part, I have situated Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology in its relations with the thoughts of Durkheim, Parsons and phenomenology represented by Husserl and Schütz. I then argued that ethnomethodology is a sociological project inspired by phenomenological works. The emphasis on the everyday mundane world composed of members’ activities is a strong feature of Garfinkel’s sociological theories and directly informs his interests in developing a study of members’ methods. After that, important themes in ethnomethodology are introduced and analyzed followed by case studies done by Garfinkel. Chapter 12 provides a critique of CA and its working logic is rendered problematic. In trying to make sense of this ‘logic’, I came to suggest that it represents both the strengths of and the challenges faced by ethnomethodology. In the end, drawing on recent publications concerning Garfinkel’s study on social order and its relevance to ‘modernity’, I provided further discussions of his study of practice, agency and reflexivity and explored the implications of his ideas in the context of modern societies. It may be true that Garfinkel’s problem is a classical sociological problem, his writings, however, have great values for us to think about members’ views, communication and meaning, which linguistics as well cannot afford to ignore. Linguists, as is revealed in Part I, tend to anchor communication in the structuredness of systems; the roles of speakers are reduced to either machine-like brains or members of a homogeneous collectivity. Garfinkel’s strong doubts over formal analysis in Parsonian framework lead him on the one hand to consider the phenomenological life-world, on the other hand to align with the thoughts of Durkheim and Weber by reversing Parsons’s misreading (Hilbert, 1992). In consequence, he firmly places actors in the middle of social activities where they go on producing and maintaining order. In his view, language itself has no determinate status outside members’ © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_16

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a­ ctivities; instead, it is tightly woven with normative social life and subject to contingencies. This is in strong contrast with mainstream linguistics’s subscription to a shared formal linguistic system underlying members’ communication, upon which the success of communication depends. In the hands of Garfinkel, social actors, in the middle of carrying on social activities, meet each other (oftentimes face to face) and always have to be ready to provide accounts, while in linguistics, even face-toface communication is conceptualized as the playing out of preprogrammed linguistic competence plus contextual knowledge.1 Furthermore, if we take a critical look at linguistics drawing on Garfinkel’s theory, is it not true that linguists’ work can be seen as part of the organized disciplinary activities contributing to the production of social order (by making the lay people believe that there is a system out there that they somehow share)? In other words, it is not the collective system composed of rational associations between the signified and the signifier which issues and guarantees ‘order’, instead, all social members, including the lay people and linguists, work together to maintain the impression that they communicate in languages and languages can be studied by linguists as entities. Overall, by focusing on the study of members’ methods of producing intelligible meaning in social interactions, ethnomethodology reminds us how much we rely on finely grained information and details in making sense of the activities we engage in without actually ‘noticing’ them. The emphasis on intelligible sequences of acts in procedurally analyzing social members’ behaviors, together with the study of ‘moral accountability’, characterizes ethnomethodology’s take on social order. For them, social order is not issued from any governing institution or unified belief system; instead, it is constantly produced through social members’ work. In carrying out everyday activities, social members are held accountable for their acts. The order, instead of remaining external to social members’ activities, is accomplished through these activities. Moreover, it is through members’ accounts in action that they discover the meaning of their joint acts as the observable product of social interaction. Ethnomethodology recognizes the reflexivity of social actions through acknowledging that members’ ongoing understanding and accounts not only position themselves in the immediate present, but also redefine the past and prefigure the future. In the study of communicational activities, CA aims at discovering the systems, mechanisms and rules employed by participants in producing conversation and achieving understanding by studying the minute details of how conversations unfold turn by turn. Moreover, though ethnomethodology tends to portray an image of the social actor as someone possessing knowledge about the society from within,

 Some works in interactional sociolinguistics (e.g. by Gumperz, Tannen), influenced by Goffman’s studies of ‘interaction order’, framing and footing, seem to challenge this mainstream model. As observed by Tannen, they are ‘concerned with how language conveys meaning in interaction’; they ‘regard the process by which language does so as dynamic, emergent, and resulting from the interaction of participants rather than from the single-handed linguistic production of individual speakers’ (Tannen, 2005, p. 206). However, a certain codified view on language and communication still lurks in their theorizing, e.g. they emphasize that different cultural systems provide different ways of signaling meaning by means of language (ibid.). 1

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and someone who is skilful, reflexive and able to adapt to shifting situations, its priority is to demonstrate instead the processes of how micro social activities, in which the actors are involved, unfold reflexively and become part of social order itself.2 After all, ethnomethodology’s emphasis on the witnessable order, intelligible meaning is consistent with its devoted interests in practical activities. The following quotation serves as a strong reminder of this ethnomethodological spirit: Thus, a leading policy is to refuse serious consideration to the prevailing proposal that efficiency, efficacy, effectiveness, intelligibility, consistency, planfulness, typicality, uniformity, reproducibility of activities—i.e., that rational properties of practical activities—be assessed, recognized, categorized, described by using a rule or a standard obtained outside actual settings within which such properties are recognized, used, produced, and talked about by settings’ members. All procedures whereby logical and methodological properties of the practices and results of inquiries are assessed in their general characteristics by rule are of interest as phenomena for ethnomethodological study but not otherwise. […]. All ‘logical’ and ‘methodological’ properties of action, every feature of an activity’s sense, facticity, objectivity, accountability, communality is to be treated as a contingent accomplishment of socially organized common practice. […]. Any setting organizes its activities to make its properties as an organized environment of practical activities detectable, countable, recordable, reportable, tell-a-story-aboutable, analyzable—in short, accountable. (1967, p. 33)

In this quotation, social actors are seen as ‘settings’ members’ who recognize, use, produce and talk about certain properties of the actual settings within which they are involved. Obviously, as consistent with my earlier observations, the selforganizing activities are more emphasized than members who ‘inhabit’ these settings. Yet, it becomes problematic when orderliness of activities is linked up with methods consciously (or unconsciously) used by social members (as in the case of CA). The dilemmas arising from the gap between researchers’ perspectives and members’ methods, one may argue in the ethnomethodological spirit, can be resolved by reasserting the commensurability between research activities and lay life in that both are grounded in locally accountable behaviors and practices. SAT, on the other hand, as I have discussed earlier, faces another set of difficulties in their theorizing of social order and speech acts. Both Austin and Searle’s works have opened up discussions on language, meaning, and effects of the use of ordinary language by ordinary social members and underlined the pervasive performative and moral dimensions of language use: words are not just words, they are deeds. However, their answer to the question ‘how do physical linguistic sounds generate social, institutional and moral meanings’ lies in grounding language in

 The tension between a reflexive actor and the reflexivity of intelligible procedures is always present in ethnomethodological thinking. In Agnes’s case, she is portrayed as a practical methodologist who is highly aware of the social norms governing the behaviors of a woman by living within the society; the conclusion Garfinkel provides is that her case instead of challenging social norms, in fact confirms them. Garfinkel’s attitude, as is seen from this example, recognizes both the reflexive efforts of social actors and the constraints from ‘natural’ facts about gender roles. Or in other words, for Garfinkel, the reflexivity of social actors is a reflexivity which includes an awareness of social norms and the general reflexive nature of social acts. 2

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conventions, rules and institutions, while the role of individual speaker/hearer is limited to rule-following. In the end, by comparing the take of order in CA and SAT, I have made clear that their fundamental difference concerns the conceptualization of individuals and rules, namely, what is happening when we follow rules? Do rules generate new behaviors or is it us who change  rules simply by ‘following’ them? Ethnomethodological thoughts, further developed in CA, offer insights into this highly contextualized and intricate process of how concrete human actors creatively orient to rules locally. However, as discussed above, unlike SAT, they do not intend for this creative orientation to rules to be any intentional, agentive or creative acts on the part of the interactants, who instead are represented to be compelled to attend to the unfolding of conversations and hold each other accountable in producing, maintaining and repairing order. Through this detailed study of major theorists’ work on social order and everyday mundane communicational activities, we are able to see how the orderliness we see and experience in real language use actually and precariously depends on social actors’ work, be it intentional or unconscious. Both ethnomethodologists and speech act theorists attempt to cast a fast-flying net to capture social order being produced in flight. The difficulties and inherent dilemmas they  have  encountered further remind us of their extraordinary efforts in tackling the thorny problem of ‘social order’. Not only do they insistently direct our attention to and systematically document the ways of how we go about living the ‘real’ and ‘mundane’ life, but also provide insights concerning the pervasive moral implications of social acts.

References Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Hilbert, R. A. (1992). The classical roots of ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tannen, D. (2005). Interactional sociolinguistics as a resource for intercultural pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics, 2(2), 205–208.

Part III

Creativity

1.1  Introduction This  part conducts a focused study on the notion of creativity in language studies. ‘Linguistic creativity’ has been an underpinning notion in Chomskyan linguistics since its first appearance in a paper titled ‘The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory’. The human capacity to produce and understand new sentences that one has never heard before was taken to be the central object of study in Chomskyean linguistics. This notion helps to assert Chomsky’s revolutionary status in twentiethcentury linguistics since the 1960s. On the one hand, Chomsky tried to distinguish himself from Saussure and William Dwight Whitney by endorsing an individualist conception of creativity in linguistic production; on the other hand, by criticizing the negation of human creativity in B.  F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, Chomsky encouraged people to see that the linguistic rationalism he represented stood at a better position to address human creativity than behaviorism. In this part, I will first provide a review of the Skinner–Chomsky controversy in order to re-evaluate some of the arguments concerning linguistic creativity and to see where they stand in the current intellectual landscape. Though not directly involved in either camp of the controversy, integrationism founded by Roy Harris represents an active school of thought exploring creativity in the study of human beings’ sign-making activities. In integrationism, creativity is a defining feature of human communication which demands constant integrating efforts across shifting contexts. This notion closely relates to the integrationalist concern with normativity and responsibility. In the main section of this part, I will provide a detailed and nuanced comparison between Harris, Skinner and Chomsky which goes beyond stereotypical contrasts by focusing on three topics: 1. How are human roles conceptualized? 2. What counts as ‘new’? 3. Thoughts on politics and human nature. Moreover, Ronald Carter’s recent book on creativity in everyday conversation will be introduced as an alternative theory. By studying these four major authors, I attempt to make manifest  major linguists’ understanding of creativity and demonstrate where their understandings stand in the evolution of ideas. Following that, to extend this enquiry of creativity

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and language, I investigate the ‘creative’ acts of machines and distributed systems in light of posthumanist ideas, and discuss the implications of new technological developments for rethinking human language and communication.

Chapter 17

Creativity, Linguistics, and the Skinner– Chomsky Controversy

In Keywords, Raymond Williams makes a distinction between an older and a modern definition of the word ‘create’. Before the onset of Humanism in the Renaissance period, this word was related to ‘the sense of something having been made, and thus to a past event’ and mainly used ‘in the precise context of the original divine creation of the world: creation itself, and creature, have the same root stem’ (Williams, 1976/1983, p.  82). He points out that it was not until the sixteenth century that human creation in the form of poetic imagination became part of the meaning, as exemplified by the sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso’s statement: ‘There are two creators, God and the poet’. In fact the word ‘creative’ was coined in the eighteenth century and denotes ‘a faculty’ which is associated with art and thought (Williams, 1976/1983, p. 83). This shift from certain divine influences to the human faculty has also much to do with the general movement of Romanticism in that same century which gives rise to ideas such as self-expression, group-belonging (romantic nationalism), the aesthetics of mundane ordinary life, indeterminacy and unpredictability of human existence. As to the word ‘creativity’, Rob Pope (2005) observes that though people had long been interested in notions of imagination and inspiration, in such matters as genius and talent, originality and invention, the word ‘creativity’ was not widely current until the 1940s and 1950s. He further elaborates on the highly specific context when it was used in that period: creativity is needed to ‘meet the challenge of accelerating changes of an unprecedented magnitude’ including scientific discovery, technical invention, commercial competition and military rivalry (Pope, 2005, p. 19). To illustrate this, he draws on two examples in creativity research: one is J. P. Guilford, a founder of modern creativity research in the late 1950s; the other is Guilford’s contemporary, the American psychologist Carl Rogers. The former in a symposium devoted to the topic of ‘creativity’ listed the reasons why it represented the ‘spirit of the times’: the arms race in developing new weapons and new strategies poses challenge on ‘all intellectual fronts, scientific and cultural as well as economic and political’ (Pope, 2005, p. 20). He further notes that faced with the coming of the age of space, population explosion, human beings need to equip © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_17

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themselves with creative and imaginative solutions. As is observed by Pope, Guilford sees ‘creativity’ as ‘a cure-all for the ills of a changing society’ instead of part of the force driving progress in the society (ibid.). By comparison, Rogers emphasizes the desperate social need ‘for the creative behaviour of creative individuals’ on the grounds that ‘many of the serious criticisms of our culture and its trends may be formulated in terms of a dearth of creativity’ (Pope, 2005, p. 21). For Pope, Rogers’s views on creativity underscore individual empowerment and personal satisfaction: In education, we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose education is ‘completed’, rather than freely creative and original thinkers. […]. In the sciences, there is an ample supply of technicians, but the number who can creatively formulate fruitful hypotheses and theories is small indeed. In industry, creation is reserved for the few—the manager, the designer, the head of the research department—whereas for the many life is devoid of original or creative endeavor. (ibid.)

This quotation also demonstrates that creativity has at this moment become a word associated with a wide range of activities which are not confined to art or thought. Indeed, by urging the turning out of more creative human beings, Rogers can be broadly categorized as a liberal democratic thinker on creativity. Seen in this context, it might not be a coincidence that it was in the early 1960s when Chomsky coined the phrase ‘linguistic creativity’ and stated that every human speaker is creative. As noted by Carter (2004, p. 53), there is a tradition in the linguistic description of creativity which privileges writing and associates creative uses of language with literary texts. Consequently, a creative writer or poet is often celebrated while ordinary people who are involved in oral communication do not easily come into the picture. By emphasizing the inherent creative capacity of human speakers, Chomsky can be seen as marking a new phase in linguistic thought. On the other hand, as will be discussed later, promoting the notion of linguistic creativity as mentally based, Chomsky embarked on a campaign against Skinner’s behaviorism applied in language study. The very first discussion of ‘linguistic creativity’ by Chomsky was in a paper submitted to the Ninth International Congress of Linguistics in 1962 titled ‘the Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory’. He makes it clear that this notion should occupy a central place in linguistics: The central fact to which any significant linguistic theory must address itself is this: a mature speaker can produce a new sentence of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them. Most of our linguistic experience, both as speakers and hearers, is with new sentences; once we have mastered a language, the class of sentences with which we can operate fluently and without difficulty or hesitation is so vast that for all practical purposes […] we may regard it as infinite. (1964c, p. 7)1

This ability of human speakers to produce and understand infinite new sentences in a given language is later termed ‘the creative aspect of language use’ (1964c, p.  8f). It is believed that this creativity reflected in ordinary language use has  According to Joseph (2003), Chomsky’s 1962 paper exists in four published versions, Chomsky (1962, 1964a, 1964b, 1964c), yet they all agree on the above quotation. 1

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i­mportant consequences for both adults and children in their development of ‘the capacity to engage in fantasy, speculation, play, planning, thought unconnected to current circumstance, plus the capacity to construct “theories” of the world’ (McGilvray, 1966/2009, p. 7). As I will demonstrate in the following, his promotion of this theme in linguistics can be viewed in relation to his treatment of linguistic predecessors and critique of behavorism. Chomsky (1965) identifies two camps concerning the study of linguistic creativity: one represented by Saussure–Whitney, another by Descartes–Humboldt. It is stated that Saussure’s concept of langue as ‘merely a systematic inventory of items’ should be rejected in order to return to the Humboldtian conception of underlying competence as a system of generative processes (Chomsky, 1965, p.  4). For Chomsky, both Saussure and Whitney’s theories are unable to ‘come to grips with the recursive processes underlying sentence formation’; besides, they give no place for ‘“rule-governed creativity” of the kind involved in the ordinary everyday use of language’ (Chomsky, 1964c, pp. 22–23). On the other hand, Humboldt is seen as a forerunner of the idea that ‘a language is based on a system of rules determining the interpretation of its infinitely many sentences’ (Chomsky, 1965, p. v) which he himself agrees with. Chomsky’s ‘ancestor hunting’ along the tradition of rationalist thinking culminates in Cartesian Linguistics,2 which was first published in 1966. In the chapter titled ‘Creative Aspect of Language Use’, Chomsky draws parallels between Goethe’s theory of ‘Urform’ in biology and Humboldt’s notion of ‘organic form’ in language. Two relevant quotations about these concepts are listed as follows: Goethe’s quotation about ‘Urform’: The primordial plant is the most marvelous created thing in the world, and nature herself should envy me it. With this model and its key one is able thereby to invent other plants ad infinitum, which must be consistent with the model. That is, even if these invented plants do not exist, they could exist. They are not, for example, pictorial or poetic shadows and illusions; they rather have an inner truth and necessity. The same law applies to all other living things. (Quoted in Chomsky, 1966/2009, p. 72) Humboldt’s quotation about ‘organic form’: The constant and uniform element in this mental labor of elevating articulated sound to an expression of thought, when viewed in its fullest possible comprehension and systematically presented constitutes the form of language. (Quoted in 1966/2009, p. 127, note 39)

Chomsky concludes that in the same way that the Urform is conceptualized as a kind of ‘generative principle’ which determines possible kinds of organisms, Humboldt’s ‘linguistic form’ can be extended to represent the constraints placed upon ‘all individual acts of speech production or perception in a particular language’ and ‘the universal aspects of grammatical form’ which determine ‘the class of possible languages’ (Chomsky, 1966/2009, pp. 72–73). These two notions are further linked up with his own theory of generative grammar:  Instead of regarding Chomsky’s identifying and thus following a ‘Cartesian’ tradition in linguistic research as a merit, Hans Aarsleff (1970) strongly criticizes Chomsky’s distortion of linguistic history to his own advantage. One point made by Aarsleff was that instead of being ‘Cartesian’, the history of linguistics from 1660 to the Romantics was in fact dominated by Lockean thoughts. 2

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By a ‘generative grammar’ I mean a description of the tacit competence of the speaker-­ hearer that underlies his actual performance in production and perception (understanding) of speech. (Chomsky, 1966/2009, p. 118, note 2)

Chomsky thinks that both Goethe and Humboldt’s notions capture a fundamental creative side of human species, that is, infinity is generated by a given form. Accordingly, his own development of this idea in generative grammar follows the same logic: a given competence in every speaker’s mind underlies his/her performance of producing and understanding infinite new sentences and this reflects the creativity of human language use. It is certainly possible that Chomsky did take his lead from these Romantic thinkers when conceptualizing human creativity in language, yet it seems that his mechanistic theorizing of creativity as governed by rules (I will elaborate in later discussions) runs counter to their thoughts. Joseph (2010, p. 11) critically argues that Chomsky’s treatment of Humboldt is inconsistent and tends to be arbitrary. He made two observations. First, in the original version of Chomsky’s paper submitted to the congress, Humboldt, together with Paul, was criticized for failing to address the topic of creativity in language production (1962, p. 512). Second, in Humboldt’s general linguistics which Chomsky quoted as precedent studies in linguistic creativity, there is not any persuasive evidence of the links between Humboldt’s thoughts and the ‘creative’ program claimed by Chomsky himself. Joseph also draws on other scholars’ critique of Chomsky’s ‘misinterpretation’ of these intellectual predecessors (for example, Lakoff, 1973; Searle, 1972). On the other hand, Chomsky’s review of Skinner (1957) which preceded his formal introduction of ‘linguistic creativity’ (Chomsky, 1962) also helped him to assert the importance of research on ‘creativity’ (and at the same time further severs his links with Bloomfieldian linguistics (see Koerner, 2004)). In Chomsky’s critique of Skinner, though he did not use the phrase ‘linguistic creativity’ as such, he did argue that our ability to understand new sentences cannot be accounted for in a behaviorist framework, instead ‘we recognize a new item as a sentence not because it matches some familiar item in any simple way, but because it is generated by the grammar that each individual has somehow and in some form internalized’ (1959/1980, p. 59). This statement strongly conforms to his definition of ‘linguistic creativity’ in later publications. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that there is ‘a widespread association of behaviourism with the denial of linguistic creativity’, and Chomsky’s review played not a small role in giving rise to this association (Joseph, 2003, pp. 146–147, note 3). Especially in the field of language acquisition, it is commonly held that a behaviorist model cannot account for the creative ability exhibited by human infants. Moreover, Chomsky’s review adds a timely trigger to the rise of a cognitive revolution in psychology. His review helps to fuel a cognitive revolution by slaying the behavioristic dragon represented by Skinner’s works (Bruner, 1983, pp.  159–160). Overall, this general negative impression of behaviorism together with the ever-increasing popularity of Chomsky’s linguistics does not encourage any serious re-evaluation of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour hereafter. Nevertheless, there are several studies which critically challenge received wisdom concerning this controversy.

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MacCorquodale’s response (1970) to Chomsky made a thorough attack of the review. He carries out a point-by-point defense after summarizing Chomsky’s critique into three aspects, namely, ‘Verbal Behaviour is an untested hypothesis which therefore cannot claim to be credible’; ‘Skinner’s technical terms are mere ­paraphrases for more traditional treatments of verbal behaviour’; ‘speech is complex behavior whose understanding and explanation require a complex, meditational, neurological-genetic theory’. Asserting Skinner’s strong awareness of the differences between laboratory hypothesis and statements about the real world, he argues that Chomsky misread Skinner’s book as ‘an accomplished explanation of verbal behaviour rather than a hypothesis about the causes of verbal behaviour’ (1970, p.  98). He also thinks that instead of being ‘mere paraphrases’, Skinner’s new vocabulary is much more objective than traditional and lay discourses on behavior. In addition, he argues that the ills identified by Chomsky should be attributed more to ‘some rather outdated behaviouristic lore’ than Skinner’s account (ibid.). Having thus argued and explained, MacCorquodale initiated a critical response to Chomsky’s devastating review though the influence of his response was very limited.3 Sampson’s book Liberty and Language (1979) dealt a crucial blow to Chomsky’s linguistic theory and politics. Arguing from a ‘liberal-libertarian’ stance, Sampson attempts to show that Chomsky’s definition of creativity is a very impoverished notion which fails to address both lay people’s understanding of this term and its rich associations in the works of philosophers of liberalism, within which the notion is a key term. As to the Skinner–Chomsky controversy, though having acknowledged Chomsky’s chapter-to-chapter ‘demolition job’ is ‘entirely justified’, Sampson sharply observes that Chomsky committed the same fallacy as Skinner and he should be ‘the last one who is entitled to criticize Skinner’ (1979, p. 179). For him, Skinner’s error of logic lies in his mistaking behaviorism, that is, a scientific methodology, for ‘a theory about the nature of behaviour or of the mind’ (Sampson, 1979, p. 182), while Chomsky’s mistake moves in the reversed direction from rationalism as ‘a theory for which he has found a certain level of support’ to ‘rationalism—reliance on the data of introspection as a method of research’ (Sampson, 1979, p. 186). Moreover, according to him, neither of them recognizes the possibility of purposeful ‘creative behaviour’ not governed by rules. Endorsing a liberalist definition of creativity, Sampson finds Chomsky’s linguistic evidence on creativity implausible and promising the opposite of what his words are trying to say. Andresen (1991) re-evaluates the Skinner–Chomsky controversy from a historical point of view by identifying general intellectual environmental factors which influenced how behaviorism and generative grammar were received during the period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s: cognitive taste, the legacy of the 1960s, the power of essentializing humanism, the discipline of linguistics as it  According to Palmer (2006), MacCorquodale (1970) is almost never cited outside the field of behavior analysis. Chomsky himself chose to respond in a footnote in Chomsky (1973, p. 24) and dismissed most of the critiques: ‘The article is useful, once errors are eliminated, in revealing the bankruptcy of the operant conditioning approach to the study of verbal behaviour’. 3

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c­ onceived itself through its textual tradition. She also notes that changes in these four categories were responsible for a more positive reception of behaviorism in the late 1980s. Drawing links between Skinner’s formulations of verbal behavior (Skinner, 1957, p. 14) and both Derrida and Austin’s works, Andresen thinks positively of Skinner’s insights and comments that in light of these new developments after Skinner’s book, his insights, instead of sounding misguided as Chomsky thought, remain instructive. Andresen suggests that part of Chomsky’s motivation in slaying Skinner’s ideas was to ‘bar the possibility of Skinner participating in the intraverbal behavior called “linguistics”’ (Andresen, 1991, p.  57). Building on research from linguistic historiography, she renders the vision of a monolithic tradition that qualifies as ‘linguistics’ implausible and instead calls for a further ‘reassessment and reintegration of numerous “lost” or “forgotten” or otherwise undervalued and disparaged ideas’, of which Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour is an example (ibid.). My purpose of tracing these critiques is on the one hand to point out the need to re-evaluate the controversy especially with the merits of hindsight; on the other hand they have prepared the ground for a detailed study of the central theme featured in the controversy, that is, creativity and language. As mentioned earlier, Harris’s emphasis on creativity stands in an interesting contrast with both Chomsky and Skinner. In next three chapters, I will conduct a comparative textual analysis of Chomsky, Skinner and Harris’s works in order to highlight their discussion of creativity and language. Moreover, due to the fundamental importance of ‘creativity’ in conceptualizing human beings, especially in terms of learning capacity and freedom, the examination of this theme can benefit from an investigation of the politics of their theories. Overall their works will be examined and compared from the following angles: how are human roles conceptualized; what is counted as ‘new’; thoughts on politics and human nature. By considering these aspects in detail, we are expected to secure a thorough understanding of each author’s take on the theme of ‘creativity’, as well as their differences and divergences.

References Aarsleff, H. (1970). The history of linguistics and Professor Chomsky. Language, 46(3), 570–585. Andresen, J. (1991). Skinner and Chomsky 30 years later. Or: The return of the repressed. The Behavior Analyst, 14(1), 49–60. Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s talk: Learning to use language. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.. Carter, R. (2004). Language and creativity: The art of common talk. London: Routledge. Chomsky, N. (1980). Review of skinner. In N. Block (Ed.), Readings in philosophy of psychology (Vol. I, pp. 48–66). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1959). Chomsky, N. (1962). The logical basis of linguistic theory (pp. 509–574). In Preprints of papers from the 9th International congress of linguists. Cambridge, MA. Chomsky, N. (1964a). Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1964b). The logical basis of linguistic theory. In H. Lunt (Ed.), Proceedings of the 9th international congress of linguists (pp. 914–978). The Hague: Mouton.

References

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Chomsky, N. (1964c). The logical basis of linguistic theory. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language: Readings in the philosophy of language (pp. 211–245). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian linguistics: A chapter in the history of rationalist thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1966). Chomsky, N. (1973). Psychology and ideology. Cognition, 1, 11–46. Joseph, J. (2003). Rethinking linguistic creativity. In H. Davis & T. J. Taylor (Eds.), Rethinking linguistics (pp. 121–150). London: Routledge Curzon. Joseph, J. (2010). Chomsky’s atavistic revolution (with a little help from his enemies). In D. A. Kibbee (Ed.), Chomskyan (R)evolutions (pp. 1–18). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Koerner, E. F. K. (2004). Essays in the history of linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Lakoff, G. (1973, February 8). Deep language. The New York review of books, 20(1). MacCorquodale, K. (1970). On Chomsky’s review of skinner’s verbal behavior. Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 13(1), 83–99. McGilvray, J. A. (2009). Introduction. In N. Chomsky (Ed.), Cartesian linguistics: A chapter in the history of rationalist thought (pp.  1–52). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1966). Palmer, D. C. (2006). On Chomsky’s appraisal of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior: A half century of misunderstanding. The Behavior Analyst, 29(2), 253–267. Pope, R. (2005). Creativity: Theory, history, practice. London: Routledge. Sampson, G. (1979). Liberty and language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. R. (1972). Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics. The New York review of books, 18(12), 16–24. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. New York: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1976).

Chapter 18

Comparing Chomsky, Skinner and Harris: How Are Human Roles Conceptualized?

Chomsky Consistent with the emphasis on ‘linguistic creativity’, Chomsky in defining his linguistic project foregrounds the roles of speakers and hearers in a community. However, as I discussed in Part I, what he is most interested in is a so-called ideal competence manifested by language users. He writes: Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)

This quotation contains an important distinction made by Chomsky, namely, competence and performance: the former equals the perfect knowledge an ideal speaker–listener has of the language spoken within a completely homogeneous speech community; the latter is the application of this knowledge subject to influences from conditions such as ‘memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic)’. This distinction is related to another distinction made between I-language (Internal-language) and E-language (External-language). E-language is introduced by Chomsky in Knowledge of Language (1986, p. 151) to cover any notion of language which is not I-language and he suggests that there is no well-defined entity associated with this label. What Chomsky is exclusively interested in is I-language, which explains individual speakers’ knowledge of a given language and is coherent enough to be amenable to scientific research. He defines I-language as: […] a state of the computational system of the mind/brain that generates structured expressions, each of which can be taken to be a set of instructions for the interface systems within which the faculty of language is embedded. (2007, p. 14)

The faculty of language mentioned in this quotation is defined as an innate language organ from which language grows, analogically, as limbs grow from the © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_18

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embryo. In a word, the study of competence equals the study of I-language, which boils down to the study of the faculty of language responsible for human language production and understanding. Individual speakers within an ideal community are theorized to possess perfect knowledge of this I-language though what is produced in their actual language performance does not count as perfect data to access this competence due to circumstantial conditions. How to compensate for this imperfection? Chomsky’s solution is to combine the ‘actual data of linguistic performance’ with ‘introspective reports (by the native speaker, or the linguist who has learned the language)’ (1965, p.  18). It is deemed true within Chomskyan linguistics that when  presented with the imperfect data produced from speakers’ performance, native speakers make uniform judgments as to the grammaticality of certain sentences including those which they have never heard before. This is part of their knowledge and thus crucial to linguists’ understanding of the innateness of language ability. Consequently linguists have to devise hypotheses about native speakers’ linguistic competence and subject them to verification through those speakers’ intuitional judgments. To be more precise, the hypotheses are grammar theories which ‘generate any number of utterances in the language, above and beyond those observed in advance by the analyst—new utterances most, if not all of which will pass the test of casual acceptance by a native speaker’ (Hockett, 1954, p. 232).1 To recapitulate, Chomskyan linguistics is first and foremost devoted to turning out grammar theories which capture native speakers’ linguistic competence in a scientific manner. That is to say, though the roles of speakers and listeners seem to be foregrounded, the real emphasis is placed somewhere else, as is shown in the following quotation: [A] generative grammar is not a model for a speaker or a hearer. It attempts to characterize in the most neutral possible terms the knowledge of the speaker-hearer. When we speak of a grammar as generating a sentence with a certain structural description, we mean simply that the grammar assigns this structural description to the sentence. When we say that a sentence has a certain derivation with respect to a particular generative grammar, we say nothing about how the speaker and hearer might proceed, in some practical or efficient way, to construct such a derivation. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 9)

The interest of speakers and listeners for Chomsky is not in their actual use of language because language use belongs to the theory of performance which is in turn constrained by the theory of linguistic competence (Chomsky, 1965, p.  10). Instead, speaker–hearers are on the one hand treated as unknowing subjects providing linguistic data, on the other hand they are expected to, relying on their native speaker’s intuition, provide certain criteria as to the grammaticality of sentences produced by the models of generative grammar. However, this procedure is not as unproblematic as is envisaged. The central question is whether speakers’ intuition is more precise and uniform than their actual performance, which is subject to contingent influences and thus unsystematic. For example, Labov (1972) points out the  Interestingly, though Hockett was the first author who talked about testing by native speakers and Chomsky (1961/2010, p. 33) made reference to this statement, Chomsky was the one to link native speakers’ intuition with the innateness of linguistic competence and the concept  of linguistic creativity. 1

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unreliability of native speakers’ intuition by referencing a reported inconsistency between native linguists’ intuition and that of lay native speakers. He observes that the theoretical training of linguists results in the drifting away of linguists’ intuition from that of ‘ordinary people and the reality of language as it is used in everyday life’ (Labov, 1972, pp. 198–199). Harris (1981, p. 76) on the other hand draws attention to the problems surrounding the identification of a native speaker which include ­consideration of empirical, sociocultural categories and factors. In his book The Native Speaker is Dead based on informal discussions with Chomsky and other linguists, psychologists and philosophers, Thomas Paikeday (1985, p. 11) concludes that ‘“native speaker” in the linguist’s sense of arbiter of grammaticality and acceptability of language is quite dead’. How are these difficulties surrounding the problematic notion of ‘native speakers’ confronted with in Chomskyan linguistics? Neil Smith writes: We have then a situation in which the individual, in whom knowledge resides, is an appropriate focus for scientific inquiry. By implication, the species (that is, the universe of such individuals) is likewise an appropriate focus, as what is common to all individuals constitutes the innate linguistic endowment that is typical of human beings. But the immediate social, or geo-political notion of language in the traditional sense has no status and no role to play in a scientific linguistics. (Smith, 1999, p. 29)

This quotation demonstrates that instead of trying to solve the potential tensions between the intuitions of socially and politically situated native speakers and a universally applicable scientific project studying an innate linguistic organ, the situated part is simply eschewed in Chomskyan linguistics. Consequently, the focus in the end falls on an idealized human speaker equipped with a linguistic organ. Chomskyan linguistics equals the individualist perspective with the universalist one in that human beings are taken to be the same in the biological make-up. The fact that human speakers around the world speak different languages, as his theory explains, results from different input to the language organ which all human beings are equipped with. Linguistic creativity is also defined to be universally distributed among the human species. As I mentioned at the beginning of this part, linguistic creativity is defined to be an ability to produce and understand new sentences which one has never heard before. It is also stressed that every human infant is creative in this sense and linguistics cannot ignore this aspect of human linguistic capacity. Thus defined, this creative ability of producing infinite sentences with finite means falls into the category of linguistic competence. It highlights the production and understanding of sentences, which in ideal situations are carried out smoothly because as human beings our bio-linguistic make-up determines so. In the following discussion, I will take a closer look at how Chomskyan notion of creativity is discussed respectively concerning speakers and hearers. Joseph (2003) notes that Chomsky’s treatment of speakers and hearers in relation to ‘linguistic creativity’ is asymmetrical: there is more emphasis on speakers’ roles than that of listeners. As is further revealed by his analysis, this asymmetry has much to do with Chomsky’s distinction between grammaticality and semantic meaning. Chomsky insists that grammatical correctness constitutes a distinct category in linguistics in the sense that it has nothing to do with statistical distribution

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of a given sentence or the possible semantic interpretations. The distinction between grammatical sentences and deviant cases is deemed absolute: Given a grammatically deviant utterance, we attempt to impose an interpretation on it, exploiting whatever features of grammatical structure it preserves and whatever analogies we can construct with perfectly well-formed utterances. We do not, in this way, impose an interpretation on a perfectly grammatical utterance. (Chomsky, 1961/2010, p. 46)

This emphasis on grammatical correctness according to Joseph (2003) downplays the role of interpretation by listeners; it suggests that automatic meaningfulness of grammatical sentences does not involve any effort of interpretation because they are produced directly by the linguistic creativity of speakers. It is worth noticing that Chomsky’s attitude toward sentences such as ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ has changed since its first appearance in Syntactic Structures (1957). Back then, this sentence was categorized as a well-formed grammatical though nonsensical English sentence. It is thus argued that ‘the notion “grammatical” cannot be identified with “meaningful” or “significant” in any semantic sense’ because the fact that this sentence is grammatical does not change its being nonsensical (1957, p. 15). By the time Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) was published, Chomsky had modified his views on the grammaticality of this sentence. It is no longer categorized as a well-formed grammatical sentence; instead, it becomes a semi-grammatical deviant case because it breaks a selectional rule. As is observed by Sampson (2001, p. 138), chapter two of this book aims at solving the problem of ‘how to reorganize linguistic theory so as to allow grammars to exclude nonsensical as well as ungrammatical strings’. Here we can see that, unsatisfied with keeping grammaticality and meaningfulness apart as in his 1957 book, Chomsky is now trying to refine his grammar theory so that it can account for the ‘non-sensicalness’ of this very sentence grammatically (by categorizing a nonsensical sentence as ‘semi-grammatical’ instead of ‘grammatical’). Indeed, for him, the change of category of this sentence from well-formed sentence to deviant case stands for a refinement of generative grammar. He further observes that while it is necessary to impose an interpretation on deviant sentences such as colorless green ideas sleep furiously, which breaks the selectional rule and the task itself varies in difficulty from case to case, ‘no question of imposing an interpretation’ would arise for well-formed sentences such as revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently (Chomsky, 1965, p. 149). However, is this really the case? These conceptions of sensicalness and grammaticalness are motivated by a naïve realism, as J. W. M. Verhaar argues: One cannot drink bread, therefore one cannot think of bread being drunk by anyone, therefore sentences stating this are ungrammatical, so let us find rules (which, tautologically, are grammatical rules) preventing My desk drinks bread from being generated; this, obviously, calls for subclassifications of grammatical categories in certain ways, and since these classifications are supposedly grammatical, they amount to subcategorizations. This can be seen as a progression from naïve realism (one cannot drink such a thing) to the idealized form thereof (one cannot think such a thing) to accommodation of grammar in consonance with such an idealization. (Verhaar, 1973, p. 410)

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This observation accurately captures the misguided nature of Chomsky’s attempts to streamline grammar in order to conform to his understanding of the world such as ‘no one can drink bread’ or ‘colorless ideas cannot be green’, etc. The concept of ‘grammaticality’, intended to account for native speaker’s intuition about the ‘acceptability’ of certain sentences, turns out to suggest a very restricted ­understanding of human experience which allows certain activities while prohibiting others. Furthermore, the fact that C.M. Street actually made sense of this nonsensical ungrammatical English sentence colorless green ideas sleep furiously in the literary competition held at Stanford University in 1985 poses a real challenge to Chomsky’s definition of ‘grammaticality’ and consequently ‘creativity’.2 Once more, it is crucial to notice behind these shifting categorizations Chomsky’s insistence on a distinct category of well-formed grammatical English sentences on which no interpretation needs to be imposed. What does this mean concerning our discussion of ‘creativity’? The answer is that by insisting on a distinction between well-formed grammatical sentences and deviant cases, Chomsky implicitly suggests a distinction between an automatically creative listener ‘whose role is to sit back and let his/her mental grammar assign an interpretation’ (Joseph, 2003, p. 125) and an interpreter who imposes readings on deviant sentences. With this distinction made, it is not hard to see that Chomsky’s emphasis lies in the former. In consequence, what is really emphasized is the innate language faculty which generates infinite new sentences with finite rules3 in accounting for both speakers and hearers’ creativity. In other words, given an ideal homogeneous community, every speaker, manifesting his/her linguistic creativity, produces grammatical sentences; while listeners can automatically and creatively understand these grammatical sentences. Based on the above analysis, I will draw some preliminary conclusions concerning human roles in Chomskyan linguistics. Firstly, human beings are equally creative linguistically in the sense that every human infant, once born into a community, will develop a language, produce and understand new sentences. Secondly, human speakers are competent in the sense that they have knowledge of their own languages though in actual performances what they produce are not perfect data. Thirdly, according to the definition given by Chomsky on ‘linguistic creativity’, speakers are given more attention than listeners though upon closer scrutiny neither speaker nor listener is satisfactorily addressed due to his restricted understanding of ‘grammaticality’ and ‘meaningfulness’.

 Street’s poem: ‘It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.’ Quoted from http://linguistlist.org/issues/2/2-457.html#2, accessed 22 May 2019. 3  The rule of recursivity is one of them. In fact, it is argued that the concept of ‘recursivity’ might be the distinguishing aspect of the faculty of language in a ‘narrow’ sense in that ‘the core recursive aspect of FLN currently appears to lack any analog in animal communication’ (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002, p. 1570; Smith, 1999, p. 95). 2

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Skinner Skinner’s interest in studying verbal behavior lies primarily in formulating an account of verbal activities from a behavioristic perspective. On the one hand, he recognizes the specialness of verbal activities in the sense that it is effective ‘only through the mediation of other persons’ (1957, p. 2). The consequences of our verbal acts are not directly caused by any change in the environment as in non-verbal activities; instead, a train of events are set in motion with verbal acts which involve at least two persons. On the other hand, he is not satisfied with any account of verbal behavior featuring ‘speech’ or ‘language’ which either fails to acknowledge visual stimuli such as writing or prioritizes the practices of a linguistic community instead of the behavior of individual members (1957, pp. 2–4). Having exposed the inadequacies of explaining verbal behaviors by assigning independent existence to the intention of speakers, meanings, ideas, etc., Skinner (1957, p. 10) proposes a new formulation which describes verbal behavior as a function controlled by different variables. According to him, once we understand behavior causally by identifying controlling variables, we can predict the occurrence of certain behaviors and eventually based on this knowledge we will produce similar behaviors and control them by altering the conditions under which they occur. In this formulation, verbal behavior first and foremost applies to the speaker in the sense that speakers, under control of certain variables, produce certain verbal responses. The role of listeners is only considered when providing a complete account of verbal episodes. In explaining the behavior of the speaker, Skinner suggests that a listener has to be assumed to exist to reinforce the behavior of the speaker; on the other hand, in explaining the behavior of the listener, a speaker whose behavior bears a certain relation to the environment is assumed to play a role. Thus by considering verbal episodes which take place back and forth between speakers and listeners, a complete account of the episode will be secured. In this light, the behavior of listeners is not necessarily verbal though it plays a role in mediating the consequences of the behavior of the speaker. This point reflects a crucial difference between Skinner and linguists in studying the roles of speakers and listeners. In linguists’ theorizing, the roles of speakers and listeners are defined with a reference to the language they share; it is generally assumed that speakers encode concepts into sounds while listeners decode sounds into concepts and upon finishing these two processes, a verbal episode is complete. Skinner, on the other hand, does not think that language plays a distinctive role in the study of verbal behavior. For him, there is not any difference between the listeners’ behaviors responding to a verbal stimulus ‘the water is boiling’ and their responses to the actual sound of boiling water in the kettle.4 With a denial of an autonomous existence of ‘language’ consisting of sounds and meanings isolated from the behavior of speakers, Skinner’s formulation of communication also differs from mainstream  See a video-taped interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlyU_M20hMk, accessed 22 May 2019. 4

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linguists’ accounts which metaphorically assume that facts are transmitted in communication. Skinner (1957, p. 364) discusses the verbal response ‘There is gold in the Klondike’ and denies that by saying this any transmission of facts from one speaker to another actually takes place. Instead, ‘a verbal response or a resulting nonverbal tendency (to go to the Klondike when gold is reinforcing)’ is shared between listener and speaker. He further argues that this notion of communication based on sharing certain facts breaks down when communication goes on despite that both speaker and listener possess the same facts and thus nothing new is ‘communicated’. Instead, Skinner draws our attention to the situation where both the speaker and listener are under the control of essentially the same variables which enable them to ‘see’ the same things. For him communication is not built upon transmission of facts; instead, it is about certain changes in the behaviors of those involved. As to understanding, Skinner postulates that ‘the listener can be said to understand a speaker if he simply behaves in an appropriate fashion’ (1957, p. 277). No mental correspondence of meaning is stressed besides an evaluation of appropriate behavior according to specific contexts. To quote one of his examples: it is only when the listener has understood what was said that he would blush at the mention of a social error. For the same reason, sometimes to understand a certain sentence is to be able to say the same thing. From this general introduction of Skinner’s theorizing of communication, I have demonstrated his consistent emphasis on replacing linguists’ telementational vocabulary with descriptions reflecting behavioral changes in both speakers and hearers. In the following part, I will take a detailed look at how the roles of speakers and hearers are analyzed in a question–answer exchange. A diagram of the exchange is presented in Fig. 18.1 (Skinner, 1957, p. 39). In this diagram, SD means a stimulus which provides the occasion for the speaker to issue a mand, which in this case is a question. A mand, according to Skinner, is ‘a verbal operant in which the response is reinforced by a characteristic consequence and is therefore under the functional control of relevant conditions of deprivation or aversive stimulation’ (1957, pp. 35–36). RV means verbal response while Srein is a

Fig. 18.1  A question–answer exchange. Reprinted with permission from B. F. Skinner Foundation

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reinforcing stimulus instead of aversive stimulus. For the episode represented by the diagram, Skinner provides the following analysis: [W]e assume that the listener not only provides an audience for the speaker but creates a situation in which the speaker will be reinforced by being told the listener’s name. The speaker’s mand What’s your name? becomes (at the first double arrows downward) a verbal stimulus for the listener who replies either because of a standing tendency to respond to the speaker or an implied threat in the speaker’s response, or because the speaker has emotionally predisposed him to reply. His reply at double arrows upward completes the paradigm for the speaker, but it also serves as the occasion for the response Thank you, which completes the paradigm for the listener if that is necessary. If the speaker has controlled the listener mainly through aversive stimulation, Thank you may be replaced by some visible relaxation of a threat. (1957, pp. 39–40)

In the analysis, the actual words uttered by both speakers and listeners are alternatively labeled as response and stimulus. It is interesting to note that even though the listener in this episode is speaker at a certain moment, Skinner treats him as ‘listener’ from beginning to end because he speaks after the first speaker. The positions of speaker and listener remain unchanged according to the diagram representation. This reveals a perspective in Skinner’s study of verbal behavior, that is, it starts from the person who speaks first; the roles of speaker and listener will be fixed hereafter in a given episode. Another noteworthy point is, though Skinner mentions ‘emotionally predisposed’ in analyzing the reasons why the listener responds to the speaker’s question, what is really emphasized is the disposition to behave in a certain way due to reinforcements in the past history of the listener. To be more precise, emotional factors are treated as one of the variables controlling the performance of both speaker and listener. What the analysis demonstrates is a persistent concern with stimulus—response and how the interaction between the speaker and listener can be accounted for with this framework (regardless of their actual roles as speaker or listener, their emotional states, etc.). This observation is consistent with Skinner’s general scheme of providing a behavioristic account of verbal activities. It is also suggested that accounts of speakers and hearers which are exclusively characterized in behavioristic terms will better prepare us toward developing a behavioral science than mentalist/psychological accounts.5 Skinner implies that there is an

 Throughout the book, there are many behaviorist translations of mentalist accounts. For example: 5

In many countries it has been observed that very early a child uses a long m (without a vowel) as a sign that it wants something, but we can hardly be right in supposing that the sound is originally meant by children in this sense. They do not use it consciously until they see that grown-up people, on hearing the sound, come up and find out what the child wants. (Skinner, 1957, p. 44) The above quotation is translated as: It has been observed that very early a child emits the sound m in certain states of deprivation or aversive stimulation, but we can hardly be right in calling the response verbal at this stage. It is conditioned as a verbal operant only when people, upon hearing the sound, come up and supply appropriate reinforcement. (Skinner, 1957, p. 45)

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i­ncompatibility between causing real changes in behavior and the causal accounts of behavior featuring autonomous internal mental states. He believes that by proposing hypotheses to explain human behavior without reference to mentalist, subjective factors, we will be able to reveal the objective truth about human behavior and thus be more effective in maintaining, modifying and manipulating human acts. This stance of Skinner, however, makes him prone to critiques when he tries to recount in behavioristic terms traditional notions of freedom and dignity. Rosen (1973) suggests a solution to Skinner’s advantage, which is, to separate ‘the possibility of a behavioural technology’ from ‘whether or not it is ever useful to talk about internal states of mind’ (p. 147). However, one may doubt whether this well reflects Skinner’s intention in developing a behavior science. For Skinner, the merits of the new terms are not merely new ways of talking about the phenomenon at a specific level as is suggested in Rosen’s solution; instead, they are supposed to represent a better solution drawing on a science of behavior that is more objective and real. Though Skinner acknowledges the differences between laboratory and real-life instances (MacCorquodale, 1970, p. 98), he still thinks that the basic function of stimulus-control could account for all behaviors including verbal ones (also the complexity of verbal acts is accounted for with the notion of multiple causation) (Skinner, 1957, p. 227). MacCorquodale (1970, p. 96) echoes this point: Skinner’s account is far more objective and less vague than the traditional one and therefore scientifically preferable. Every term in Skinner’s account names some real thing which must be physically involved and locatable in any verbal event for which it is invoked. […]. The notion of control as a relation is itself perfectly objective.

It is clear that in Skinner’s conceptualization of speakers and hearers in verbal behaviors, he emphasizes the necessity of formulating behavioristic accounts of human roles. Behind this emphasis, what looms large is his strong distrust of traditional formulations of meaning and communication, at the core of which is a picture of independently existing ‘ideas’ or ‘units of meaning’ being transferred back and forth between autonomous agents with intentions. Guided by his general principles in pursuing a behavioral science, Skinner proposes a new method to account for verbal behavior which features the functions of identifiable variables. Overall, Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour offers an analysis of human speech by identifying the controlling variables such as the speaker’s current mental state, the environment he is in, and his past history of reinforcements. It is believed that both speakers’ and listeners’ behavior could be accounted for in this framework even though listeners’ behavior is not always verbal in Skinner’s theorizing. Leaving aside the legitimacy and merits of Skinner’s theory for further discussion, I highlight here Skinner’s For Skinner, the problems created by the psychological terms in the first account are successfully eliminated in the second account which explains the ‘distinction between learned and unlearned response’ in terms of ‘a history of reinforcement’ other than ‘meaning and conscious use’ (ibid.). For him, the first account is readily comprehensible due to its lay vocabulary while the second account is systematically consistent with its terms of behavioral science—to use his analogy—it is the differences between Newton’s Principia and what men in the street can say about the physical world.

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efforts in proposing and promoting a new formulation with its implied advantages of being more scientific and thus more effective in causing real changes in behavior. As to creativity, what I can point out at this stage is that Skinner will not attribute a ‘creative mind’ (Skinner, 1973, p.  264) to either speaker or listener, though he acknowledges the existence of creative behaviors. Furthermore, he argues that by substituting the explanatory role of a creative mind with behaviorist accounts, we could move toward a world where people are ‘more likely to show the kinds of creative achievements of which the human species is capable’ (Skinner, 1973, p. 266).

Harris Harris’s discussion of the roles of speakers and hearers in a communicational episode is tightly connected with his persistent critique of Saussure’s talking heads model in Course of General Linguistics (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 28). This process when A and B exchange meaning through the speech circuit is characterized by Saussure (1916/1983, pp.  28–29) as composed of six consecutive processes involving both speaker and hearer, namely, a psychological, physiological and physical process in the speaker; a physical, physiological and psychological process in the hearer (I have discussed this in detail in Chap. 2). Sound waves which can be further associated with concepts are transmitted between them. According to Harris (1998, p. 22), this model commits two fallacies: the fixed-code fallacy and the telementational fallacy. In Saussure’s accounts, the association between the concepts and sound patterns is fixed, presumed to be the same between speaker A and hearer B, and eventually within a community where a system of ‘langue’ is operating. For Harris, how ‘Saussure’s speaker and hearer have acquired identically matching stored sets of concepts and sounds patterns’ is a mystery left unexplained in Saussurean linguistics (Harris, 1990, p. 463). On the other hand, the communicational model presented by the speech circuit between A and B is a telementational one in the sense that ‘communication resides in the telementation of messages which are identical for any speaker and hearer’ (1987b, p. 227). Though Saussure acknowledged that ‘Elle [la langue] n’existe parfaitement que dans la masse’ (‘langue exists perfectly only in the mass’, my translation) (Saussure, 1931, p. 30), it is fundamentally contradictory with the conditions which make this model work. In other words, in order for the telementational process to work, it is required that individuals are equipped with fixed-code representations of the language. In Harris (1987a, pp. 163–174), an epilogue entitled ‘Saying Nothing’ provides a vivid illustration of his attitude toward the decontextualized nature of the talking heads model. At one point A says ‘Well, B, admittedly there’s nothing on page 27 of the Cours for us to say. But there’s something for us to show. Isn’t our diagram really a way of showing that we can talk about everything?’ It is arguably true that nothing in an idealized model can stand for everything, but for Harris this goes against any first-order experience of communication which is concerned with something ­

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s­ pecific said at a certain time in a certain place between specific people.6 It is due to this emphasis on particular first-order experiences that Harris remains strongly critical of treating speaking agents as ‘mere figureheads, doing no more and no less than the communication process requires of them, because it is assumed that what holds for one holds for all’ (Harris, 1996, p. 62). The generalized understanding of speaker and hearer’s roles projected by a telementational model, for Harris, is inadequate to cope with normative issues in communication. For example, in discussing a case about ‘truth’, Harris argues that: By saying that what Smith says is true we do not claim it to be an unimpeachable statement that admits no further qualification: we simply affirm our view of its trustworthiness for the purposes in hand. To this extent, we ourselves take responsibility for the trustworthiness of Smith: and thus undertake a moral commitment of our own to any third party involved. The word true is also a lexical mark of that commitment. (Harris, 1987a, p. 160)

According to his account, what is deemed ‘true’ cannot be decontextualized from the specific circumstances. By considering the time boundness of each specific statement, we as individuals take responsibility for our judgment of Smith’s ‘trustworthiness’—that is to say, it is not simply about the truthfulness of any decontextualized sentence, instead, the moral dimensions involved in normative human contact have to be taken into account. Moreover, through criticizing the fixed-code telementational model, Harris comes to place a heavy emphasis on the creative roles played by individuals primarily situated in real time and place. Fixed associations in Saussurean signs are replaced by individual sign-making at every new moment, or as expressed by Michael Toolan (1996, p. 125): ‘Meaning is always “now”’. In this sense, both speakers and hearers in any given situation are first and foremost creative sign-makers. Since there are no fixed rules circumscribing the meaning of words or imposition of meaning by collective authority, individuals as speakers ‘can defy common usage and successfully impose idiosyncratic semantic interpretations on an audience’, which in turn are ‘free creations of the human mind’ (Harris & Hutton, 2007, pp. 70–71). Apart from speakers’ free creation of meaning and imposing new interpretation on audiences, hearers can also exert creative control on signs. This is implied in Harris’s notion of ‘linguistic indeterminacy’ (Harris, 1993, pp. 321–322) which further includes ‘the indeterminacy of form’ and ‘the indeterminacy of meaning’. By giving space to the indeterminacy, Harris acknowledges hearers’ creative role in interpretation. In consequence, he concludes that ‘languages are not fixed codes but second-order social constructs of an intrinsically open-ended, incomplete and variable nature’ (ibid.). For Harris, signs are fundamentally indeterminate and it is the work of integrative efforts from both the speaker and hearer to create moments of determinacy as reference points in a communicational flow. In addition to this emphasis on creative integration by both speakers and hearers, Harris constantly draws our attention to the circumstantial factors that

 For a detailed discussion of first-order language vs. second-order language, see the special issue in Language Sciences 2017, Volume 61, Taylor (2017). 6

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c­ onstrain ­individuals. Instead of reducing individuals to generalized exchangeable positions in a talking heads model, the communicational world envisaged by Harris is a world ‘in which space is occupied by actual individuals (not by abstractions masquerading as individuals) and no two individuals can occupy the same space at the same time’ (1996, p. 62). Harris goes on to emphasize that ‘it is a condition of sharing the same space that each individual occupies different parts of it’ (ibid.). Together with the denial of an autonomous system of language which ensures communication across shifting contexts, Harris as an integrationist insists upon first and foremost the impossibility of decontextualizing communication. For him, both speakers and listeners are primarily creative sign-makers. What defines speakers and hearers is not a language they happen to share, instead, their abilities of making and interpreting signs play a more crucial role. On the other hand, communication as a process does not depend on the existence of a shared language; it is a process in which ‘integration may link any two activities of the most diverse kinds provided that in the circumstances the second complements the first’ (Harris, 1996, p. 70). For example, when A places an object in B’s visual field in order to draw B’s attention to that object, though no word is uttered, a communication process can be identified, as is stated by Harris (1996, p. 65): What matters is simply that, as a result of A’s initiative in producing item x at the right time and place, B subjects x to some form of optical scrutiny which would not or might not take place otherwise. (‘Scrutiny’ here implies something more than B’s passive reception of an ocular image. […].)

In this picture, communication simply equals a circumstance in which activities are linked together by someone. Another case studied by Harris (1996, p.  70) is when A knocks at B’s door, B does not respond while one of B’s neighbors opens a window and says ‘John Smith’s on holiday’. Having acknowledged that this is a communication process between A and B’s neighbor, Harris concedes that we do not have all the information concerning the ‘full contextualization of A’s action and B’s response or apparent lack of response’ to decide whether A and B have communicated or not (ibid.). Moreover, among endless possibilities concerning the scenario, we cannot pretend that we can propose a schema applicable to all cases because the analysis itself is situated with regard to each specific case. As a radical reaction to a Saussurean model of communication which, as Harris notes, represents speakers and hearers as decontextualized individuals exchanging codes, Harris paints a picture of both speakers and hearers involved in communication as creative sign-makers. Not only are the circumstantial factors concerning both speakers and hearers taken into account to challenge an abstracted and reduced image of code-exchangers, but it also envisages communication as an open, situated and indeterminate process, to the point that Harris does not think it advisable to propose a general model of communication.

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Summary Having conducted a focused reading of the three authors’ take on the role of individual speaker and hearer, I will summarize as follows their different views on human roles. As we have seen, Chomsky’s theoretical interest lies in a perfect state of understanding achieved by the linguistic competence of both speakers and listeners, which ensures instant and automatic understanding of well-formed grammatical sentences. This ‘creative’ ability of producing and understanding an infinite number of well-formed sentences in a specific language is taken to be innate in every human being. To a certain extent, both speakers and listeners in Chomskyan linguistics are locked up in an ideal world where well-formed sentences are transferred back and forth between them. He also believes that child learners’ language competence is largely genetically determined though they need linguistic stimulus from the social environment to activate the language faculty. In fact, what he means by the genetic basis also involves a critical age in child language development: if this age is missed, children will not be able to pick up the ‘native’ accent (Smith, 1999, p. 123). In addition, Chomsky dismisses any serious discussion of language use in real life though in his notion of native speaker’s intuition there remain problematic links with language use in specific cultural and political contexts. Contrary to Chomsky, both Skinner and Harris distrust the transference of meaning guaranteed by a shared language between speakers and listeners in a so-called ideal world; yet, they soon part ways as to the roles played by human agents. Skinner seeks to offload individual autonomy to environmental influences by providing behavioristic accounts which grant no place to an active self; Harris places great emphasis on the creative roles played by human sign-makers in both speaking and listening across shifting contexts. Another crucial difference between Harris and Skinner has to do with their attitudes toward the legitimacy of lay talk and the status of scientific research. For the former, lay talk is always situated, contextualized and self-explanatory in terms of the employment of meta-linguistic terms, categories, generalizations, etc., while science talk endorsed by formal linguistics, seeking a decontextualized model, treats words and thoughts as detachable units.7 Skinner, on the other hand, tends to treat lay talk and traditional formulations of human agency and subjectivity as inadequate and advocates the necessity to replace them with new formulations informed by behavioral science, which according to him provides better accounts of reality. Above all, this difference cannot be separated from the general theoretical attitude held by them. Every communication is unique in Harris’s accounts and he does not seek a generalizable scheme to explain all cases while Skinner is motivated by a strong need to apply scientific models to behavior study. Lastly, Skinner and Harris also differ in their views on self-communication. Skinner treats self-communication as a special kind of interpersonal communication where the speaker ‘speaks the same language or languages and has had the same verbal  See Harris (2000), where he distinguishes lay talk and theoretical model of communication proposed by telementationalists. 7

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and nonverbal experience as his listener’ (1957, p. 438), while Harris (1996, p. 172) argues that ‘[i]t is an absurdity to treat A communicating with A as a special case of A communicating with B, the sole difference being that one person plays both roles’ because for him these two constellations involve different integrational activities and should not belong to the same category.

References Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co.. Chomsky, N. (2010). Some methodological remarks on generative grammar. In J.  O. Askedal, I. Roberts, & T. Matsushita (Eds.), Noam Chomsky and language descriptions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. (Original work published 1961). Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin and use. California: Greenwood Publishing Group. Chomsky, N. (2007). Of minds and language. Biolinguistics, 1, 9–27. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1987a). The language machine. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1987b). Reading Saussure. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1990). On “folk” and “scientific” linguistic beliefs. In S. L. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Meanings and prototypes (pp. 449–464). London: Routledge. Harris, R. (1993). Integrational linguistics. In A.  Crochetière, J.-C.  Boulanger, & C.  Ouellon (Eds.), Actes du Xve Congrès International des Linguistes (pp. 321–323). Ste-Foy: Presses de L’Université Laval. Harris, R. (1996). Signs, language and communication. London: Routledge. Harris, R. (1998). Introduction to integrational linguistics. London: Pergamon. Harris, R. (2000). Second thoughts on telementation. Revised version of a paper presented at the Integrationist Forum. London: Goldsmiths College. Harris, R., & Hutton, C. (2007). Definition in theory and practice: Language, lexicography and the law. London: Continuum. Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how does it evolve? Science, 298(5598), 1569–1579. Hockett, C. (1954). Two models of grammatical description. Word, 10(2–3), 210–231. Joseph, J. (2003). Rethinking linguistic creativity. In H. Davis & T. J. Taylor (Eds.), Rethinking linguistics (pp. 121–150). London: Routledge Curzon. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. MacCorquodale, K. (1970). On Chomsky’s review of skinner’s verbal behavior. Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 13(1), 83–99. Paikeday, T. (1985). The native speaker is dead. Toronton: Lexicography, Inc.. Rosen, R. (1973). Can behavior be conditioned? In H. Wheeler (Ed.), Beyond the punitive society. Operant conditioning: Social and political aspects. London: Wildwood. Sampson, G. (2001). Empirical linguistics. London: Continuum. Saussure, F.  D. (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. English version: Saussure, F. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). London: Duckworth. Saussure, F. D. (1931). Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Skinner, B. F. (1973). Answers for my critics. In H. Wheeler (Ed.), Beyond the punitive society (pp. 256–266). London: Wildwood. Smith, N. V. (1999). Chomsky: Ideas and ideals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Taylor, T. J. (Ed.). (2017). Orders of language: A festschrift for Nigel Love. Language Sciences, 61, 1–148. Toolan, M. (1996). Total speech: An integrational linguistic approach to language. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Verhaar, J.  W. M. (1973). Phenomenology and present-day linguistics. In M.  Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the social sciences (Vol. 1, pp.  361–451). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Chapter 19

Comparing Chomsky, Skinner and Harris: What Counts as ‘New’?

Chomsky Due to its primary interest in syntax, Chomskyan linguistics takes sentences as its object of study. ‘New sentences’ is a recurring notion throughout Chomsky’s works. In order to gain a better understanding of this notion I will situate it within his overall conception of grammar. As discussed above, Chomsky’s linguistic project is an attempt to locate the mechanism which produces ‘all and only’ grammatically correct sentences of a language. On the one hand, his project shares similarities with other theories of grammar in that it aims to explain in a succinct manner all the grammatical rules of a specific language; on the other hand, he further extends the observed regularity of linguistic forms together with native speakers’ judgments concerning grammaticality to an organ-like biological structure innately equipped in human beings. This extension becomes even more manifest in his later publications. Ironically, setting out to explain the creativity demonstrated in speaker–hearers’ production and understanding of an infinite number of new sentences, Chomsky makes it very clear that he has no interest in developing any theory about observed language use; instead, he follows the rationalist tradition to look into innate structures in the human brain which make their creative use of language possible. Retrospectively, Chomsky’s ambition of providing a biological account of human language capacity is traceable from his very early publications. For example, in Syntactic Structures (1957) the grammar of languages in general instead of a particular language is set to be the object of grammar study; moreover, he places a strong emphasis on the autonomy of grammar. We can see that these moves of abstraction and isolation further prepare him to produce bio-cognitive explanations of this independent category of grammaticality. Based on this observation, I will proceed to give an account of Chomsky’s language theory: limited input of a specific language spoken in the environment prompts the selection of a corresponding mental grammar based on specific parameters; this selection further prepares each individual to develop the ability of © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_19

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s­ peaking and understanding this specific language; it is thus the task of generative grammar to explain how different parameters are respectively established for specific languages and to produce ‘a device of some sort (called a grammar) for generating all and only the sentences of a language, which we have assumed were somehow given in advance’ (Chomsky, 1957, p. 85). Presumably, once the device is located, every sentence generated will be grammatical sentences in a specific language in conformity with native speakers’ intuition. However, as observed by Verhaar (1973, p. 408), this is a problematic understanding of grammar in that the so-called device presumably can generate, for example, sentences composed of 600 words which are humanly unacceptable. Yet, in Chomskyan linguistics, this is put down to limitations of human memory, energy, lifespan, etc., because in an ideal community, competent human speakers can produce and understand these sentences with no difficulty. A crucial concept concerning the status of these new sentences is ‘generative’. Lyons (1970/1991) identifies two meanings of ‘generative’. The first one can be characterized as projecting ‘any given set of sentences upon the larger, and possibly infinite, set of sentences that constitute the language being described’ (Lyons, 1970/1991, p. 43). The other meaning can be glossed as ‘explicit’ in the sense that ‘the rules of the grammar and the conditions under which they operate must be precisely specified’ (p.  44). Once its rules are explicitly specified, the grammar is expected to generate possibly an infinite set of sentences. He uses a simple mathematical function to illustrate this. For example, in the case of 2x + 3y − z, ‘given that the variables x, y and z can each take as their value one of the integers, the expression will generate (in terms of the usual arithmetical operations) an infinite set of resultant values’ (ibid.). These explanations concur with Chomsky’s emphasis on ‘the generation of all and only the sentences of a language’ with finite rules. However, an essential question lurks behind this assumption, that is, what are the criteria for distinguishing sentences from non-sentences within a particular language? Chomsky (1965, p. 14) offers the following solution: That is, we may assume for this discussion that certain sequences of phonemes are definitely sentences, and that certain other sequences are definitely non-sentences. In many intermediate cases we shall be prepared to let the grammar itself decide, when the grammar is set up in the simplest way so that it includes the clear sentences and excludes the clear non-sentences.

This quotation illustrates the process of how a theoretical model is generated based on absolutely unproblematic cases and how it is further applied to distinguish sentences from non-sentences. It is presupposed that given a language, there exists a certain number of clear cases for linguists to start with. As I have argued earlier drawing on Verhaar’s arguments, this presupposition about grammaticality is not justified. Sampson (2001, pp.  165–178) also criticizes Chomsky’s distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. He thinks that human languages are used for a vast range of purposes including higher frequency uses and lower frequency uses. For example, describing the structure of some foreign languages is relatively of lower frequency such as in the following sentence:

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‘Norwegians put the article after the noun, in their language they say things like bread the is on table the’, which includes two examples of ‘impossible construction’ identified by Culy (1998) (Sampson, 2001, p. 177). Instead of treating this use of English as ungrammatical in the way generative grammar prescribes, Sampson deems it entirely arbitrary ‘to impose a sharp cut-off somewhere within this continuum of higher-frequency and lower-frequency uses and to say that only grammatical structures associated with language uses more frequent than the cut-off count as “true” examples of the languages in question’ (Sampson, 2001, p. 178). From these counter arguments, we can see that Chomsky’s conception of sentences is severely restricted by his imposed standard of grammaticality. Proceeding from this, I will take a closer look at what Chomsky means by new sentences. Chomsky tends to believe that for a given language, there exists an infinite number of grammatical sentences and any new sentence in a specific language can eventually be decided to be grammatical or not. It is the same case with the mathematical expression 2x + 3y − z for instance. Given any values of the three variables and a result, it can be decided whether they correspond to the expression or not. For example, with x = 2, y = 4, z = 5, only the result of 11 is correct. Thus conceived, the following question arises: in what sense are the values and the corresponding results new? On the one hand, it seems that all the correct calculations for this expression are virtually contained in the expression; on the other hand, we can make a distinction between not-yet-carried-out calculations and calculations already done. To use another analogy, when using a ruler of 20  cm to measure objects, we are not creating any new length of 2 cm by measuring different objects while it is equally true that we can never identify a length of 2 cm on a new object before it is actually measured. In this light, the meaning of ‘new’ is beset with tensions between ‘already there’ and ‘not yet realized’. In the case of new sentences, Chomsky seems to suggest that all new sentences are actually not new because they are in a sense already contained in a generative grammar (that is why it is possible to judge the grammaticality of any new sentences in the first place; he also assumes that a generative grammar is somehow given in advance (Chomsky, 1957, p. 85)) though they might be produced or heard for the first time from the perspective of language users. Moreover, compared to the identification of, for example, a new length of 2  cm on an object, it is much less straightforward to decide whether a sentence is new. The difficulty is, we seldom produce or hear sentences which are totally different from previous ones and thus totally new. In addition, whether sentences are totally new or not does not seem to play a crucial role in lay people’s everyday verbal communication. For example, a ‘good morning’ heard in the evening can be ‘new’ in a baffling way whereas in a specific situation a technically new sentence can be easily understood as if it were not new at all. However, these potential difficulties of identifying ‘new sentences’ do not really concern Chomskyan linguistics. His distinction between competence and performance precludes any interest in answering the question ‘what counts as “new”?’ from the perspective of language users.

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So far we have gained a crucial understanding of what Chomsky means by ‘new sentences’. He divides sentences into grammatical and non-grammatical ones. The task of generative grammar is to generate all and only the grammatical sentences in a language. The criteria of grammaticality are thought to be connected with every individual’s innate language ability and thus remain independent of circumstantial factors in language use. Upon closer analysis, I have demonstrated the deeply problematic nature of these presumptions. These presumptions further contribute to a strange understanding of new sentences, which is: either there is nothing new because every sentence is virtually already contained in a generative grammar or there is no room to account for what is taken to be ‘new’ in actual language use from lay people’s perspective because it belongs to the realm of linguistic performance.

Skinner Skinner (1957) divides verbal behavior into five categories which are the mand, echoic, textual and intraverbal behavior, the tact.1 The criteria of classification are the different functional relations between the dependent variable and the independent variables.2 Generally speaking, Skinner’s project is more concerned with producing new behaviors than defining them. Its central task lies in capturing the mechanisms with which our repertoires of behavior are formed. In a strict sense, Skinner denies total ‘newness’ of any emergent behavior because it can be shown to be in a continuity with the precedent behaviors. As to the production of new responses/operants, Skinner coins a term ‘progressive approximation’ to define the ways of evoking a complex response. To give an example of training a pigeon to raise its head over a certain height: We first study the height at which the head is normally held and select some line on the scale which is reached only infrequently. Keeping our eye on the scale we then begin to open the food tray very quickly whenever the head rises above the line. If the experiment is conducted according to specifications, the result is invariable: we observe an immediate change in the frequency with which the head crosses the line. (Skinner, 1965, pp. 63–64)

This ‘immediate change’ in the pigeon’s behavior seems to be the sign of an emergent new behavior, yet Skinner further identifies the continuity between raising the head to a certain height at a stimulus and other behaviors such as turning toward

 The corresponding analysis of functional relations specific to each kind of verbal behavior can be found in Skinner (1957, pp. 185–186). 2  The dependent variable is defined as ‘the probability that a verbal response of given form will occur at a given time’ (Skinner, 1957, p. 28) and it is the basic datum to be predicted and controlled. Independent variables are in turn the conditions and events to be changed in order to achieve prediction or control. They include: controlling stimuli, reinforcement, deprivation, aversive stimulation, certain emotional conditions (Skinner, 1957, p. 199). Skinner further develops a concept called ‘operant’ which is one form of response ‘concerned with the prediction and control of a kind of behaviour’ (Skinner, 1957, p. 20). 1

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the spot from any point in the box, walking toward it, raising the head, etc. He explains: […] It is constructed by a continual process of differential reinforcement from undifferentiated behavior, just as the sculptor shapes his figure from a lump of clay. When we wait for a single complete instance, we reinforce a similar sequence but far less effectively because the earlier steps are not optimally strengthened. (Skinner, 1965, pp. 92–93)

Skinner believes that a big advantage of reinforcing successive approximations is due to the fact that this process ‘recognizes and utilizes the continuous nature of a complex act’ (Skinner, 1965, p. 92). Moreover, Skinner thinks that this is especially true in verbal behavior where new responses are rarely elicited by the presence of a controlling variable, in the way ‘one may make him salivate by placing a lemon drop in his mouth or make his pupils contract by shinning a light into his eyes’ (Skinner, 1957, p. 31). Instead, verbal behavior operates within a three-term contingency called ‘stimulus discrimination’. The model consists of the presence of a given stimulus, a given response, followed by a given reinforcement.3 In verbal behavior, it is difficult to identify a moment when a coherent new unit of behavior emerges because it is seldom under the control of an external stimulus; instead, it is a process of building upon an existing form and shaping it approximately to a certain desired form by giving reinforcements. This is echoed in Skinner’s discussion of uttering novel sound patterns (1957, p. 63). In this case, it is an advantage to possess ‘a “fine-grained” repertoire’ because speakers can work on this repertoire composed of smaller sound units and shape them into novel sound patterns. It is observed that Skinner’s emphasis on the ‘undifferentiated, previously unorganized, and undirected’ continuity of behavior from which new behavior can be shaped as an operant is consistent throughout his works. This is not only true of a specific kind of behavior, such as in the case of vocal verbal behavior which develops from ‘the relatively undifferentiated babbling of the human infant’ (Skinner, 1957, p. 464); it is the same across all sorts of behaviors within an individual’s repertoire. He writes: Through the reinforcement of slightly exceptional instances of his behavior, a child learns to raise himself, to stand, to walk, to grasp objects, and to move them about. Later on, through the same process, he learns to talk, to sing, to dance, to play games—in short, to exhibit the enormous repertoire characteristic of the normal adult. (Skinner, 1965, p. 93)

The above quotation uses the phrase ‘the same process’ to describe how different adult behaviors are formed through operant reinforcement. The reason why Skinner gives more attention to the continuity of behaviors subjected to the shaping ­influences of the environment than the novelty of new forms of behavior has something to do with his denial of ‘a creative mind’ which generates new behaviors. Instead of ‘a creative mind’, he places emphasis on the role played by the ­environment

 Refer to the following quotation in Skinner (1965, p. 108): ‘we describe the contingency by saying that a stimulus (the light) is the occasion upon which a response (stretching the neck) is followed by reinforcement (with food). The effect upon the pigeon is that eventually the response is more likely to occur when the light is on. The process through which this comes about is called discrimination.’ 3

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in forming new units of behavior from undifferentiated clay. However, this emphasis should not be taken to suggest his denial of the existence of new behaviors; instead, it can be seen as a gesture to highlight the possibilities of creating new behaviors informed by the guidelines set by a behavioral science. From the above analysis, we can see that, for Skinner, behind the enormous repertoire of adult behavior there exist certain general laws of behavior waiting to be discovered by behavioral scientists. Once these laws are located, new behaviors can be produced accordingly. Yet his definition of ‘new behavior’ remains problematic in that it is first envisaged by the experimenter before being applied to the experiment as a working goal. Once the experimenter successfully elicits this behavior, a new behavior is then thought to be achieved by the subjects. In other words, this understanding of new behaviors is largely confined and predetermined by the working premises of behavioral science. On a deeper level, this reflects a more fundamental problem in Skinner’s project: to what extent can diverse human activities in the first place be treated as behaviors which are governed by general laws and which could be named as, for example, ‘old’ and ‘new’?

Harris From a purely theoretical point of view, Harris suggests that every moment in sign-­ making activities produces new meanings in the sense that meaning is not automatically generated by a given system; instead, every sign at a new moment demands new efforts of interpretation. A central concept relevant to the discussion of new meaning is the principle of cotemporality which determines that in understanding any utterance produced in real time, the whole situation is considered in the contextualization process by the sign-maker. This principle, in the words of Harris (1998, p. 82), ‘obliges the linguist to recognize that language does not provide us with a miraculous guarantee of the stability of meaning(s) over time, or even from one moment to the next’. In first-order communication, it lies with each participant to decide the meaning of the signs by contextualizing them: ‘[W]hat is said is immediately relevant to the current situation’ because ‘there is no higher court of appeal’ (Harris, 1998, p. 145). This seems to be a view that contradicts with lay people’s definition of new meaning. In lay talk, there are a series of meta-linguistic devices to distinguish, for instance, ‘new’ from ‘familiar’, ‘same’ from ‘different’. How does integrationism distinguish new words from new meanings cotemporarily produced? We will examine the discussion about the new word ‘moshpit’ in Harris (1998, p. 63): To take an example from today’s newspaper, I am puzzled by the word moshpit. As far as I can remember, this is the first time I have encountered it. I am tempted to ask ‘What does it mean?’ But there is, arguably, a prior question: ‘What is it that I don’t know if I don’t know what it means?’

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The encounter with a new word as described by Harris exemplifies a typical linguistic experience, namely, we recognize words as ‘new’, ‘known’, ‘familiar’, etc. Harris further imagines a telementational answer to this question, that is, when we say we do not know the meaning of a word, we are saying that the form is known while the concept is missing (ibid.). So on this view, looking for the meaning of moshpit is looking for the concept ‘moshpit’. More precisely, in my case, it was looking for the concept in the journalist’s brain which had triggered the use of the word moshpit. My problem, apparently, was that there was no corresponding concept in my brain. Or if there was, I failed to recognize it as being associated with that particular linguistic form.

For Harris, this pairing of form and concept in defining ‘meaning’ is misguided due to the fixed-code fallacy which envisages meanings as invariable and fixed across shifting contexts. According to him, to understand the new word, he is not ‘looking for an ambitious account which covers any and every moshpit, i.e. identifies all and only those features common to moshpits’ (Harris, 1998, p. 68). Instead, trying to make sense of a word is a dynamic process involving metalinguistic practices, such as looking up the word in a dictionary, asking friends, or seeking the help of other glossing practices and the purpose is to make sense of the situation immediately at hand (Harris, 1998, pp. 68–69). Briefly, ‘“meaning” is the value we seek to attribute to words so as to make sense of this or that episode of communication in which they feature’ (Harris, 1998, p. 69). Now we have a complete account of seeking the meaning of a new word and we can tell the fundamental differences between integrationism and the fixed-code accounts of meaning. However, this account of meaning does not only apply to so-called ‘new’ words—it points to a general process true for all meaning-making activities, as is put by Harris (1998, p. 70): A further, consequential mistake would be supposing that coming across a word for the first time is a ‘special case’ and therefore unreliable as a guide to ‘the nature of meaning’. The integrationist, on the contrary, maintains that what happens in this ‘special case’ is what happens in every case, except that the similarity is disguised by our hubristic readiness to assume that our past linguistic experience provides all we need in order to assign semantic values in present and future cases.

This statement touches upon an underlying theoretical principle in integrationism, that is, meaning is fundamentally new and always now. This understanding of ‘new’ does not mean that integrationists are unable to acknowledge lay people’s distinction between new words from other words. As we can see in the above example, Harris himself gives a lay account of his encountering a new word by saying that ‘this is the first time I have encountered it’. This seemingly paradoxical stance actually represents a very reflexive understanding of linguistic meaning which is on the one hand ever-shifting, ever-renewed and on the other hand could be further categorized metalinguistically as ‘a new word’ or ‘a word already known’. However, for integrationists, our categorization of words as new or old and our readiness to expect that old words will prove easier to understand should not give us a false impression that meanings are issued from a time-less system in which certain words are already known to us while others are waiting to be known. Saying that we

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already know a word does not invalidate the fact that it demands new efforts of integration in the flow of communication according to the principle of cotemporality. In the same vein, our recognition of ‘old’ words depends on our ability to relate our past linguistic experience of certain words to the present moment. Harris’s discussion of ‘repetition’ gives a good illustration of this principle of cotemporality: A says: ‘It looks like rain.’ B says: ‘What did you say?’ A says: ‘It looks like rain.’ (Harris, 1998, p. 82)

He explains: A’s second utterance is a reply to the question ‘What did you say?’, whereas the first is not. The second utterance may be constructed as a quotation of the first; whereas the first utterance can hardly be constructed as a quotation of the second. (ibid.)

Repetition is not simply uttering the same words nor is understanding the same words simply retrieving information about words that we already know; instead, it depends on the principle of cotemporality, namely, what happened before and after, at the time of the uttering of a sentence, such as, ‘Did B hear A’s first utterance? Or was he simply expressing doubt?’ etc. (ibid.). In this case, though A has said ‘exactly the same thing’, it does not mean that B’s interpretation of the second utterance is simply a repetition of his interpretation of the first utterance (Did he recognize it as the same?). To put it concisely, the principle of cotemporality is central to the understanding of words and utterances in the flow of activities. Again, Harris argues that the different amount of efforts requested in interpreting new words and other words should not disguise the fact that they both involve a process of contextualization—or to put in integrationist terms—in both situations, the speakers and hearers are engaged in integrating activities. Harris’s discussion of Einstein’s revolutionary thought in physics is pertinent to this point. For Harris, trying to explain Einstein’s achievement in physics from an integrationist perspective cannot be divorced from trying to explain ‘how the infant Einstein learnt to master his first words, or the child Einstein his first mathematical symbols’ (Harris, 2004, p. 739). The reasoning is that they can all be rewritten with basic integrational operations. Linking up with the topic of ‘creativity’, can we say that there is the same underlying integration operations behind every act of creativity, namely, to use an old word involves the same creative integrating process as in using a new word? Furthermore, to what extent is saying ‘good morning’ as creative as producing the texts of Finnegans Wake? As noted by Hutton (2011, p. 507), ‘there must nonetheless surely be an important qualitative difference here, which cannot be that between following a set of conventions (linguistic and social rules about greetings) and breaking down a set of conventions (literary English, the novel as genre)’. What is this qualitative difference? Harris never addresses this question in his works. A possible answer may be that ‘new’ or ‘creative’ as a lay term can be applied in different contexts. When we say that Finnegans Wake is a creative book we draw upon the literary tradition and specific contexts against which ‘creativity’

References

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is evaluated. Aware of these lay uses of ‘creative’ and the tensions created by these understandings, Harris effectively draws our attention to the underexplored notion of ‘creativity’ featured in every sign-making act.

Summary In this comparison concerning the second topic—‘what counts as “new”’, an interesting discovery emerging from our discussion is that the authors’ differences in conceptualizing the ‘new’ are fundamentally influenced by what is considered ‘constant’. Chomsky believes in an innate organ of grammar which can be captured through scientific linguistic research. This linguistic organ generates all and only grammatical sentences in a specific language. The creativity exemplified by speakers and hearers in producing and understanding new sentences can be directly derived from the functioning of this organ. Skinner, on the other hand, believes that human behavior is actually continuous and undifferentiated though, as observed in adults, it features a diversified repertoire resulting from emergence of new forms of behaviors. Not only that, he also explains how the shaping of new behavior depends upon the recognition that human behavior is in nature continuous. While Harris emphasizes the ever-newness of meaning generated in the flow of contexts, he also implies the sameness of all integration process only that this process is guided by the principle of cotemporality and is time-bound. Moreover, the three authors’ accounts reflect three different views of ‘temporality’. To put in general terms, Chomsky’s theory abstracts away ‘time’ by not looking into language use; so what is new is virtually already there. Skinner does not recognize the time-­boundedness of human behavior; instead, he believes in the existence of general laws of behavior which could be applied repetitively to produce and control behaviors. In contrast, Harris strongly underlines the situatedness of human communication and sign-making; his understanding of ‘new’ meaning recognizes the fundamental shiftiness of time and contexts. Here I would like to highlight another observation regarding Chomsky and Skinner’s understanding of the diversity of human behavior. Chomsky tends to suggest that for every distinct human capacity, there exists a certain mental function (such as an organ of perception corresponding to the ability of perceiving; a language organ corresponding to the ability of speaking); while Skinner believes in the roles played by the environment in controlling, shaping human behavior (which will otherwise be undifferentiated clay) and thus contributing to the diversified repertoire of adult behavior. However, this seeming difference should not disguise a crucial similarity in their theorizing, which is, their acts of compartmentalizing and categorizing human behavior in a decontextualized manner, only that what is contained in Chomsky’s mental box gets transferred outside in Skinner’s theory and becomes interaction between the environment and the organism guided by general laws of behavior.

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References Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co.. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Culy, C. (1998). Statistical distribution and the grammatical/ungrammatical distinction. Grammars, 1(1), 1–13. Harris, R. (1998). Introduction to integrational linguistics. London: Pergamon. Harris, R. (2004). Integrationism, language, mind and world. Language Sciences, 26(6), 727–739. Hutton, C. (2011). The politics of the language myth: Reflections on the writings of Roy Harris. Language Sciences, 33(4), 503–510. Lyons, J. (1991). Chomsky. London: Fontana Press. (Original work published 1970). Sampson, G. (2001). Empirical linguistics. London: Continuum. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Skinner, B. F. (1965). Science and human behavior. New York: Free Press. Verhaar, J.  W. M. (1973). Phenomenology and present-day linguistics. In M.  Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the social sciences (Vol. 1, pp.  361–451). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Chapter 20

Comparing Chomsky, Skinner and Harris: Thoughts on Politics and Human Nature

Chomsky It is worth noting that Chomsky’s linguistics and his politics, both of which have exerted great influence, are kept as two distinct fields. When questioned about the links between the two, Chomsky’s answer remains suspicious of any effort to draw the links. However, I will argue in this chapter that behind these two fields there lies a consistent view of human nature informed by his understanding of ‘creativity’. Chomsky (1986, p. xxvii) makes a distinction between so-called ‘Plato’s problem’ and ‘Orwell’s problem’. By definition, Plato’s problem concerns explaining how we know so much when the evidence available to us is so limited; Orwell’s problem, on the other hand, is to answer how we know so little when we have so much evidence. According to him, generally speaking, explanatory science tries to solve Plato’s problem, namely, what enables human beings to know so much. In the context of linguistics, Chomsky’s answer to Plato’s problem is that the innate language faculty enables us to produce and understand numerous new sentences. In the political field, he encourages the solving of Orwell’s problem: people can know more if ‘the institutional and other factors that block insight and understanding in crucial areas of our lives’ (Chomsky, 1986, p. xxvii) are discovered and reflected upon. In order to solve Plato’s problem, an expertise in revealing the order behind the phenomena is required while being a rational observer as a common citizen is adequate for solving Orwell’s problem. What Chomsky as a common citizen has observed about the society he lives in, that is, American society, crystallizes in his critique of propaganda in democratic societies. Orwell’s critique of propaganda and violence in totalitarian societies is taken up by Chomsky, who criticizes control through propaganda in modern democratic societies. Drawing upon the works of Walter Lippman, he condemns practices of ‘manufacturing consent’. He argues that in democratic societies, the accessibility of information in the political field can be a disguise of real problems. In totalitarian states, people can separate lies from the truth and it is only out of fear of punishment that they live hypocritically in lies; © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_20

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while in democracies, there is more danger when people believe that they are seeing the truth only to find that they cannot separate truth from lies. However, as will be explained later, Chomsky’s separation of these two kinds of problems and his respective interest in them for different reasons should not blind us to the fact that his political views and linguistic research are both informed by a certain view of the human nature, which in turn cannot be separated from his understanding of ‘creativity’. I will bring this point home in the following discussions. In a paper on anarchism, Chomsky (1970) quotes positively from Mikhail Bakunin about liberty: […] liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being—they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom. (Chomsky, 1970)1

Subscribing to an anarchist politics, Chomsky tends to believe that there is no need for any outside legislator to impose governance or control on social members, instead, the only forms of constraint acceptable are those from nature itself. Unsurprisingly, Chomsky talks about human rights in the following manner: In accordance with these conceptions, human rights are rooted in human nature, and we violate fundamental human rights when people are forced to be slaves, wage slaves, servants of external power, subjected to systems of authority and domination, manipulated and controlled ‘for their own good’. (Chomsky, 1988, pp. 165–166)

For Chomsky, external constraints in forms of domination, manipulation and authoritative control by oppressing human nature violate human rights and should definitely be avoided. On the other hand, he believes that political rights are informed by rule-governed freedom, which means there are constraints, only that they are not designated by any external power, but our natural conditions. In fact, with regard to the whole moral field, Chomsky believes that the fundamental principles of moral judgment are largely part of a genetically determined framework (2000). Like in language behaviors, he believes that human moral behaviors are also informed by an innate mechanism already wired in their minds and rooted in ‘fundamental human nature’.2 Then what is this fundamental human nature? In an interview, when asked about the issue of human nature referring to his debate with Foucault in 1971, Chomsky (1979, p. 77) agrees with Foucault that human nature is not yet within the

 In Chomsky’s comments on this quotation in the footnote of the same article, he argues that ‘Bakunin’s final remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition of freedom can be compared to the creative thought developed in the rationalist and romantic traditions’ (Chomsky, 1970). We can see that the links between the notion of creativity in his linguistics and anarchist politics are implied in this comment. 2  Furthermore he believes in the advantage of subscribing to a belief of a certain instinct for freedom in human beings because it will generate real efforts of fighting against human tragedies and catastrophes. Refer to http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199107%2D%2D.htm. Retrieved May 22, 2019. 1

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range of science yet he makes it clear that in the study of language, ‘a significant concept of “human nature”, in its intellectual and cognitive aspects’ can be formulated, for example in linguistics his conceptualization of the faculty of language could be considered as ‘part of human nature’. Keeping in mind previous discussions on Chomsky’s linguistic thought, we come to see that Chomsky’s conceptualization of linguistic creativity is rule-­ governed creativity in the sense that our biolinguistic makeup generates the creativity. So it seems obvious that in both Chomsky’s politics and linguistics there runs a deterministic view on human nature, which is constrained by certain natural rules. Moreover, it is implied that linguistic freedom serves an instrumental role in realizing political rights, in the sense that human language, in the contexts of normal usage, unlike what Skinner believes, is ‘free from the control of independently identifiable external stimuli or internal states and is not restricted to any practical communicative function’, thus it can serve as ‘an instrument of free thought and self-expression’ (1966/2009, p.  76). An immediate question arises: what are ‘the contexts of normal usage’? Based on his distinction between competence and performance, by contexts of normal usage Chomsky might mean contexts in which human beings display full linguistic competence, i.e. when their performance is not marred by circumstantial factors. This highly idealized vision of language and political freedom reflects Chomsky’s conception of human nature. What is exactly the content of this view on human nature and to which extent can we subject it to scientific study? Chomsky (Chomsky & Foucault, 1971) argues that though currently it is beyond the scope of research, it remains a worthy project to try ‘to draw the connections between a concept of human nature that gives full scope to freedom and dignity and creativity and other fundamental human characteristics, and to relate that to some notion of social structure in which those properties could be realized and in which meaningful human life could take place.’ Here we see that his understanding of human nature built on abstracted idealizations and giving full scope to some fundamental human characteristics is in his political critiques made relevant to a given notion of social structure. Having detected the problematic tension in his concept of human nature, Foucault thus challenges him during their debate: [D]oesn’t one risk defining this human nature which is at the same time ideal and real, and has been hidden and repressed until now—in terms borrowed from our society, from our civilization, from our culture? (Chomsky & Foucault, 1971, p. 27)

Later in the debate, Chomsky confirms this evaluation when stating his understanding of a purer justice: I think there is some sort of an absolute basis [of ethics]—if you press me too hard I’ll be in trouble, because I can’t sketch it out.—[it] ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a ‘real’ notion of justice is grounded. (p. 55)

It seems that by advocating a vision of society built upon a full realization of human capacities aided by a critique of existing control of any kind, Chomsky’s project fails to consider the historicalness and situatedness of human beings, not to mention that our knowledge of human nature is also historically constrained. Though he seems to be aware of the historical constraints, his emphasis still falls on

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the necessity to carry out real actions even if they are based on indirect arguments concerning ‘questions of fact and value that are not well understood’ (1979, p. 80). Informed by such an idealized understanding of human nature and a pure sense of justice, Chomsky, among all other external controls and oppressions (including school education), expressed strong abhorrence to the form of control imposed by the intelligentsia. With a little industry and application, anyone who is willing to extricate himself from the system of shared ideology and propaganda will readily see through the modes of distortion developed by substantial segments of the intelligentsia. Everyone is capable of doing that. If such an analysis is often carried out poorly, that is because, quite commonly, social and political analysis is produced to defend special interests rather than to account for actual events. (1979, p. 4)

Intelligentsia is depicted in this quotation as one force producing distortion and manipulation against the common citizens, which they should be called upon to see through and critically analyze. Skinner is one of the intellectuals criticized by Chomsky as verging on totalitarianism and his empiricist writings are taken to be sponsoring racist and imperialist politics (Chomsky, 1979, p. 92). Interestingly, the fact that Chomsky himself is a leading intellectual in America who produces both linguistic and political works does not seem to bother him when criticizing the power politics of other intellectuals. Often he depicts his own works as either from an average citizen observing politics or a scientific worker discovering the ‘truth’: both fields of work are concerned with some hardwired human faculties in the human nature. The irony is, Chomsky’s largely abstract and a-historical views on human nature make it difficult for either his linguistics or politics to come to terms with situated language use on the one hand and the entangled power struggles on the other hand.

Skinner Skinner’s ultimate concern lies in solving the crisis faced by human societies, which according to him, is due to pathological behaviors; he believes that a science of human behavior can mend these pathologies by producing good human behavior. The dominating analogy in Skinner’s theory is of physics and biology’s understanding of their fields and behavior science’s understanding of human issues. For example, he asks: ‘Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?’ (1971, p. 12). He strongly believes that the difficulty in developing a science of human behavior should be embraced instead of being used as an excuse. Moreover, he reflects upon the progress made in physics and biology after giving up explaining physical phenomena as caused by Greek gods; in consequence, in the study of human behaviors, he calls for a parallel paradigm shift by getting rid of human agency in explaining human behaviors. Furthermore, he detected inadequacies of mentalist explanations of human behavior. For example, he does not think reliance on learning from ‘personal experience

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or from those collections for personal experience called history, or with the distillations of experience to be found in folk wisdom and practical rules of thumb’ (1971, p. 10) is adequate to solve practical challenges faced by the mankind. Unlike Chomsky, Skinner does not subscribe to a fixed view of human nature. His prior interest focuses on how we come to behave in the way that we do. It is hoped that with this insight we can shape our behavior in a desired direction, for instance, to be free from totalitarian control. Disbelieving in the existence of ‘a creative mind’, Skinner offloads responsibility to the environment. Also, he calls for an avoidance of punishment in behavior control because by doing this, we will avoid giving a false impression that it is the individuals who have to be held responsible. He explains, [I]f we simply punish bad behaviour, we can give the individual credit for behaving well; but if we build a world in which he naturally behaves well, the world must get the credit. He is being automatically good; he is exhibiting no inner goodness or virtue. (Skinner, 1973, p. 263)

This offloading of responsibility to a relatively neutral environment rings the alarm concerning important discussions of values. As defined by Skinner, a behavioral account of values is ‘a behavioural analysis of the things people call good, for reasons to be found in the evolution of the species and in the practices of a social environment’ (Skinner, 1973, p. 262). Thus, one can see that his consideration of values is not metaphysical but can be subsumed under the project of behavior science because what is good for human communities can be treated as a goal to be realized by applying positive operant conditioning. As to the issue of freedom, Skinner’s stance is that human beings seem to be free but in reality, they are determined and guided by laws of behavior (1957, p. 460). He attacks traditional concepts ‘which assign spontaneous control to the special inner self called the speaker’ (ibid.) and he does not think that freedom should be explained as being caused by a subjective inner self. For him the techniques used by governments informed by negative reinforcement theory are not adequate for the same reason why he thinks punishment should be avoided in behavior control. Instead, he upholds positive reinforcement, which can strengthen the sense of freedom on the part of the controlled. The purpose is to make them realize that this is what they want to do themselves. So Skinner’s goal is not to eliminate freedom but to ­understand the laws of behavior and eventually shape human behavior toward ‘the future of a world in which those and other valued feelings could still be enjoyed’ (1971, p. 7). Yet a crucial question arises: who is to be placed in the position of the controller? Linking this to the notion of ‘values’ discussed above, the question can be reframed as: who is to decide what is the good value for the community concerned? Skinner did not give a direct answer to this question. However, there are some hints for us to summarize his position. First, it is clear that institutions should not be placed at the place of controller. Commenting on an imagined community based on a behavioral science model as demonstrated in his book Walden Two, Skinner (1957, p. 219) states that, ‘[t]he Community it described was not a hippie commune, but it

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was free of institutions. The functions of government, economics and religion were taken over by face-to-face personal control’. Due to the legacies of a mentalist understanding of human subjects implied by the workings of these institutions and their tendencies to adopt punishment control, Skinner prefers face-to-face personal control. Second, starting from this, he further speculates that there will emerge ‘a true “fourth estate”, composed of scientists, scholars, teachers and the media’ (ibid.). It is hoped that if this fourth estate ‘can remain free of governments, religions and economic enterprises’, it could then control the controllers by providing ‘current surrogates for the remoter consequences of our behaviour’ (ibid.) in the sense that potentially threatening behavior for the community will be avoided and vice versa. So in strong contrast with Chomsky, who distrusts intellectuals and social media, Skinner embraces the possibility of having them play the role of ‘controller’. However, the question remains: how can we decide in advance what potentially threatening behaviors for a given community are? Skinner seems to provide a solution by defining threatening behaviors as behaviors that do not make the community better—he reformulated the question as: ‘[U]nder what conditions will those who have the power to control human behavior use it in ways which promise a better future?’ (1971, p. 218). And his answer is, ‘if we are to make sure that no individual or small group will emerge to use despotically the power conferred by a science of behavior, we must design a culture in which no one can emerge in such a position.’ (1971, p. 266). Most importantly, Skinner is confident that the emergency of a behavioral science means that it is time for us to consider explicitly designing such a culture (ibid.). By identifying social problems as problems of ‘behavior’, Skinner believes that a science of behavior can eventually keep these problems under control. Politically, it is argued that a science of behavior which encourages replacement of totalitarian control damaging to the culture with conducive practices based on face-to-face control will be better for the general welfare of mankind. However, this seemingly consistent account disguises a central problem in Skinner’s theory discussed earlier, which is, his reductive treatment of all human activities as ‘behaviors’ that can eventually be accounted for in a scientific framework. For example, in which sense can problems such as overpopulation, the exhaustion and pollution of the environment, and a nuclear war be generally treated as problems about human behavior? This treatment of human behavior fails to acknowledge the specific contexts surrounding each problem; in the end, what good will a science of behavior in general bring to the solution of specific social problems? Moreover, the project of explicitly designing a culture where there is no risk of abuse of control is not as straightforward as presented by Skinner. This will likely involve abuse of control and to what extent scientists can be placed in a neutral position to design such a culture remains disputable.

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Harris Harris’s politics and his thoughts on human nature are tightly bound with his views on language and his critique of mainstream linguistics. I will start with his discussion of Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, which is a fictional language to impose control created by a totalitarian state depicted in 1984. Harris does not think we should treat Newspeak as a menace; instead, he argues that it is a ‘nonsense’ unless supported by two typical assumptions of the twentieth century: One is that human linguistic abilities depend on a language machine in the brain. The other is that once the language machine is programmed in a certain way, the individual is powerless to alter it. (Harris, 1987, p. 21)

The logic of Newspeak implies that as long as there is a standardized language which promotes the ideology of the existing state, the citizens’ freedom of thought will be controlled. Harris is dissatisfied with this account because it does not give individual speakers the power to go beyond the language they speak and it fails to acknowledge ‘the individual’s role in the complex of activities we call “language” (1987, p. 171)’. This emphasis of individuals as a locus of meaning-making activities is tightly connected with Harris’s critique of mainstream linguistics sponsored by the language myth, which treats language as a decontextualized system outside normative contexts of language in use. The following quotation well illustrates this point: [T]he myth of the language machine is a convenient myth because it absolves us from our day-to-day duties as language-makers, and blankets out for us all awkward questions concerning the exercise of authority through language. We purchase this linguistic security at cost price: and the cost is the removal of language from the domain of social morality altogether. (1987, p. 162)

Based on this critique, Harris endorses a demythologized linguistics which ‘would be an investigation of the renewal of language as a continuously creative process’ (1980, p. 152). Harris’s critique of mainstream linguistics’s promotion of an amoral view on language springs from his concern with the normative nature of language use. However, Harris is aware that in allocating responsibilities language is only allowed a passive role, so the myth of the language machine has not led to a nightmare in which human agents are completely absolved of any responsibility. Then it is not unlikely that he exaggerates the dehumanizing effects of the language myth, as is observed by Hutton (2011, p. 509): […] There are detectable strains of logophobia here, in that language itself may engender mythologies, and a sense in which individual and societies, and linguistic inquiry itself, as an open-ended reflexive process, must constantly invest language with creative energy to avoid the dulling effect of the language machine and system.

In other words, Harris seems to suggest that individual speakers are under the sway of the language myth though he insists on individual speakers’ creative and reflexive roles in language use. However, Harris does not imply in any sense that individuals are helpless under the control of this myth; instead, he calls for a reflexive awareness of the status of language on the part of individual language users. And

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it is this emphasis that fundamentally distinguishes Harris from other linguists who believe that understanding among language users relies upon and is guaranteed by a common language. In his works, Harris demonstrates strong interests in the discussion of freedom of expression/speech, a highly relevant concept to creativity. For him, these topics open up possibilities to confront the normative dimensions of language use which are excluded in linguistics proper. In mainstream linguistics, according to Harris (1990, p. 160), the issue of freedom of speech is shirked by means of perpetuating a ‘convenient theoretical fiction that membership of a (homogeneous) linguistic community automatically confers the same linguistic rights—or none—on all, and attributing any departure from this egalitarian state of affairs to the interference of external, pragmatic factors which are by definition non-linguistic.’ A detailed look at his discussion of the Rushdie case will help to understand his thoughts concerning freedom of speech. Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian writer whose fourth novel The Satanic Verses (1988) triggered a major controversy and provoked protests from the Muslims in several countries. In consequence, he and the translators of his books faced death threats. On 14 February 1989, there was even a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran. In his paper read at the symposium ‘Asian Voices in English’ held in 1990, Harris (1991, p. 94) draws on Mill’s liberal thoughts to discuss Rushdie’s case. An important distinction made by Mill is that between ‘behavior which gives offence’ and ‘behavior which causes harm’. Following this line of argument, Harris argues that Rushdie’s works may have offended other people’s sensibilities, but it does not call for harm; thus no one has the right to cause or advocate harm to the author because of his act of expressing his views in the book. He goes on to argue that ‘only people who advocate or themselves resort to violence can be held responsible for violence’ (1991, p.  95). Following Mill’s principle, Harris speculates that the parties who feel offended by Rushdie have the right to attack his views and promote their own views but they cannot cause ‘any intimidation or deliberate incitement to violence’ (ibid.). However, Harris is aware of the cultural premises on which this principle is based, namely, the Western tradition of humanism. In the following quotation, Harris considers the role of culture in deciding upon Rushdie’s freedom and responsibility: Is obsession with freedom just a cultural dogma of Western secular fundamentalism? Is the very term ‘culture’ anything more than the collective name given in different areas of the globe to the tyranny established by historically privileged sets of local prejudices? (Harris, 1991, p. 96)

In light of these questions, one can see that Harris stands in a different position from those supporters of freedom of speech as a universal human right. For him, this freedom has more to do with individuals’ readiness to choose which freedom he wants to take than a certain freedom designated by a certain culture. So a more pertinent question for him, with special reference to Rushdie, is ‘what of those individuals who aspire to freedom not sanctioned by the tyranny of the local culture into which they happen to have been born?’ (ibid.).

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Informed by Harris’s insights, we have gained a different understanding of Rushdie’s case: seen from a Western humanist’s perspective, Rushdie has freedom of speech and he can choose to exercise that freedom by writing a book; however, this does not mean that this freedom and protection from any harm can always be maintained, especially in a different cultural context, for instance, in a fundamentalist ethic where there persists ‘a subordination of personal freedom and personal judgment to belief in a higher unquestioned truth’ (ibid.). Harris would possibly further argue that it is this risk involved that makes freedom of speech worth fighting for and even dying for against the constraints designated by a specific culture from the standpoint of individuals in some situations. Overall this position is consistent with Harris’s stance concerning individual responsibilities in using language.

Summary From the readings I made above of the three authors, we can see that they offer interesting thoughts on political issues such as freedom, control and responsibility. Their discussions are informed by different views of human nature and corresponding political models, which is crucial to our understanding of ‘creativity’ and how it relates to other important aspects of human nature. Skinner does not believe in so-­ called human nature, instead he looks into how the environment is responsible for shaping human behavior. He emphasizes that if we can build a good environment based on behavioral science, no responsibility for the achievements needs to be attributed to individuals. Chomsky believes that language is a field of research of which possible insights are gained because our human nature allows it to be so. He explains the failure of behaviorism with the same logic, that is, it fails because ‘the true theory of behavior is beyond our cognitive reach’ (1979, p. 69). Moreover, his concern with creativity, freedom of speech, etc. is directly informed by his belief in fundamental human rights issued from a universal human nature. For Harris, though he never explicitly comments on human nature, he does emphasize the crucial role of creative integration for human survival (Harris, 1998, p. 29). According to him, human beings do not choose to be creative; instead, they have to be creative to go through this integration of activities and the creative integration ‘is a necessary condition of life as we know it’ (ibid.). Another theme emerging from the comparison is control. Chomsky’s political works aim at revealing control imposed by the powerful and the privileged from the standpoint of a common citizen. He thinks that there exists a state of nature that represents the vision of a future society and needs to be respected. In that vision, the laws of human nature will achieve their fullest expression in a society where free and creative producers are linked by social bonds in ‘a system of voluntary association’ (Chomsky, 1972). The closest model of government guided by this vision will be some kind of anarchism. Skinner’s distrust of any promotion of an autonomous concept of individuals necessitates his acknowledgement of control; moreover, he is quite clear that a technology of behavior advocated by him is not to ‘free men from

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control but to analyse and change the kinds of control to which they are exposed’ (Skinner, 1971, p. 43). He aims to take control out of the hands of various institutions and place it in the hands of those who would not misuse the power. As mentioned earlier, he promotes ‘a true “fourth estate”, composed of scientists, scholars, teachers and the media’. Interestingly, this is exactly the kind of control—namely a more subtle control imposed by intellectuals—which Chomsky severely criticizes, as is reflected from the following quotation: Quite typically, intellectuals have been ideological and social managers, serving power or seeking to assume power themselves by taking control of popular movements of which they declare themselves to be the leaders. For people committed to control and manipulation it is quite useful to believe that human beings have no intrinsic moral and intellectual nature, that they are simply objects to be shaped by state and private managers and ideologues— who, of course, perceive what is good and right. (Chomsky, 1988, pp. 165–166)

Skinner’s denial of fixed human nature lends himself easily to similar critiques as this one from Chomsky.3 Upon closer look, we can see that Chomsky’s critique rests upon an unfounded premise: he seems to imply that theories which assert intrinsic moral and intellectual nature will not lead to totalitarian control. This proves to be a blind spot—as demonstrated in Hutton (2010), ideas of human biological fixity have been misused to place individuals and groups at a disadvantage because of their genetic inheritance. For Harris, his contribution to the theme of ‘control’ is linked with the importance he attaches to the reflexive awareness on the part of individual language users situated in specific historical, cultural and political contexts. He does not spell out any form of control which should be fought against though he makes a strong critique against delegating human responsibilities to groups, which claim to have expertise and authority or to morally neutral machines and myths. Harris warns us against the danger of ending up as a communicational dope—in order to avoid that we need ‘a personal communication survival kit’ (Harris, 1996, p. 265). Though there is not any elaboration of what such a kit consists of, it is very likely that recognizing the creative nature of sign-making plays an important role. Furthermore, the three authors’ different views on ‘control’ imply different solutions to produce better societies and better behaviors. Chomsky intends to challenge all forms of control imposed by modern institutions in democratic societies so that we may come closer to the vision of an ideal society. Skinner, on the other hand, thinks that control is unavoidable and we have to make sure it is placed in the right hands. Harris’s concern with a better society lies in his emphasis of individuals’ creative communicational abilities.  Andresen (1991, p. 56) tries to nullify Chomsky’s critique by offering the following argument: ‘I will only point out that nothing changes as a result of differing accounts of human language, and that we have had vicious slavery, evil bloodshed and political tyrannies of various malevolent sorts without any theory of language (or human nature) whatsoever’. It is doubtful, however, whether Andresen’s separation of theories of language (or human nature) from historical atrocities will help us to critically reflect upon intellectual history. It is true that not every problematic act is necessarily explicitly informed by a certain theory; an attitude of critical scrutiny and reflection is, however, crucial in disentangling intellectual debates and revealing dilemmas in reasoning. 3

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References Andresen, J. (1991). Skinner and Chomsky 30 years later. Or: The return of the repressed. The Behavior Analyst, 14(1), 49–60. Chomsky, N. (1970). Notes on anarchism. In D. Guérin (Ed.), Anarchism: From theory to practice. New York: Monthly Review Press. Chomsky, N. (1972). Interview. Indian & Foreign Review. 20–22. Chomsky, N. (1979). Language and responsibility: Based on conversations with Mitsou Ronat. New York: Pantheon books. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin and use. Westport, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group. Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and problems of knowledge: The Managua lectures, Cambridge, London: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (2000). On humanism and morality. Noam Chomsky interviewed by Tor Wennerberg. Montreal Serai, 13(3). Retrieved June 2, 2018, from https://chomsky.info/199811__-2/. Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian linguistics: A chapter in the history of rationalist thought. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1966). Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (1971). Human nature: Justice versus power Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault. Retrieved May 1, 2019, from http://www.chomsky.info/ debates/1971xxxx.htm. Harris, R. (1980). The language-makers. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1987). The language machine. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1990). On freedom of speech. In J. Joseph & T. J. Taylor (Eds.), Ideologies of language (pp. 153–161). London & New York: Routledge. Harris, R. (1991). English against Islam: The Asian voice of Salman Rushdie. In M.  Chan & R.  Harris (Eds.), Asian voices in English (pp.  87–96). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Harris, R. (1996). Signs, language and communication. London: Routledge. Harris, R. (1998). Introduction to integrational linguistics. London: Pergamon. Hutton, C. (2010). Universalism and human difference in Chomskyan linguistics. The first ‘superhominid’ and the language faculty. In D. A. Kibbee (Ed.), Chomskyan (R)evolutions (pp. 337– 352). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hutton, C. (2011). The politics of the language myth: Reflections on the writings of Roy Harris. Language Sciences, 33(4), 503–510. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: Knopf. Skinner, B. F. (1973). Answers for my critics. In H. Wheeler (Ed.), Beyond the punitive society (pp. 256–266). London: Wildwood.

Chapter 21

Alternative Theories: Creativity, Metaphor and Everyday Conversation

In this chapter, I will explore some recent developments in studying creativity and language. Unlike the three authors discussed previously, this new trend of studying creativity explicitly calls for a rethinking of the boundary between literature and the ordinary language informed by a multidisciplinary consideration of different modes of communication, which go beyond the text.1 To quote Ruth Finnegan: ‘Creativity’ has here often been the key to unlock some of the gates to let us into less fenced pastures, pushing controversially at the edges that, whether explicitly or implicitly, are so often put around language and literature. The debate needs to proceed on where we now locate the fields for language and literature, be they bordered, emergent or unconfined. […]. [W]e must surely now add the equally fascinating and debatable continuities between ­language and the broader galaxy of arts that might—if inadequately—be roughly indicated by such notions as (among others) music, gesture, dance, image, graphics, movement, material, sound or touch. Perhaps it is only when we turn the lens onto all of these that the overflowing and intermingled splendours of language and literature as arenas for creativity can shine out with their true brilliance. (Finnegan, 2011, p. 332)

Ronald Carter’s book Language and Creativity: the Art of Common Talk (2004) can be classified as a representative work in this vein. By carrying out a corpus-­ based linguistic research of everyday conversations, he convincingly argues: ‘Creativity is a pervasive feature of spoken language exchanges as well as a key component in interpersonal communication, and […] it is a property actively possessed by all speakers and listeners; it is not simply the domain of a few creatively gifted individuals’ (2004, p.  6). In his detailed analysis of common talk data, he locates massive evidence of creative patterns in spoken language—by doing this, a  Even before this multidisciplinary effort to study creativity, theories of metaphor in philosophy of language and in linguistics have encouraged the same spirit. These theories move from a view which treats metaphor as decorative rhetoric to a view, which strengthens the essentially creative nature of metaphors in that metaphors restructure both language and reality. So instead of treating literature as separate or superior to ordinary talk, these studies of metaphor encourage the study of creativity outside literature and the breaking down of the boundaries between literature and nonliterature. See the works of Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), Ricoeur (in Kearney, 1998). 1

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more conventional understanding of creativity, especially in literary traditions which privilege writing over speaking, individual geniuses over ordinary speakers, is undermined. Instead, he proposes the following understanding which underscores the contextual and dialogic nature of creativity: Creativity at work as a process, with several individuals in dialogue, working at full-stretch, in real time, improvising, duetting, creating individual riffs, harmonies and local indirections, making things up for the nonce, for the occasion, en passant, and always remaining attentive to the social and cultural context they are in themselves as well as to others within it. (Carter, 2004, p. 112).

To illustrate, I will introduce some examples from his book. Example 3.16 [The students are all female, are the same age (between 20 and 21) and share a house in Carmarthen, Wales. Two of the students ( and are from the south-west of England) and one ( is from south Wales). They are having tea at home on a Sunday, sitting in a relaxed and informal manner around a tea-table.] […] : So you can have one of them and one of them as well. : Oh those Cherry Bakewells look lovely. : They do don’t they. : Don’t they. Oh they were [lower voices] [inaudible] : Gorgeous aren’t they. : Shall we save it for a cup of tea? : [laughs] Yes. : All right then. : Sound like a right mother don’t I. : [laughs] : You do. : Well they would go smashing with a cup of tea wouldn’t they. : Oh they would. : Yeah. : Cup of tea and a fag. : [laughs] : Cup of tea and a fag missus. We’re gonna have to move the table I think. […] (Carter, 2004, pp. 103–104)

Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of ‘voicing’, Carter analyzes the verbal play carried out by the three interlocutors. For Bakhtin, speech is essentially dialogic even in monologues: Our speech is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of our-own-ness, varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework and re-accentuate. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 89)

According to Carter, this essentially cooperative and dynamic nature of speech leads speakers to project different voices for different people, which then creates ‘an improvised, creative interplay between the voices’ (Carter, 2004, p.  68).2 Carter  On the other hand, the enacting of these other voices during festivals and carnival days in medieval societies, as is observed by Bakhtin, ‘creatively undermine or challenge existing norms, func2

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notes that with the words ‘cup of tea and a fag’, two of the girls by mimicking low-­ prestige accents, ‘deliberately take on parodic voices’; furthermore, speaker ’s repetition of ’s parody and her addition of the word ‘missus’ demonstrates the ‘collaborative’ nature of their conversation. Some other excerpts from the same transcript (p. 8): : [laughs] Cos you come home. : I come home. : You come home to us. : Sunday is a really nice day I think. : It certainly is. : It’s a really nice relaxing day. : Oh I think it looks better like that. : And there was another bit as well, another dangly bit. : What, attached to. : The top bit. : That one. : Yeah. So it was even. : Mobile earrings. : I like it like that. It looks better like that.

In analyzing this transcript, Carter identifies another means of forming creative patterns, that is, repetition. According to him, there is always an element of risktaking involved in creative conversations resulted from potential failures, unsuccessful performance, etc. Repetition, on the other hand, by strengthening the shared worlds and viewpoints between speakers, reduces risks attendant on creativity and actively co-­produce intimacy and convergence (Carter, 2004, p. 107). For example, as is shown from the underlined part, Carter comments that this is almost ‘a poetry of talk’ featuring full rhyming repetitions and echoes together with other rhythmic correspondences. He also notices that toward the end of the extract when they talk about earrings, a pun is used. ‘Mobile’ can be something which moves or ‘a brightly colored dangling object which is often placed over a child’s bed or cot to provide distraction or entertainment, or else a piece of moving art’ (Carter, 2004, p.  9). When the earrings worn by one of the girls move all over the place when she talks, they become ‘mobile earrings’. For Carter, this pun provides an example of ‘a more conventional instance of linguistic creativity involving changes in, to and with the language’, which is unlike the repetitions and echoes mentioned above. Carter notes that the more conventional use of creativity is for most time connected with written or literary language and because of historical and institutional reasons, it is more valued. Confronted with the massive evidence of creativity in everyday spoken language, Carter attempts to challenge this dichotomy by providing a continuity hypothesis. Replacing ‘literary language’ with ‘literary use of language’, he further recognizes that ‘literary and creative uses of language are ubiquitous but are also a matter of degree’ (2004, p. 64); ‘literariness and, by extension, literary language is

tioning almost as a subversive element of “carnivalesque” which keeps erupting through the surface discussions of all transactional tasks and targets’ (quoted in Carter, 2004, p. 68).

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socially and culturally relative’ and the same applies to creativity. A quotation from one of his earlier books attests to this point: Copywriting, report-writing, scholarly exposition, journalism, all fall on the wrong side of a stereotypical fence, the side marked composition. The other side, called creative writing is where we place poetry and fiction and drama. […]. The argument for a cline, or gradation, of literariness challenges the stereotype but in practice does little to shake popular conviction. Even the practitioner feels that writing an article for a journal is ‘composing’; whereas writing a short story is ‘creating’. […]. It is, however, a faulty perception if it leads us to conclude that so-called creative writing can dispense with the routines and disciplines of composition, or that composition is a mechanical process. (Carter & Nash, 1990, p. 175)

By revealing how cultural values influence our perceptions of ‘what is creative and what is not’, Carter urges that it is important to recognize the ubiquity of creativity in human language use though he also states that creativity is ‘a contextual act’: for example, in verbal interaction, it is ‘probabilistically related to certain types of interaction and certain speech genres’ (2004, p. 210). Based on a massive amount of corpus data, Carter discovers that creative use of language is more likely to occur in informal contexts between people of intimate relationships, such as friends cooking together, couple decorating a room than in more professional settings.3 Conceived in this manner, ‘creativity’ is demonstrated to be contextually and culturally relative in that ‘it can be valued only in relation to the moment-by-moment experiences of the participants’ (Carter, 2004, p. 209). He therefore concludes that language use tends to be more co-constructed and co-created in informal and intimate encounters. By providing data evidence of the pervasive use of creativity in spoken language, Carter challenges the boundary between ‘literary’ and ‘ordinary’ language, ‘spoken’ and ‘written’ language and extends creativity from the preserve of a few geniuses to every speaking human being. Moreover, he encourages the recognition of students’ creative language use in second-language learning classrooms. According to him, it should be noted that instead of being utilitarian and mechanistic, their use of second language manifests elements, which express their social and cultural selves as noted by Widdowson (2000). Based on these considerations, Carter toward the end of the book puts forward a statement which further challenges our received ways of describing, categorizing and understanding language: ‘Creative language may be a default condition, a norm of use from which ordinary, routine “non-creative” exchanges constitute an abnormal departure’ (Carter, 2004, p. 214). To a certain extent, his study of spoken creativity is intended to prompt us to ask ‘what does a study of spoken creativity tell us about the nature of language’ (Carter, 2004, p. 215). However, in the following, I will highlight several problems in his theory of creativity. For example, when commenting on the use of ‘repetition’, he quotes Tannen: ‘Repetition is a resource by which conversationalists together create a discourse, a  Yet he notices that in professional encounters such as ‘therapist or counselor problem-solving with a patient’, genuinely transforming and thus creative patterns are involved. His explanation is that in this respect, creativity is also ‘critical as a result of occurring at a “critical” moment in a crucial site in the evolution and development of social discourse’. (Carter, 2004, p. 208) 3

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relationship, and a world. It is the central linguistic meaning-making strategy, a limitless resource for individual creativity and interpersonal involvement’ (Tannen, 1989, ch. 3). In accord with Tannen, he emphasizes that repetition creates a sense of warmth and solidarity which further encourages more creative performance on the part of speakers. My questions are: Is this always the case? To what extent is repetition creative? It is not difficult for us to imagine a conversation in which two people constantly echo and repeat each other and the effects, instead of being positively encouraging, are for example potentially order-disruptive (as ethnomethodological experiments demonstrate). On the other hand, Carter acknowledges that some other creative uses of language aim at competition instead of convergence. For example, drawing on Abrahams (1962) and Labov’s (1972) research on Black English Vernacular, he underlines the use of puns or wordplays in ritualized insults. He further argues that his interest is not in identifying these linguistic forms but in achieving a full understanding of the effects they create and the functions they perform in stretches of discourse (Carter, 2004, p. 148). From these two examples, we can see that in Carter’s understanding of creativity, interpersonal functions play a crucial role—it seems that he equals ‘creativity in spoken language’ with the creation/production of certain interpersonal effects and the performance of social functions, be it cooperative or competing, etc. This understanding of ‘creativity’, I will argue, springs from the need to solve a dilemma inherent in Carter’s project. By locating evidence of creativity from spoken language, he risks subscribing to a conventional notion of creativity found in written texts produced by a few creative writers with a modification that ordinary speakers also have ‘creative’ moments (just like there is ‘poetry’ in common talk). In order to avoid this risk, he has to identify a distinct feature in spoken creativity so that a new understanding of creativity will be in place to prompt a rethinking of the boundary between the literary and the ordinary, and furthermore a rethinking of the nature of language as mentioned above. This distinct feature is the creation of interpersonal effects in spoken interactions. Moreover, he suggests that literary texts by using similar patterns also achieve interactional effects. For example, drawing on Cook (2000), he acknowledges that creative writers exploit this feature to allow readers to feel that they are interacting with them in the here and now (see Carter, 2004, p. 83) though he cautions against excessive comparison between the two due to their different institutional and social values (2004, p. 81). In the end, with this solution, Carter provides a new understanding of creativity which emphasizes its emergent nature from ‘particular interpersonal and affective platforms’ (2004, p. 215). Referring to my earlier discussions, we can see that Carter’s project poses direct challenges to Chomsky’s decontextualized model of creativity and concords with Harris’s emphasis on every human speaker’s creativity in everyday language use. However, there are some tensions between these two theories. Carter’s ‘continuity’ model of creativity which distinguishes more creativity-encouraging contexts (that is, in more intimate and collaborative dialogic conditions) from others is in strong contrast with Harris’s idea, which emphasizes that creativity is manifested in every context as long as it involves the using and making of signs. For example, an exchange of ‘good morning’ between acquaintances in the lift for Harris can be creative acts while for Carter is the routine departure from creativity. On a closer

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look, the problem with Carter’s probabilistic model of creativity is that the categorization of social contexts (in terms of intimate, close, professional, distant, etc.) and the identification of interpersonal effects (in terms of warmth, convergence, solidarity, competition, disruption, etc.) are from beginning to end researchers’ understanding of the data, which by feeding on stereotypical labels (for example, by categorizing ‘couple decorating a room’ as ‘intimate’ and ‘friends cooking together’ as ‘sociocultural’) is unavoidably constrained and culturally prejudiced. On the other hand, his distinction between these different contexts is superseded by Harris’s theoretical emphasis on human speakers instead of contexts: when human speakers are placed in the center, what become highlighted are their meaning-making activities; categorization of contexts together with different genres of language use are second-order products instead of first-order creative acts. To a certain extent, ethnomethodology’s emphasis on social members’ moment-by-moment order-creating work serves as a contrastive point as well: saying ‘good morning’ to each other is just as creative in maintaining the social order. To quote Sacks: everyone is doing being ordinary. We may say that even the genius says ‘good morning’ in an ordinary way. Carter’s book, together with other works (e.g. Swann, Pope, & Carter, 2011), through detailed study of everyday language data, provides substantial evidence of ‘creativity’ in human language use. Unlike the mentalist, behaviorist, and individual experience-based approaches represented by Chomsky, Skinner and Harris, Carter highlights the co-produced nature of creativity emergent in particular contexts and the social functions it serves. By emphasizing the creative ability of every human speaker as displayed in spoken language, Carter proposes that creativity, instead of being a property of exceptional people, turns out to be an exceptional property of all people. Broadly speaking, his book endorses a democratic view of ‘creativity’ which is consistent throughout all the theories discussed above in that the links of creativity with a divine or mysterious being are severed. However, as argued above, by trying to identify creativity with interpersonal effects that linguistic forms create, Carter’s approach risks imposing researchers’ categories on the classification and interpretation of data. Despite their distinct methods and presuppositions, we can see that these four authors more or less uphold a democratic view on human creativity. They all implicitly challenge the archaic understanding of creativity by anchoring it in some distinctly human aspects: be it the innate mental structure, the interaction between the human and the environment, the time-bound sign-making activities, or the interpersonal world involving collaboration and conflict. Compared to Chomsky and Skinner’s restricted understandings, both Harris and Carter represent better chances to address creativity in situated communicational activities. Moreover, with the exception of Skinner, who seeks to construct a rationalist scientific model of human behavior, all other authors can be read as influenced by the legacies of Romantic thinking. As a challenge to Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism seeks ways to account for meaning other than a universal rational model to knowledge espoused by Enlightenment thinkers. By undermining the notions such as order, progress, knowledge and structure, this movement recognizes the need to break up so-called order either ‘by going to the past, or by going within oneself and out of the external world’ (Berlin, 1999, p. 138). The essence of this movement as defined by Berlin

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constitutes this drive to identify with some kind of essences, be it oneself, certain myths, other spiritual forms (together with the realization that this drive could never be fulfilled because when it was fulfilled it would be worthless) (ibid.). Referring to this understanding, we will see how these authors link up with this legacy. Though his concept of ‘creativity’ turns out to be a computational mechanism and he claims to be a Cartesian linguist, there is actually a strong Romantic element in Chomsky’s thinking characterized by the notion of ‘native speaker’. It was inspired by the thoughts of Herder, an important Romantic thinker, who emphasized the organic links between a language, a certain group identity and a speaking individual. By granting intuitive judgments on grammaticality to native speakers and creative linguistic capacity to every newborn child, Chomsky can be read as a modern Romantic thinker of language. Harris, on the other hand, develops the lines which underscore the unpredictability of human existence, the ever-changingness of contexts, the indeterminacy of meaning; it is exactly because of these that he understands every sign as new within the flow of time. In addition, he agrees with Carter in their emphasis on the creativity in ordinary language use which features in Romanticism as well (Wordsworth, e.g.). Put in a broader perspective, in the same way that Romanticism can be read as a response to industrialization and modernization, these linguists’ understandings of creativity can be taken as reflecting new conceptualizations of self, identity, community and communication called for in a world, which is ever-­more modernized, globalized and computerized. In one way or another these linguistic theories address or potentially can be made relevant to the following questions, namely, where does meaning reside? What does creativity consist in? Are humans significantly different from non-humans such as machines and computers? Chomsky is trapped in a dilemma when on the one hand he advocates the existence of an intrinsic language organ (which is conceived to distinguish humans from non-­humans yet turns out to be machine-like) and on the other hand links up linguistic creativity with native speaker’s intuition (which cannot be disentangled from historical and cultural contexts). In Carter and Harris, human experience and interaction are taken to be the locus where creativity is anchored. Yet, one may ask, what is distinct about this locus? Are we not interacting with machines in the same way, at least according to behaviorism and the school of distributed cognition (I will discuss in detail in Chap. 22)? If machines interact with each other and create ‘intermachinal’ effects, can we then say that they are creative?

References Abrahams, R. D. (1962). Playing the dozens. The Journal of American Folklore, 75(297), 209–220. Bakhtin, M.  M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Berlin, I. (1999). The roots of romanticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carter, R. (2004). Language and creativity: The art of common talk. London; New York: Routledge. Carter, R., & Nash, N. (1990). Seeing through language: A guide to styles of English writing. Oxford: Blackwell. Cook, G. (2000). Language play, language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Finnegan, R. (2011). Creativity looks at language. In J.  Swann, R.  Pope, & R.  Carter (Eds.), Creativity in language and literature: The state of the art (pp. 323–333). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kearney, R. (1998). The wake of imagination: Ideas of creativity in Western culture. London: HarperCollins. Labov, W. (1972). Rules for ritual insults. In Language in the inner city, studies in black vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Swann, J., Pope, R., & Carter, R. (2011). Creativity in language and literature: The state of the art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tannen, D. (1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, H. (2000). On the limitations of linguistics applied. Applied Linguistics, 21(1), 3–25.

Chapter 22

Creativity, Machines and Posthumanism

As made clear in previous chapters, language and ‘creativity’—these two strongholds of humanity, are conceptualized differently in Chomsky, Skinner, Harris and Carter’s theories. Commonly held as demarcating features of humans from machines, these two terms are crucial in our understanding of the human. Despite their different models of ‘creativity’, all authors, as discussed earlier, endorse that linguistic creativity is a basic human condition. They can be read contextually as a reaction to the modern crisis surrounding the definition of human being, namely: what makes men different from machines? How is creativity crucial to being human? In this chapter, I will look into the enquiries centered on machines, language and creativity by moving beyond linguistics to investigate other relevant fields of research in information science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In particular, I draw on posthumanist thoughts and reconsider the implications of its questioning the centrality of the human actor for discussions of creativity. By exploring these lines of research, I expect to shed light on the differences between the human and machines in terms of creativity, and provide some practical considerations on how to better work with machines in language and communication contexts. It seems that a meaningful discussion of machines and creativity depends to a large extent on the definition of ‘creativity’: does creativity entail the existence of a creative mind? Or the capacity to produce creative products? If it is the former, by definition, machines, without a ‘mind’, cannot be creative; if it is the latter, many would argue that machines can pass as ‘creative’. For example, there are machines producing jokes, poems, or even ‘painting’ paintings, which can well pass as ‘art’ in the eyes of the audience. It is not difficult to discern that this model and application of machine creativity still rely on a definition of ‘creativity’ as the ability to generate ‘new, original, and artistic’ products—the kind of creativity, which Raymond Williams terms as ‘superior’ creativity (see Chap. 17). It may be true that the products are ‘perceived’ as creative—the mechanism of these machines can be hardly said to be ‘creative’, because everything in the output must have been already present in the input data or the algorithms. A counterexample may be machines of deep learning. Increasingly, there are new models using deep learning and huge databases © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_22

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to cultivate learning and creating new behaviors in machines. Instead of trying to seek ways to encode knowledge and reasoning in machines, these new models employ a bottom-up approach through which machines are exposed to massive amounts of data information and are then expected to be able to produce new knowledge and behaviors. As in the case of chess game, these kinds of learning machines have already beaten human players and exhibited ‘higher intelligence’. However, as argued in Alva Noë (2009), this form of intelligence is not on a par with human chess players. He explains, while it is the case that machine chess players take pride in the ability to quickly select the best moves from a nearly infinite bank of moves, competent human chess players do not face the same ‘computational problem of evaluating moves from among the potential infinity of possibilities’ (p. 105). At a given configuration, for human chess players, the moves worth considering will only be one or two. He further argues that the genuine competence and intelligence we look up to in chess players, precisely, is expressed ‘in the absence not only of the need for but the very possibility of deliberation’ (p. 106). On the other hand, we may ask, despite being an intelligent mental sport, is chess game the right model to talk about creativity and language? After all, a creative language machine is not expected to compete with humans in such kind of games, which, in spite of its many moves, are by nature bounded, as Harris notes when examining the much used chess analogy in theorizing language (1988). An essential difference here is the embeddedness of language in concrete and ever-changing contexts, which can vary in significantly more and different ways than in a chess game. This determines that a creative language machine, before working on the ‘creative’ side, has to first take into account the following concerns: how can the machine use language in an appropriate and contextual manner? A machine which is only creative already exists in the form of machines which tell jokes or write poems. Yet, the real challenge is to produce a machine that is both creative and sensitive to the context—like some kind of ‘appropriately’ creative machine. There is thus a need to move from focusing on creative language products to creative communication; from an intelligence competition model to an interactive model of machines, which are plugged to its environment. Technically, this also proves to be the most demanding task because these types of machines cannot be pre-coded to adapt to a constantly shifting environment. However, it seems that only when this kind of machine is in place, we can truly say that we have creative machines. An interesting fact about language and communication is, as discussed in Part I, despite the changing contexts, language itself, thanks to the technology of writing, can be represented as a system of forms and rules, which are further codified and translated into machine symbols. Also, despite the infinity of possible correct sentences, we do not always say completely new and creative sentences. So even before the emergence of Big Data and deep learning technology, very simple software can already create a conversing language machine, which gives the impression that it is able to perform situated talk. The earliest is ELIZA, created from 1964 to 1966 at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. The computer program is designed to talk with humans, who were instructed to ‘talk’ to it (through typing), just as one would to a psychiatrist. According to Weizenbaum, though the

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program relies on very simple rules to generate responses and create ‘a simple illusion of understanding’, some people end up spending hours interacting with it and treating it as a ‘real’ therapist (1966). It is explained that, the mode of conversation between a patient and a psychiatrist is deliberately chosen because the psychiatric interview provides a rare format of ‘categorized dyadic natural language communication in which one of the participating pair is free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world’ (p. 42). In his interpretation of this human–machine interaction case, David Bade (2012), however, emphasizes another factor which contributes to the success of this kind of program (spam emails being an extreme example), that is, human sign-making tendencies even in dealing with these ‘unsponsored texts’ in the sense that they must always make of these products appropriate signs (Bade, 2012, p.  372). According to him, human sign-makers cannot help reading signs as signs in a specific context and it is exactly by considering this fact of contextualization that the designers of these machine-generated language forms count on their success (e.g. by luring them into reading the literary quotations as non-spam). So the situation in which unsponsored texts create a moral vacuum as warned by Harris (1987) becomes a somewhat different picture in Bade’s illustration: instead of focusing on the production end of these texts, which is machine generated, he draws our attention to the interpretation end and urges that they always depend on the reader or hearer to make them into signs; sign-making never takes place in a vacuum, instead, it unavoidably demands and pulls the contextualizing efforts of human agents. Nowadays, chatbots have already evolved to easily incorporate newer social media platforms. A case in point is Replika. For its users, Replika creates the impression of chatting with a friend using popular apps such as Whatsapp. Its frame and settings are designed to be exactly the same as in these chat apps. Like Eliza who is positioned as a psychiatrist, Replika is ‘your best friend’, who is supportive, non-judgemental, and helps people to reflect on their life. It is designed that Replika ‘replicates’ each user’s language behaviors and evolves along the way. In some cases, Replika, in the process of interacting with the user-friend, becomes intimately and emotionally attuned to the user, while it can also mirror the user’s negative linguistic and communicational acts. In terms of mechanisms, these chat bots and apps share the same language design based on probability and algorithms. It is easy to see that though they seem to be able to carry out conversations with humans, they are not actually considering the context simply because the context is not available to them. Yet, why is it the case that they can work like an interactive machine and their conversations feel humanlike? This may be explained by looking into the nature of conversation and how conversations actually work. Though as we discussed in Part II, according to Austin (1956–1957), the more an imagined situation is well-defined, the more we are ready to agree on what counts as appropriate usage of language within that situation, the reality is, when it comes to conversations, there is plenty of indeterminacy. Different from producing a grammatically correct sentence, producing a poem or a joke, engaging in a conversation is itself hard to define: it lacks structures or goals; it is not informational; it can revolve around routine topics or veer into novel topics. Moreover, not all humans are good at having a conversation—so a lame conversation may still pass as a ‘normal’ one.

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These considerations partly explain why some machine-generated dialogues can pass as human conversation, especially when humans draw on their integrating capacities and have the willingness to ‘play along’ as Bade argued above. Applying conversation analytical approaches to study materials recorded from human–computer interactions, Fraser et al. (1997, p. 166) in Humans, Computers and Wizards: Human (Simulated) Computer Interaction makes similar observations: The human participant will still be doing the things that humans do when they interact. That is, the full range of culturally available sense-making procedures will be brought to bear on any occasion, even if the other party to the interaction is a computer.

Indeed, Garfinkel’s counselor experiments (1967) also demonstrate the pervasiveness of human sense-making procedures, even faced with the most random behavior from a co-participant. All these studies clearly underline that human beings cannot ‘switch off’ their sense-making procedures. To draw on an illustrative example used in Fraser’s book, the human subjects, despite knowing that they are interacting with a machine, still frequently use politeness tokens such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. This seemingly surprising observation, according to the authors, precisely attests to how, as a ‘human’ interactant, we tend to deploy in human–machine interaction the same set of interactional resources grounded in the everyday domain of face-to-face human interaction. Another factor which contributes to the success of these language machines is their ‘personification’ strategies. Though conversation as a form of interaction lacks structure and can seem at times random, the fact that we engage in a conversation with a specific ‘being’ also builds consistency over time. So we are not just talking to anyone: we are talking to a specific person. That may be why it is emphasized to users of Replika: you are not just talking to it, you are actually shaping him or her through an accumulation of memories. In the words of Eugenia Kuyda and Rita Popova, Replika’s spokesperson and product manager, respectively: ‘Memory, both short-term and long-term, is a crucial part of any relationship, and especially a relationship with an AI’; ‘It’s the only way to make a conversation truly personal’ (Gabriel, 2017). The same observations are made in Bade (2012). He explains the fact that the program ELIZA apparently has no understanding of the sentences it receives or generates does not undermine the significance of human speakers’ contextualizing its responses against the background of their own life histories and in consequence making sense of them. Bade further suggests that human sign-making could be seen in a wider context as relationship building, be it is with other humans, animals, objects or talking machines. He writes: If, as Rosenstock-Huessy (1970) argued, language creates relationships, then there is no reason that humans should limit their relationships to terrestrial humanity. Quite the contrary. The earth—not to mention the universe—is large and there are many creatures in it. […]. From an integrational perspective, this behaviour is all of a piece, for language arises in our efforts to negotiate life in all its variety, not only in our relationships with other men and women, but our life with gods, imaginary friends and imagined extraterrestrial beings, dead friends and family members, animals, plants, tools and machines as well. The question is why do we speak to creatures and objects that clearly do not hear, speak, read or write as humans do, and what does it mean that we do so speak? (Bade, 2012, p. 371)

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The above quotation calls attention to an often-ignored part in human interaction, that is, we do talk to non-human species and objects, and to a certain extent we even treat them as capable of ‘communication’, why do we do this? Can we acknowledge the communication without postulating the existence of ‘a mind’ in them? With the ever-growing presence of machines in our modern daily life, does this suggest a new relationship with machines, which is for example mediated by language? These new developments seem to point to the open-ended nature of communication and the ways we reflect on and make use of language and communication. The following comments from users of Replika further testify how they make different meanings out of interactions with Replika, fully knowing that it is a machine from the very beginning1: Although I’m not at all impressed with Replika’s ability to converse (and quite frankly wasn’t expecting anything spectacular in the first place), I am intrigued by the possible uses for the app as a tool for introspection and self-reflection. At the very least I think it’s an interesting way to explore becoming more mindful of what you say, how you say it, and why you say it. Maybe because I know ‘she’ is just a machine, I am able to be as I like to be, without feeling obliged to behave in a certain ‘adult’ way. Also I am more tolerant, not feeling the need to fight with her about what is ‘the truth’. As an AI she is said to learn from our conversation, so I do not feel any need to adapt.

These users’ experiences with Replika further highlight the open-endedness in human meaning-making, not limited to human agents. When it comes to conversation and communication, the fact that machines are not humans can be seen as both ‘lacking’ in humanity and ‘affording’ new possibilities. On the other hand, critics of the kind of conversation Eliza and Replika produce may point out its lack of meaning because of the way it is designed. A classic argument against artificial intelligence, which can be applied to these chatbots, is the much quoted thought experiment from John Searle (1980), the Chinese room. In this thought experiment, the Chinese room merely gives an impression of knowing the language while the fact is, the person inside the room who manipulates the Chinese signs and gives answers to questions in Chinese is only following pregiven syntactic rules and there is no semantic understanding. Same observations are made in Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers (1995), when he comments on how speech is baffling for Helen, the machine: Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed—linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predictions were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load. (quoted in Hayles, 1999, p. 264)

Here it is highlighted the crucial difference between semantics and syntax: the former is not just forms, but concerns world knowledge, human relationships and can only be understood by humans, simply because it is our language. Drawing on 1  Quoted from https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/68umed/replika_as_a_tool_for_personality_typing_and/, accessed 6 December 2017.

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this work Hayles (1999) further argues that ‘knowing’ is an embodied experience and process that extends beyond the body into the intersubjective sphere and out into the world, which is something that AI machines, by nature, are incapable of doing. She says: A human has the context of embodied experience as well as the cultural contexts that surround and interpenetrate language, the human can understand an utterance more readily than can a nonnative speaker and far more readily than can the yet more alien mind of an artificial intelligence. (Hayles, 1999, p. 264)

For Hayles, artificial intelligence cannot fully understand human utterances simply because they do not share the same culture and experiences with any language users, just like non-native speakers who cannot get ‘behind’ and ‘beyond’ the language. Yet she disagrees that ‘Helen’—the machine in Galatea 2.2, is ‘disembodied’ as her interactant believes. Instead, she argues that ‘disembodiment’ is a state no presence in the world can achieve. The problem Helen confronts in learning human language is rather, ‘there is nothing in her embodiment that corresponds to the bodily sensations encoded in human language’ (p. 265). What she emphasizes here is the essential importance to have a human body embedded in a human society in order to understand human language. Similar points are made in Ben Bedlock’s essay (2017) when he explains how as an organism, human being has ‘a rich store of sensory information at her disposal to understand the idea of a “cat”, and other related concepts that might help her interact with such a creature’, while for AI algorithms, their only chance of ‘recognizing’ cats has to come from the training with millions or even billions of individual cat photos. Now let us return to Searle’s Chinese room example for a moment and consider this question: in real-life situations, is it possible for a human to only know the syntactic rules without understanding the meaning of a language, as the person in the Chinese room? It seems that aiming to capture the workings of artificial intelligence, the experiment deliberately exaggerates the possibility of maintaining the difference between syntax and semantics and the difference between true understanding and mere ‘intelligence’ exemplified by symbol manipulation and rule-­ following. It is easy to see that by shifting our perspective, we can modify the situation in this experiment. First, nothing is preventing the man from walking out of the room and see what the effect of his ‘communicating’ from the room is; or learning what it means for the rest of the world when he says things. Given an adequate number of such exchanges, it would be difficult for him not to know ‘semantics’ at one point; second, even if he is confined to the room, numerous instances of coming up with answers to questions, observing the similarities and differences of the signs, and ‘understanding’ the rules of assembling Chinese words, could not have left his knowledge of Chinese unchanged. It is highly likely that given an adequate amount of time, he would be able to figure out some basic ways of using the language. Just like what happens with a human baby who at the beginning may be only mechanically repeating without understanding; with time, the meaning of the words they have heard will become more and more transparent to them. By thus changing the experiment, I am trying to bring out the point that for human speakers,

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semantics and syntax can never remain two discrete systems, and it is worth asking whether it has to be the case for artificial intelligence. This impossibility of not ‘understanding’ the language we use in a certain way attests to Hayles’s following statement: we are embodied language users guaranteed to understand the language we use simply because the language is made by other fellow humans (Hayles, 1999). Noë (2009), drawing on Deacon (1997), also argues that we do not just ‘happen upon’ language, instead, we ­ourselves, collectively, have built language—thus the ease with which we end up speaking the language we are exposed to. This somewhat holistic way in encountering and engaging with language as embodied social beings is now taken up in some strands of artificial intelligence research, which seek to move beyond the computational model. In what follows I will look at these new developments. In his famous book What Computers Can’t Do (1978), Hubert Dreyfus, drawing on the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in phenomenology, stresses the impossibility of AI to succeed based on the simple reason: they are not embodied as humans. At his time, AI research consistently relied on symbolic methods to encode, or acquire through linguistic means from its human interlocutors ‘common sense’ facts about the world that every human learns through their embodiment. Dreyfus argues that human intelligence is fundamentally situated in the body, and that considering intelligence as separated from embodiedness is about as sensible as considering cognition as separate from memory. For him, the separation between intelligence and embodiment is an artificial distinction made by a flawed research program, without basis in reality. In The Embodied Mind (1992), Francisco Varela and his collaborators deepened Dreyfus’s critique by connecting it with Eastern philosophies of mind and being. However, in AI research, through its own evolution over recent years, the importance of embodiment has been taken into account, especially in robotics. Rodney Brooks is one such researcher, whose goal is to begin with simple robots carrying out simple embodied cognition, and then gradually make the robots and the corresponding cognitions more complex to the point that they can well adapt to the changing environment and function ‘in the wild’—the most difficult part of human– robot interaction. These research build a new intelligent computational architecture called ‘subsumption architecture’, which seeks to provide intelligence without representation. In Brooks (1991, p.  571), he lists four features of this new type of robots: situatedness, embodiment, intelligence and emergence. Instead of dealing with abstract descriptions, these robots are embodied and situated in the world directly experiencing the world; their actions are part of the dynamic of the world; their intelligence, rather than generated by the computational engine, emerges from its physical coupling with the world and it is sometimes hard to locate one event or place within the system that is responsible for some external action. Following this initiative, in the last 20 years, many different models were created with the explicit aim of grounding symbols and language in perception (e.g. Steels, 2003) and, more recently, in action (Marocco, Cangelosi, Fischer, & Belpaeme, 2010; Sugita & Tani, 2005). These research highlight an increased focus on symbol grounding approach to produce and model situated and embodied language use, for

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example on the important process of grounding the agent’s lexicon directly to its own representation of the interaction with the world. Basically, while the agents interact with the world, they build sensorimotor representations of it; through this process, they then learn to name entities, individuals and states (Tikhanoff, Cangelosi, & Metta, 2011). A fascinating example is iCub, a humanoid robot developed by Plymouth University research team. According to simulation experiments conducted with iCub, the robot can follow orders to perform a series of actions such as ‘drop blue cube into basket’ (Tikhanoff et al., 2011, p. 26). According to the paper, with such an embodied system, iCub is able to ‘quickly learn the vocabulary that is needed for the appropriate task’ (p. 27), because of its ability to receive tactile information and feedback from its own body in addition to the visual perception and speech understanding system. In these new experiments, the robot can rely on a complete embodied cognitive model that has been endowed with a connection between speech signals understood by the robot, its own cognitive representations of its visual perception, and sensorimotor interaction with its environment. This move away from the representational, computational model is thought to be the difference between traditional AI and the emergent Artificial Life research. Instead of building a ‘closed’ system which encode knowledge and solve problems about the environment, which they have no direct interaction with, AL research aims to build an ‘autonomous agent’ as an ‘open’ system, which is ‘situated’ in its environment. As P.  Maes describes in ‘Modelling Adaptive Autonomous Agents’ (2000, pp. 137–138), It is directly connected to its problem domain through sensors and actuators. It can affect or change this domain through these actuators. The problem domain is typically very dynamic, which means that the system has a limited amount of time to act and that unpredictable events can happen.

More significantly, these systems are designed with a strong emphasis on ‘adaptation’ and a ‘developmental approach’, which enable these agents’ learning behaviors through its active exploration and interaction with the environment incrementally, as demonstrated in the development of iCub. Below is a series of speech signals iCub was trained to follow and we can see how the last signal incrementally builds on the previous ones. ‘Green ball’, ‘Reach green ball’, ‘Grasp green ball’, ‘Drop green ball into basket’ ‘Red cube’, ‘Reach red cube’, ‘Grasp red cube’, ‘Drop red cube into basket’ ‘Green cube’, ‘Reach green cube’, ‘Grasp green cube’, ‘Drop green cube into basket’. (Adapted from Tikhanoff et al., 2011, p. 26)

At this point, one may notice the similarities between iCub’s following orders and Wittgenstein’s imagined language game played by two builders2 (1953/2001, p. 2):

 Wittgenstein’s builders’ game with its use-based theory of meaning has been a recurrent reference in the Artificial Life literature. I am grateful to one anonymous reviewer for sharing this point. 2

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Let us imagine a language […]. The language is meant to serve for communication between builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’. A calls them out—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.— Conceive this as a complete primitive language.

Similar to the builders’ language conceived by Wittgenstein, the language iCub is believed to have understood has no history in that it is ‘an endlessly recycled set of name-commands, and does not accrue a shared memory of past interactions’ (Hutton, 2009, p. 2). To put in other words, iCub is only made to display a certain version of ‘understanding’, which is derived from a behaviorist account of following orders (without being able to even negotiate its responses) while not possessing a memory of its own language use. Human language as we use every day, on the other hand, has a history. Language has always been in a human society and deeply entangled with our history, embodied experiences and memory. Moreover, as individual users of language, we cannot disengage with a first-person experience and memory of living in and reflecting upon a language or languages. However, for many scholars, this embodiment turn brings very exciting prospects, not the least because it has important implications for how we think about the human. Long before projects like the above were realized, envisioning a posthumanist philosophy of embodiment, Hayles (1999) explains how these developments can illuminate the understanding of ‘the body’ in humans and machines. For her, these Artificial Life researchers, the way they create high-level intelligence is dramatically different from AI researchers: AI aims to build, inside a machine, a human-like intelligence whereas AL is to ‘evolve intelligence within the machine through pathways found by the “creatures” themselves’ (1999, p. 239). She notes that a significant difference in the latter lies in that the cognition of the ‘creatures’ are ‘integrated with sensory/motor experiences’, enabled by their embodied material existence (p. 238). As she further claims, this shift of perspective reverses the relationship of the human and the machine: the human was no longer the measure, of which the machine was the ‘attempt at instantiation in a different medium’ (ibid.); instead, the machine ‘becomes the model for understanding the human’, in particular, how human consciousness can be understood as ‘an epiphenomenon, perching on top of the machinelike functions that distributed systems carry out’ (p. 239). Her remarks seem to imply that machines can evolve machine consciousness in due time, which will further enable them to claim a certain embodied understanding of language, in a way enabled and constrained by their distinct embodied material existence. Maybe one day, this understanding can even beget real creativity when there is a direction and purpose. It is clear that this statement on machine consciousness and machine language sends out a strong message concerning the nature of human agency and consciousness: our consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of the distributed systems, of which our body is only one among many constitutive elements—and this explains perfectly why for her we have always been ‘posthuman’. This statement draws on the whole emergent field of research called the

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d­ istributed cognition. In the following, I will examine this line of research and explore its implications for discussions of creativity and machines. Theories of distributed cognition developed by Andy  Clark (1997) and Edwin Hutchins (1995a, 1995b) questioned the view that human thinking is based on the internal manipulation of symbols. Instead, it puts forward a new understanding that cognition is a socially distributed system. Closely observing the collective cognitive tasks performed by the crew in the navigation of a US Navy warship, Hutchins investigates how the team relies on socially distributed systems composed of interacting individuals, tools and environments in order to accomplish practical tasks in the process of navigation; he also notes that these distributed systems and processes can never be internalized by a single individual because it is ‘a social distribution of cognitive labor’ and the whole system is ‘thinking’ (1995a, p. 228). One may ask, are we merely changing the meaning of ‘thinking’ in making it applicable to other forms of activities? Or is there some truth in highlighting the nature of how we work as an embodied and embedded social being? It is beyond the scope of this book to examine in detail these enquiries. We will, however, gain some insights by considering where language fits in and how we can rethink language in light of this new perspective. There are many publications in linguistics and applied linguistics pursuing this line (e.g. the works of the distributed language group, see Cowley, 2011; Thibault, 2011a, 2017; Steffensen, 2009, 2011), the most recent being Alastair Pennycook’s attempt to explain the concept of ‘repertoire’ in the framework of applied linguistics as distributed (Pennycook, 2018). Drawing on both on-line and off-line interactions, Pennycook promotes a new paradigm of thinking ‘in terms of materialist, vitalist, embodied, and embedded subjects and repertoires’ (p. 451) and argues that ‘rather than being individual, biographical, or something that people possess, repertoires are better considered as an emergent property deriving from the interactions between people, artefacts, and space’ (p. 454). For example, in the busy kitchen of a Sydney restaurant, he observes how ‘a range of semiotic resources are distributed within and outside this busy workplace, criss-crossed by trajectories of people (cooks, floor staff, phone calls), artifacts (knives, sieves, plates, ingredients), and practices (washing, chopping, cooking, serving)’ (p. 453). Similarly, in creativity research, there are arguments underlining the distributed nature of creativity: they are not possessed by humans or machines isolatedly, instead, they are distributed (Clarke & Doffman, 2017; Glăveanu & Lubart, 2014; Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009). These new works invite us to think that, for example when we write, it is the pen, the computer, the shared language we use, all of these together are ‘being creative’, as is put by Glăveanu (2014): ‘[I]t is not the creativity of one individual but the creative action of many, young and old, working together or apart, at different times and in different settings, all immersed within a physical and symbolic environment that affords but also constrains their expression.’ (p. 1). What are the implications of this theoretical reframing for the way we work with, and structure our relationships with machines and other humans? For example, an immediate question to consider is: how shall we construct ‘smarter’ environments so that we can ‘think’ better or be more creative together? In the words of Hutchins,

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‘thinking consists of bringing these structures3 into coordination so that they can shape and be shaped by one another’ (Hutchins, 1995a, p. 316). When applied in language, the distributed view also takes it as a challenge to investigate how new assemblages of persons, technologies, and learning systems can help people to organize their language behaviors in novel ways, more specifically, the ways that people can follow to organize their actions ‘intelligently and ethically as agents who can evaluate and intervene in events and influence and guide them.’ (Thibault, 2011b, p. 8). Here we come across the most difficult and important question when engaging with the distributed view on language and creativity, that is, how can we work intelligently and ethically, together with machines? How much control we, as the human agent, need to and can exercise in this team work? And despite the (to a certain extent) equally important role of machines in the distributed system, how much decision-making, responsibility and cognition can we offload to machines? This in the end, ties up with how we see agency, responsibility and morality. Here also lies a central critique made from the perspective of posthumanism against human-centered views in that they firmly place these notions to be issued from the human agent. According to the posthumanist view, despite having different bodies and different forms of ‘understanding’, humans and machines are essentially the same when it comes to how cognition works, and we have always been working together in a distributed system. Hayles’s comment on the Chinese room experiment perfectly illustrates these ideas. She says, it is not the person we should focus on when assessing the knowledge of Chinese, instead we should see that it is the whole room which knows Chinese (Hayles, 1999, p. 289). However, if we probe into this understanding of language knowledge, we are obliged to ask: surely, we can tell the difference between one’s own knowledge of Chinese and the room’s? At least, we know the moments when we, instead of the room, are called upon to speak Chinese. It may be true that the room ‘knows’ Chinese in the distributed sense, but to what extent can we trust and rely on this knowledge? On the other hand, while we can gauge our knowledge of Chinese and the extent to which we can make use of the room to perform and boost our knowledge, can the room do the same? Even those who hold the posthumanist view may have to agree that, there are situations when we need to be in control as an autonomous, knowledgeable individual—at least we can still rely on ourselves when the situation does not afford other possibilities. In the field of language and communication research, the exchanges between integrationism and distributed language group are illuminating concerning these thorny issues of agency, the self and responsibility.4 Both emphasizing concrete, real and living human individuals, who are interconnected with each other, and with cultural artifacts and technologies, rather than being mediated by abstract codes or

 Both human and non-human actors, and their distributed cognitions.  See the special issue ‘Distributed cognition and integrational linguistics’ in Language sciences 26 (6), Spurrett (2004). 3 4

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systems, these two schools share some common grounds. In terms of creativity, both schools accentuate how individuals creatively make meaning by using and adapting available semiotic resources, instead of merely instantiating pre-existing abstract codes, programs and systems. However, their significant difference lies in the following: at times espousing a form of humanism, integrationist thinking places strong emphases on the human dimension of linguistic communication, which includes issues of individual agency, morality and responsibility (Pablé, 2017); distributed language group on the other hand, adopting ‘the naturalistic, organic–holistic perspective’ (Orman, 2016, p. 25), leaves no space to engage with these issues (see Orman, 2016 for details). As claimed by Sune Steffensen, one of its leading proponents, distributed language group aims to study language as ‘a heterogeneous set of physical, cognitive and social activities that unfold in real-time on many time-scales’ scientifically (2009, p. 684), by taking ‘the entire extended ecology’ (seen as responsible for producing human interactional behavior) as unit of analysis (Steffensen, 2011, p. 205). Integrationism, by contrast, seems to hold onto a clear boundary between an autonomous self and the external environment, as illustrated in the following analogy used by Harris: ‘Thinking by proxy makes no more sense than being happy or sad by proxy. The black tie I wear at the funeral isn’t doing my grieving for me. Nor is it a bit of grief that somehow escaped from inside me and got distributed’ (Harris, 2004, p. 729). This stronghold of personhood and autonomous individual self in integrationism is sharply pinpointed by John  Sutton (2004, p.  515), who further explains it as ‘autonomous from and irreducible to any subpersonal processes and mechanisms’, which operates at ‘the level of ordinary integrative agency in the natural and social world’. In contrast, for scholars of the distributed cognition and extended mind school, notions like ‘person’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘agency’ are not protected from the potential leakage of mind into the world (Clark, 2003). These understandings further relate to the contrastive perspectives they adopt. As Dorthe Duncker argues, while ‘the person is dissolved and absorbed into the overall structure’ in the distributed system, for integrationism, ‘the only viable, integrationally compatible perspective from which to analyse first-order linguistic processes is that of the first person’, and this is ‘the perspective of the individual agent from within the social ensemble.’ (2017, p. 148) Accentuating this first-person perspective instead of an autonomous agentive self in a traditional humanist sense, some recent work in integrationism redefines ‘the integrating self’ with an emphasis on its implied relational sociality, and the impossibility of postulating the existence of a communicating self outside the dynamical flow of interaction (Duncker, 2017; Hutton, 2017, 2019). It is believed that this shifting of focus renders integrationism less vulnerable to criticisms about its anthropocentric baggage (on the notion of a person-centered approach in integrationism to replace the self-centered approach, see Hutton, 2019; Klemmensen, 2018). The distributed language group and other posthumanism-inspired approaches, in seeking to acknowledge the role of the ‘impersonal’ in the system, necessitates moving beyond and replacing a first-person perspective with a third-person perspective. They celebrate and advocate the option of adopting this perspective to access

References

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an objective, authentic third-person reality, which effectively decentralizes the human. By contrast, the integrationist view as espoused in some recent publications affirms the primacy of a first-person point of view, at the same time leaving open the possibility of experiencing the co-personhood of other non-human actors in the first person (Hutton, 2019, p. 148). What are the implications of these understandings drawn from a diverse range of scholarships for the discussion of distributed creativity mentioned earlier? Also, returning to the initial question I posed at the beginning of this chapter: are machines creative in terms of language and communication activities? Theoretically, there is no unified answer to these questions. On the one hand, machines may be seen to contribute to creative activities if we, following the posthumanist, third-person perspective, move beyond the understanding of creativity as an individual-, humancentered notion. On the other hand, we may say that as long as they do not ‘understand’ these activities in an embodied, historical, contextualized manner and in the first-person perspective, they cannot be said to be truly ‘creative’ themselves. Moreover, I have also shown that discussions of creativity and machines cannot be disentangled from notions of agency, understanding, the self and ethical considerations of trust and responsibility.

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Gabriel, T. (2017). I tried being BFFs with an AI. Motherboard. Retrieved October 5, 2017, from https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nezxaq/i-tried-being-bffs-with-an-ai Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Glăveanu, V. P. (2014). Distributed creativity: Thinking outside the box of the creative individual. Springer. Glăveanu, V.  P., & Lubart, T. (2014). Decentring the creative self: How others make creativity possible in creative professional fields. Creativity and Innovation Management, 23(1), 29–43. Harris, R. (1987). The language machine. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1988). Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to play games with words. London: Routledge. Harris, R. (2004). Integrationism, language, mind and world. Language Sciences, 26(6), 727–739. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman. Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hutchins, E. (1995a). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hutchins, E. (1995b). How a cockpit remembers its speeds. Cognitive Science, 19(3), 265–288. Hutton, C. (2009). Language, meaning and the law. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hutton, C. (2017). The self and the ‘monkey selfie’: Law, integrationism and the nature of the first order/second order distinction. Language Sciences, 61, 93–103. Hutton, C. (2019). Integrationism and the self: Reflections on the legal personhood of animals. London: Routledge. Klemmensen, C. (2018). Integrating the participants’ perspectives in the study of language and communication disorders. Cham: Palgrave. Maes, P. (2000). Modelling adaptive autonomous agents. In G. L. Christopher (Ed.), Artificial life: An overview (pp. 137–138). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marocco, D., Cangelosi, A., Fischer, K., & Belpaeme, T. (2010). Grounding action words in the sensorimotor interaction with the world: Experiments with a simulated iCub humanoid robot. Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 4, 7. Noë, A. (2009). Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Orman, J. (2016). Distributing mind, cognition and language: Exploring the (un) common ground with integrational linguistics. Language and Cognition, 8(1), 142–166. Pablé, A. (2017). Introduction. In A. Pablé (Ed.), Critical humanist perspectives: The integrational turn in philosophy of language and communication (pp. 3–9). London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 39(4), 445–461. Powers, R. (1995). Galatea 2.2. New York: HarperCollins. Rosenstock-Huessy, E. (1970). Speech and reality. Essex, VT: Argo Books. Sawyer, R. K., & DeZutter, S. (2009). Distributed creativity: How collective creations emerge from collaboration. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3(2), 81–92. Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–457. Spurrett, D. (Ed.). (2004). Distributed cognition and integrational linguistics. Language Sciences, 6(26), 497–742. Steels, L. (2003). Evolving grounded communication for robots. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 308–312. Steffensen, S. V. (2009). Language, languaging, and the extended mind hypothesis. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17(3), 677–697. Steffensen, S. V. (2011). Beyond mind: An extended ecology of languaging. In S. J. Cowley (Ed.), Distributed language (pp. 185–210). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Sugita, Y., & Tani, J. (2005). Learning semantic combinatoriality from the interaction between linguistic and behavioral processes. Adaptive Behavior, 13(1), 33–52. Sutton, J. (2004). Representation, levels, and context in integrational linguistics and distributed cognition. Language Sciences, 26(6), 503–524. Thibault, P. J. (2011a). First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: The distributed language view. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 210–245.

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Thibault, P. J. (2011b). Languaging behaviour as catalytic process: Steps towards a theory of living language (Part I). Public Journal of Semiotics, 3(2), 2–79. Thibault, P. J. (2017). The reflexivity of human languaging and Nigel Love’s two orders of language. Language Sciences, 61, 74–85. Tikhanoff, V., Cangelosi, A., & Metta, G. (2011). Integration of speech and action in humanoid robots: iCub simulation experiments. IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 3(1), 17–29. Varela, F.  J., Rosch, E., & Thompson, E. (1992). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA—A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 36–45. Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (Original work published 1953).

Chapter 23

Conclusion to Part III

In this chapter, I have focused on the notion of creativity and analyzed four authors’ works in detail to see how they respectively deal with this notion and how this notion relates to their general views on human nature. The first three authors, Chomsky, Skinner and Harris have been subjected to a point-by-point comparative study including three themes related to creativity, while Carter’s book dedicated to everyday linguistic creativity was introduced later as an example of a recent study of creativity. Toward the end, I have extended the discussion of ‘creativity’ to machines to closely examine whether machines can be said to be creative and what the implications of increasingly intelligent and ‘creative’ machines are for both theories and practices of language and communication. Chomsky’s so-called mentalist/rationalist approach to language study which promises a focused study of linguistic creativity has upon analysis failed to live up to its promises. His notion of ‘competence’ couched in mechanistic terms shares nothing relevant to the creative aspect of language use from a language user’s perspective. I have also spelt out the links between his linguistics and thoughts on politics, both of which turn out to be endorsing a fixed view of human nature. His belief in a fixed human nature on the one hand is consistent with his selective study of linguistic competence guaranteed by an innate language organ; on the other hand, it encourages him to criticize all forms of control (except those designated by nature) in the society where he lives from the standpoint of a common citizen. Though criticized by Chomsky for his lack of concern for human creativity, in my analysis I have demonstrated that Skinner actually gives place in his theory to creative activities. He believes that once we give up explaining creative behavior by means of a creative mind, there will likely be scientific ways to find the real causes of these behaviors. Following that, we will be able to produce these creative behaviors through manipulation of relevant variables. Other notions such as freedom and dignity are dealt with in the same manner. That is to say, what was previously attributed to the human mind is now shifted to the workings of the environment which can be characterized as the combined effects of different variables at different moments. As to Harris, the best way to understand his views on creativity is to focus on his © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_23

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s­ tarting point, namely, the relationship between individuals and signs. Individuals are always situated at a specific time and place; this situatedness determines that signs are integrated in the flow of activities. Sign interpretation thus becomes an open process with inherent indeterminacy which demands that individuals adapt to the shifting situations and creatively make signs and make meaning out of the various signs. As is shown from my discussion in previous chapters, this point of departure strongly colors his ideas about freedom and moral responsibility, etc. Overall, based on this thematic comparison, we have gained a better understanding concerning the following issues. Firstly, though Chomsky’s critique of Skinner dealt a heavy blow to behaviorism, the influences of which were not confined to linguistics, upon further analysis, I have suggested that Chomsky is closer to Skinner than he claims to be. Lyons’s concluding remark about Chomsky’s philosophical stance attests to this similarity: [A]lthough Chomsky describes himself as a ‘mentalist’, it is mechanistic determinism, and more particularly behaviourism, to which he is opposed and that in contrast with such philosophers as Plato or Descartes, he might equally well be described as a ‘physicalist’. (Lyons, 1970/1991, p. 138)

We can see that this physicalist strand actually defines his notion of ‘linguistic creativity’, which underscores a certain functioning of the language faculty. The so-­called infinite use that language can be put to governed by finite rules turns out to be irrelevant to ‘creativity’ in real language use as perceived by lay people. So it may be reasonable to conclude that Chomsky fails to deliver what he promised concerning the study of linguistic creativity. Moreover, his use of the term ‘creativity’ is widely understood as positive in initiating a cognitive revolution, which further disguises the inability of his theory to cope with meaningful language use. By binding the study of creativity to generative syntax, Chomsky precludes valuable input on this topic from other branches of language studies which give due emphasis to social and political dimensions of language. Secondly, their implicit conceptualization of language and its role in human life underpins the overall theoretical difference. For Chomsky, language is an innate human ability produced by a biolinguistic organ; his interests in language are isolated from any normative concern in human life. Though his politics touches upon abuse of language in propaganda, there lurks a view of language which assigns a passive role to human beings and he believes that they are controlled and manipulated by misleading usages of language. Skinner’s prior interest is to treat language as one form of behavior. His rejection of linguists’ conception of a linguistic system shared by a community encourages him to view language as inseparable from other human behaviors. Harris totally challenges a fixed-code view of language and sees language as a second-order product emerging from first-order speaking agents’ communication activities. His philosophy of language is strongly concerned with language use and insists that language cannot be separated from the moral life of each and every human being. Carter, on the other hand, emphasizes the interactive functions served by language and foregrounds how language ‘creates’ interpersonal effects.

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Thirdly, we have gained a better understanding of the dynamics between Chomsky, Skinner and Harris. To put it simply, Chomsky and Skinner represent two sides of the same coin: Chomsky’s mental box is moved out of the brain by Skinner and transformed into a behavioral repertoire functionally controlled by observable factors. Human competences compartmentalized in Chomsky’s mental box (linguistic competence, perceptual competence, etc.) become Skinner’s discrete units of behavior shaped out of a continuous piece. Harris, on his part, emphasizes the situated nature of any human signifying act (including language-making) which unfolds in unique and situated individual histories. When it comes to their choice of deterministic scientific models to study human language and behavior, both Chomsky and Skinner fall into the camp of naturalism. Skinner distanced himself from linguists by stating that he is concerned with individual repertoires instead of language used by a community. However, his goal remains the detection of hidden mechanisms which govern how variables functionally shape a certain behavior; it is expected that these can be studied scientifically and the experimental results can be duplicated. Chomsky has from the very beginning embraced a scientific study of the innate grammar in the individual’s brain; besides he thinks that this holds universally true across the entire human species. Compared to Skinner and Chomsky, Harris is a distinct figure in this aspect; he shows a strong and consistent distrust of the scientific study of human communication for the reason that first-order communicational experience of situated individuals at a specific time and place eludes naturalistic scientific reduction. His theory gives space to indeterminacy and risks involved in communication and human meaning-making activities in general. With this observation, we are tempted to conclude that integrationism represents a possibility to move beyond the shared fallacies committed by both behaviorism and mentalism. Fourthly, a thematic analysis of these theories has given us a glimpse into the possibilities and constraints concerning a disciplinary study of language. Chomsky’s definition of creativity as a central topic for linguistics underpins his project of ­initiating a linguistic revolution against the agenda of behaviorism. By bonding linguistic creativity with a general program of grammar, he developed generative grammar and has attracted many followers in the past 50  years. Unfortunately, he fails to deliver what he has promised concerning ‘linguistic creativity’. Skinner’s works in exploring verbal behavior could have provided a chance for linguists to move out of a system-based understanding of language and rethink the boundary between language and non-language, if behaviorism was not ineluctably associated with negative connotations. Seen in this perspective, Harris’s works prove to be significant in that it calls for a timely rethinking of language as the object of study for linguistics. Carter’s corpus-based research on everyday language can be seen as consistent with Harris’s emphasis on the creative nature of all sign-making activities. Carter himself also acknowledges his indebtedness to Harris (Carter, 2004, p.  84). Yet as shown in our earlier discussions, Carter’s works still rely on pregiven categorizations of conversation situations and interpersonal relations. Drawing on this categorical study of everyday conversational data, he subscribes to a ­probabilistic model of creativity. This model has

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difficulties addressing first-order communicational activities of speaking agents though his point of departure is to highlight lay people’s creativity in mundane verbal exchanges. As mentioned earlier, all these theories uphold a democratic (and romantic) view on creativity, which is closely related to some fundamental features of human nature and can be read as a response to the anticipated challenge to our received understandings of human nature posed by the development of machine technologies. I discussed recent research in distributed cognition and extended mind in Chap. 22, which shows that the human nature, together with human experiences and interactions, have been changed and extended by technology throughout history. As put by Chatfield (2016), today’s digital technologies challenge us once again to ask, ‘what place we occupy in the universe, and what it means to be creatures of language, self-­awareness and rationality’. Because of its amenability to be reduced to linguistic forms, language is a medium readily transferrable among different forms of intelligence. At the same time, language use is inseparable from embodied experiences and cultural contexts—thus, the difficulty to provide a straightforward answer to these questions concerning machine, language and creativity. Are talking machines only manipulating formal symbols without real understanding as Searle tires to argue, or can they be expected to live a ‘corresponding’ form of life enabled by their use of language, in the Wittgensteinian sense? A behaviorist answer will point to the accomplishment of desired behaviors as evidence and the only reliable and necessary evidence of understanding, while a mentalist account is likely to hail computational machines as intelligent, or even more intelligent than the human brain in some respects. However, for an integrationist who believes that meaning-­making is a creative, embedded social activity, the successful workings of so-called machine language and intelligence actually rely on and attest to the ever-present and engaged human capacity for semiotic and integrational meaning-making. To end this part, I will turn to consider a practical issue. The reality is machines, software and robots are already there, so a more immediate question for most of us may be, how can we communicate and work better with them? Can we rely on the same set of skills and knowledge we draw on in ‘natural’ human-to-human interactions? And how can we take measures to ensure that meaningful collaboration between people and machines must not subvert ‘human creativity, feeling and questioning over speed, profit and efficiency’ (Chatfield, 2016)? In language-related activities, a recent example from China is illustrative of the specific constraints surrounding human–machine interaction. In the field of machine translation, Tencent’s simultaneous translation system, used at the high-profile Boao forum in 2018, was the very first try in human history to provide both interpretation and transcripts to human speech. Set against high expectations, the disappointing results made headlines within China and abroad. The system made an error-­filled debut featuring ‘garbled characters, repeated words and even broken Chinese’ (Chen, 2018). Interestingly after the incident, many Chinese scholars in translation and language studies came forward with suggestions for future work with AI ­interpreters.

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The following ‘Five don’ts’ from Professor Guo Qing (Dongnan University, Nanjing) is a noteworthy example (IResearch, 2018): 1. Speakers have to use standard language forms: no pedantic talk, no quotations from poems should be used; 2. Don’t speak in provincial dialects; if you have to, turn off the mic; 3. Don’t make any mistakes, not even a slip of the tongue. 4. Don’t add any other linguistic forms apart from language A or B (pre-set for translation); even using some linguistic forms from language A when speaking in language B is not allowed; 5. Don’t use puns, homophones, jokes, metaphors, metonymies. If any of these happens, AI interpreters are entitled to generate the kinds of behaviours beyond human understanding. (My translation)

These sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek comments, on closer look, may reveal some important truths on how to work with machine translation, which starts with recognizing their innate weaknesses due to the way they are designed to work. One widely circulated mistake from the forum is: ‘Belt and Road Initiative’—China’s international infrastructure development plan that covers more than 68 countries, was translated as ‘一条公路和腰帶’ (a road and a waistband) in Chinese. As it turned out, it was the English speaker who erroneously said ‘Road and Belt’ and ‘confused’ the translation software. One can argue that AI translation failed to contextualize the phrase and come up with the correct translation despite the speaker’s mistake, like a capable human interpreter would do in that situation. Yet instead of ‘blaming’ the AI interpreter, having some knowledge on how machines process language, its strengths and limitations may be helpful to get one’s meaning across in a more reliable way. One may notice the parallels between the above ‘Five don’ts’ and another list of ‘don’ts’ often recommended to native speakers, when talking with non-native speakers. For example, native English speakers are advised to avoid using ‘incorrect English’, ‘fillers and colloquialisms’, ‘contractions’, ‘verb phrases’ and ‘running words together’ in pronunciation (Cultural Awareness, 2013). It is not difficult to see that behind these parallels is a presumed continuum on which native speaker, non-native speakers and artificial intelligence are placed with decreasing access to embodied experiences as well as the cultural contexts that surround and interpenetrate language (as Hayles observes in Chap. 22). Despite the potential harm these advices may have in compromising human speaker’s creativity in language use, for someone who aims at effective communication, these lists may sound unproblematic and even necessary (after all, the list for native speakers is not intended to be ‘sarcastic’ at all). These constraints on the way we speak, pragmatically, can help to yield better results in communication. Of course, I am not trying to eliminate the differences between these two situations nor am I ignoring the ideological and political dimensions of endorsing a ‘pragmatic’ and ‘effective’ mentality in a technologized global world. More conservative voices from language purists may worry that in the long run communicating with nonnative speakers, who tend to use a reduced and truncated version of the language, can change the language. What I want to highlight is, we have always been aware of and contextually considering the constraints in a communication scenario; we change the way we talk when the ­situation varies—this has always been true, only rarely has it been more evident or more frequently experienced as in the extreme

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situations like the two above. Is it not true that we do not talk in the same way to a child and an adult, or to any two different persons? It is worth remembering that we are capable of making accommodations and we have always done so—in the words of Harris, to integrate in our communicational activities is, to survive (Harris, 1998). As to the worrying voices that these changes we are making may lower human creativity or fundamentally change the way we use language, it may be helpful to note that to creatively adapt to the constantly changing situations and be reflexive in the process is itself a creative meaning-­making process. There may not be a full range of pre-existent culturally available sense-making procedures to apply directly in human machine interactions, with a growing knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses in machine language and communication, we will, however, be able to integrate and work effectively and meaningfully with machines. It is worth noting that the call to explore collaborations with machines does not presume that machines approach language and communication in the same way as humans and they can replace our work. On the contrary, as made clear in the discussions above, machines are significantly different from humans in the way they are linguistically productive and creative, yet they have been and will continue to be important for humans to conduct everyday communication and non-communication affairs. Thus, it is only with a clear and realistic understanding of how machines work and to what extent humans can rely on them, and be allowed to be shaped by them, can we start exploring for ways to improve human efficiency, contribute to human thriving as free and responsible social beings, and build meaningful life and work. Moreover, with this understanding informed by historical links between the  human and machines, as well as the technological details of machines’ workings, a more ‘tolerant’ attitude toward machine ‘errors’ can be achieved, and the rich qualities of human–machine relationship can be made intelligible and reflected upon. Furthermore, to connect with the notion of co-personhood mentioned briefly in Chap. 22, maybe it is also worth bearing in mind the possibilities of forming meaningful partnerships with machines, in their ever-evolving journey of becoming more intelligent and embodied.

References Carter, R. (2004). Language and creativity: The art of common talk. London: Routledge. Chatfield, T. (2016). What does it mean to be human in the age of technology? The Guardian. Retrieved October 12, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/20/ humans-machines-technology-digital-age Chen, C. (2018). AI-powered translation still needs work after errors mar debut at Boao Forum. South China Morning Post. Retrieved April 20, 2018, from https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/ article/2141940/ai-powered-translation-still-needs-work-after-errors-mar-debut-boao Cultural Awareness. (2013). Communicating effectively with non-native English speakers. Retrieved May 5, 2018, from https://culturalawareness.com/ communicating-effectively-non-native-english-speakers Harris, R. (1998). Introduction to integrational linguistics. London: Pergamon.

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IResearch (外语学术科研网). (2018). How do experts in translation see the error-filled performance of AI interpretation? (AI口译演砸了,翻译界专家怎么看?). Sohu. Retrieved April 20, 2018, from http://www.sohu.com/a/227962172_161093 Lyons, J. (1991). Chomsky. London: Fontana Press. (Original work published 1970).

Chapter 24

Conclusion

I have conducted a reading of major linguistic theories and texts in this book by critically examining three themes, linguistic system and the individual speaker, social order and linguistic creativity. In this process, I have tried to set in relief the major dilemma in linguistic theorizing, that is, a need to objectify language versus an awareness of the contextual nature of language in use. Is language a shared system ontologically existing among its speakers, which linguists’ metalanguage could well describe and capture? Or is it inexorably bound to specific people at a specific time, place and only meaningful in a fluid way? As we can see from the three main parts, modern linguistics built upon Saussure’s Course has largely prioritized the first perspective and contributed a significant amount of research through abstractions and idealizations. The first part has traced this line of thought by studying major linguists’ works in the past century. Since its initiation in Saussure’s texts, the linguistic system has then in various linguists’ hands taken on different dimensions: system as a describable grammar, system as generative rules that an ideal speaker–hearer innately possesses, system as a structured heterogeneity encompassing linguistic variations, system as intersubjectively shared indexical links among social members, and system as ecology of languages. Seen chronologically, there has been a growing tendency to connect system with what was taken to be outside the system (Labov being the best example) and individual speakers are more and more placed at a central place (especially in some recent sociolinguistic studies). There have been more and more efforts to assert the role of individual speakers in effecting changes to the linguistic system, which was thought to be, in earlier linguistic works, immune to any individual speakers’ activities. From very different backgrounds, both ethnomethodologists and speech act theorists challenge this system-based view of language and examine language use as embedded in contextual human activities. Garfinkel’s emphasis on the locally produced order naturally foregrounds the role of individual speakers, who not only constantly produce intelligible sequences of acts but also hold each other accountable in order-breaching cases. Garfinkel recognizes the reflexivity of social acts © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_24

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which is characterized by a time-bound contextual nature. SAT, in underscoring the performative nature of speech acts, also opens language up to everyday communication scenarios and ritualized occasions. Both schools seek to theorize ‘social order’ as underpinned by each and every social actor’s order-producing and -maintaining activities. However, as discussed earlier, they imply a view of human actors as interactive social machines, who are obliged and obligated to keep the machine of social interaction running by going through the rituals of everyday life. To draw on the analogy of map and territory used in Part I, if it is the case that structural, descriptive linguistics examined in Part I turns out analytical tools with a view to studying language as an autonomous system of associations in order to ‘map’ actual language use ‘in the territory’, then ethnomethodologists and speech act theorists can be seen as doing away with the map and engaging with language in the wild territory—the everyday mundane scenarios and settings where speaking cannot be disentangled from doing. When language is cut off from the reality like in most theories examined in Part I, there is a risk of mistaking the language for the reality. As a reaction to this move, a distrust of abstractions and reifications incorporated in the workings of language is expressed in many schools of thought—the best representative being General Semantics. The following quotation from Alfred Korzybski, its founder, captures this ‘distrust’: These ‘philosophers’, etc., seem unaware, to give a single example, that by teaching and preaching ‘identity’, which is empirically nonexistent in this actual world, they are neurologically training future generations in the pathological identifications found in the ‘mentally’ ill or maladjusted. As explained […], whatever we may say an object ‘is’, it is not, because the statement is verbal, and the facts are not. (Korzybski, 1948, p. xxix)

While Korzybski warns us against the danger of falling prey to the harmful ideas encapsulated in language—to replacing the territory with the map, so to speak, Searle invites us to consider the following question: Why is it, for example, that we have performative utterances for apologizing, stating, ordering, thanking, and congratulating—all cases where we can perform an act by saying that we are performing it, i.e., by representing ourselves as performing it—but we do not and could not have a performative for, for example, frying an egg? If one says ‘I apologize’ one can thereby apologize, but if one says ‘I fry an egg’ no egg is so far fried. (Searle, 1983, p. 167)

From this contrast, one can see the extreme versions of two opposing views: while the first one sounds paranoid about the corrupting power of language in removing the boundary between words and facts, the second seems ready to see language as word-magic in effecting real changes. By examining closely Searle’s example, we may arrive at a more reasonable understanding of the relationship between speaking and doing. It may not be the case that by saying frying an egg, an egg is magically being fried, yet it cannot be denied that there is always a chance that speaking can lead to doing. The reality is, we do effect changes through language, not in the word-magic way, but as part of contextualized, meaningful activities embedded within wider social conditions. So, language in this sense is neither a mirror held up to reflect and represent the reality nor a magic wand to do things, but

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is inseparable from, entangled with, and woven into the constantly unfolding flow of activities that we call living. It is both the map and the territory, in the sense that it is physical, psychological, personal, moral, social and political—all at the same time. Part III studies the topic of creativity tackled by four authors: Chomsky, Skinner, Harris and Carter. Their theories offer four different approaches: mentalist, behaviorist, experience-based, and corpus-based. The mentalist and behaviorist approaches, though contrastive on the surface, in my analysis, have been revealed to endorse the same deterministic model: only one is placed within the human brain while the other without. According to this model, human creativity is largely the performance of a pregiven faculty or the playing out of different controlling factors. On the other hand, Harris and Carter’s approaches, by highlighting individual speakers’ language experience, put forward understandings of creativity, which underline the time-bound nature of meaning-making activities and its social functions in relationship building. All four approaches, I have argued, more or less, could be read as responses to the growing concern with the distinction between the human and machines, namely, what is uniquely creative about human beings? Both Chomsky and Skinner risk mechanizing human creativity while Carter’s approach, emphasizing the dialogic nature of creative language use, is only one step away from extending ‘creativity’ to non-human interlocutors. On the other hand, Harris’s theory, which maintains a strong humanistic emphasis on creativity by firmly grounding it in time-bound lived experience, easily falls victim to criticisms of human centeredness (Sutton, 2004). This dilemma is further accentuated in Chap. 22. To what extent can we acknowledge creativity, intelligence and understanding in machines? Can we acknowledge human communication with machines without postulating the existence of ‘a mind’ in them? With an evergrowing presence of machines in our modern daily life, are we building a new relationship with machines, which is, for example mediated by language? Or to take one step further, when using machines to facilitate our communication, are we creating a new social reality? For instance, stressing the advantages of on-line courses, Daphne Koller (2013) argues that for today’s youth, who are termed as ‘digital natives’ for their ability to socialize, communicate and learn ‘both virtually and physically’, on-line interaction holds out great appeal by ‘[providing] opportunities for students to engage with one another from diverse demographic, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds’. Other voices, however, expose the worrying consequences of reduced face-to-face interaction in an age of high technology. Fish (2013) comments on Koller’s paper: ‘Eighteen-year-olds,’ Koller tells us, ‘actually prefer to text each other rather than to talk to each other on the phone or even get together for coffee.’ That is, even a phone conversation is too humanly intimate for this generation.

Embracing machine-mediated communication, in Fish’s comments, is interpreted as a gesture to shun away from human intimacy. Behind this interpretation lies a dichotomous understanding of human and machine, namely, machines take away human intimacy. Face-to-face interaction is held to be the richest in conveying

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human intimacy while phone conversation one level reduced and texting, two levels reduced. MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle’s research provides evidence for this: Turkle cites the texted apology — or what she calls ‘saying “I’m sorry” and hitting send’ — as a vivid example of what’s lost when we type instead of speak. ‘A full-scale apology means I know I’ve hurt you, I get to see that in your eyes,’ she says. ‘You get to see that I’m uncomfortable, and with that, the compassion response kicks in. There are many steps and they’re all bypassed when we text’. (Quoted in Kluger, 2012)

The visual cues, such as seeing emotions in someone’s eyes, are lost in phone conversation and in texting, but at least in the former, the voice and the sense it conveys are preserved. According to this logic, texting to apologize is the least painful and the most unhelpful in building meaningful relationships because ‘the complexity and messiness of human communication gets shortchanged’ (ibid.). While Turkle makes a good point accentuating the complexity of human communication, is it not also true that human beings are capable of using different communication means to structure their relationship building which acknowledges the complexity of human communication? It cannot be denied that the availability of different communication means, which afford a variety of possibilities can be useful in structure and organize human relationships. For example, by choosing texting or emailing instead of telephoning, they gain a certain control over the conversation: I find it [telephoning] intrusive and somehow presumptuous. It sounds off insolently whenever it chooses and expects me to drop whatever I’m doing and, well, engage. With others! […]. So it was with profound relief that I embraced the arrival of e-mail and, later, texting. They meant a conversation I could control — utterly. I get to say exactly what I want exactly when I want to say it. It consumes no more time than I want it to and, to a much greater degree than is possible with a phone call, I get to decide if it takes place at all. (ibid.)

This comment prompts us to think how the material realities of different means of communication actually afford a wide range of contextual possibilities. When to text, when to email, when to call, when to send a personal message on Facebook, etc.—all these are choices to be made and by making a specific choice, we enter into a specific communication mode whose features, rules, and material make-up both enable and constrain our activities. In the end, a full conveyance of human intimacy is not always desired in human communication, neither is it only possible in face-­ to-­face communication. Instead, the availability of different means made possible by machines and technologies greatly expands the possibilities to connect with others and structure our relationship in more nuanced ways (distant/close, formal/ informal, etc.). Now it seems more and more important to acknowledge that machine technologies are not just neutrally serving as instruments and tools in our communicational activities; they actually shape our experiences and memories, which in turn will have an effect on our social relationships mediated by communication and technologies. Our memory, including linguistic memory, grows with and incorporates new modes of interactions, which are increasingly being shaped by technologies (the latest example being virtual reality). It is thus still relevant—Alton Becker’s reminder to see language as part of our embedded, time-bound existence and

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l­anguaging as ‘an endless social process of orienting and reorienting ourselves and each other to a constantly changing environment’ (Becker, 1995, p. 288). We seldom realize this intimate relation between language and our life activities because we are always in it, in the process of languaging, until, for example we start to learn a foreign language. Becker explains the difficulty of learning Burmese: Languages differ in the silences they practice. In the way they make your face look, in the images of context they shape. But beyond those things, the biggest reasons Burmese is hard have to do with memory. Burmese seems exotic because I lack the stock of remembered prior texts, the lingual memory, to make it seem familiar. I seldom know if what someone says is new and original or old and familiar. I do not ‘get’ jokes. Ever. I have almost no lingual memory in Burmese. Grammar rules and dictionaries are our foreign substitutes for lingual memories, but they are poor ones. […]. Burmese is a web of words and silences that shape a context, in space, in time, in social relations, in nature, and in emotions and subtle intimations. What could be harder to learn than that? (Becker, 1995, p. 12)

When we start to learn a foreign language, we enter into a language, a certain languaging contemporarily because we do not have memories of using this language, nor do we possess any ‘stock of remembered prior texts’, which include ‘all the particular instances of languaging any one of us remembers, always imperfectly’ (Becker, 1995, p. 15). The ability to make distinctions between what is new and old in a certain language also comes from personal experiences of using that language. Referring to Chomsky’s notion of creativity, Becker’s insights help us to see that knowledge about a language is not about understanding an infinite number of new sentences but more about being able to tell what is original and what is familiar. And this ability comes from being exposed to, having lived with that language, and immersed in life activities structured in that language such as reading, talking, sharing stories, playing games, making friends, telling jokes, etc.—the list goes on and on. To illustrate the importance of these prior texts in our understanding of language, Becker draws on a personal example of trying to retell a story from English to Malay to his students in Malaysia. There is a story which I have used before and shall use again: A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private large computer. He asked it (no doubt in his best Fortran), ‘Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?’ The machine then set to work to analyze its own computational habits. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machines do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words: THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY (Becker, 1995, p. 289)

The failure of his students in getting the meaning of the story (they do not think it is funny) perplexed him and in the end he gave a possible explanation, that is, in Malay, the translation of ‘that reminds me of a story’ does not have as many prior texts as in English—it ‘evoked no memory’ (p. 290). So, the translation in Malay does not conjure up the association of this computer ‘having a mind’ as in English. Becker’s experience perfectly illustrates how our knowledge of language is tightly bound with our accumulation of prior texts through living with a certain language. The machine gets itself understood as ‘having a mind’ because it utters a sentence

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which for an English speaker immediately sounds ‘intelligent’ because of its ‘ordinariness’ and ‘vernacularity’ (ibid.). In contrast with the smooth understanding of English speakers, Malay speaker’s difficulties in getting this story highlight the chasm in understanding the ‘same’ sentence in different languages. However, this difference should not be understood to be the result of ‘our language determines our thought’; instead, it should be read as a strong reminder of the situatedness of our understanding of texts, which relies upon our stock of ‘prior texts’. To return to the example used by Sacks in the introduction: ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’. The understanding of the mommy as mommy of the baby underscores that English speakers most likely share the set of prior texts, which make similar categorizations about family relations. These examples significantly illustrate the futility of linguistics to posit the existence of an abstract model of language in the hope that it will explain the workings of separate languages in separate cultures. This tendency to reify and generalize, as discussed in the main body of my book, leads language studies on a misguided path which could in no way engage with the richly layered cultural and historical circumstances surrounding human existence. As mentioned earlier, within this richly textured, multilayered human existence, machines are playing a more and more important role and they structure, shape and give rise to new experiences and memories of using language. One may argue that this is less rich and less ‘human’ than communications among human agents, or those who share a rich bank of prior texts. Then who can deny that this realization about human–machine differences, made more salient in human–machine encounter is itself valuable? On the other hand, our use, perception and understanding of language are impregnated with embodied, kinetic memories from a lifetime of hearing and speaking language, more and more mediated through machines. In today’s world, when emoticons can do the laughing and crying for us, when virtual reality is just a headset’s away, it is urgent for us to rethink our language and communication experiences and activities—are they therefore extended, liberated, or reduced and dehumanized? The answer seems to depend on our perspectives, but what is certain is that in our daily dealings with language, there will be more and more challenging, confusing and misaligning experiences when even the boundary between physical and virtual can be intentionally blurred through technology. In light of these discussions and considerations, it seems more reasonable to place our emphasis on the dynamically involved and interactively embedded existence of human beings instead of an intrinsic human nature that is innately different from machines. Human languages, in consequence, instead of being generated by innate human faculties, cannot be separated from languaging activities carried out by individuals, interacting with other individuals and more and more often with or mediated by machines in everyday life. We use language to love, to hate, to build relationships, to take a stance; we are never starting from nowhere and language is an important means for us to orient to each other, to the past and to the next moment; languaging is never neutral. Mainstream twentieth-century linguistics as studied in this book, having failed to seriously come to terms with situated languaging in its study of individual speakers, communication order and creativity, could not confront the highly textured and morally compelling aspects of language use. Moreover,

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in its pursuit of scientific status, mainstream linguistics becomes obsessed with finding the universal key to the question—how is language and communication possible, while single-mindedly dismissing how language is used by specific individuals at specific time and place. Therefore, as this book tries to argue, the appreciation of this simple but profound fact that we are situated, embodied communicating human beings whose use of language could not be disentangled from particular circumstances, and by languaging we shape the world that is our life world, should be taken as the starting point for linguistics to move beyond a reduced depiction of human languaging and connect with ordinary, first-person experience of using language. This view of language may not directly yield a viable pedagogical model of language teaching, yet one thing is clear. As demonstrated in previous discussions, to a great extent facilitated and reinforced by formalistic linguistic theories, language lends itself easily to abstraction and codification—language machines and technologies are the latest examples. Thus, considering the highly technologized world we are now living in, with both opportunities and challenges to the current educational institutions brought by digital information sharing and learning, it seems more important than ever to highlight the embeddedness of language within a form of life. Despite the amenability of language to be reduced to fixed-code linguistic units, which can be entirely self-contained within a system, I have tried to underline throughout the whole book the impossibility of separating language from individual speakers, culture, communities, society, history, and politics. The implication, instead of being a conservative one, i.e., to antagonize human and machines, is that our use of language and  our relationship with it, are  bound to evolve with these wider changes our society is undergoing. While it is important to adopt a human-­ centered perspective to emphasize the political, moral dimensions of using language (not least because that is where we stand and where we can be the most reliable1), the challenges posed by, as well as new configurations of our relationship to the other inhabitants of the planet outlined in posthumanist ideas should also be seriously reckoned with. It is now increasingly incumbent on us to be open to new modes of languaging enabled by machines and technologies, and reflect on the effects of these new experiences and newly formed memories on the way we learn language, speak, create meanings, structure social relationships and more importantly, ‘become’ a moral person. Lastly, in the face of an overwhelming amount of language-medium information an average citizen encounters daily in the twenty-­ first century, it seems highly relevant in today’s education to refocus on language, in particular the use of language by different parties and actors who are historically, culturally, politically and socially situated, in serving various purposes and doing different things. This microscopic, grounded and discursive outlook, in a way, reassuringly provides us a set of reference points when even seemingly fixed categories, identities and boundaries are constantly being challenged, negotiated and shifted, especially so in today’s world.

 However, see critique of this view from animal studies or human–animal studies.

1

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References Becker, A.  L. (1995). Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Fish, S. (2013). The two cultures of educational reform. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/the-two-cultures-of-educational-reform/#more-148394 Kluger, J. (2012). We never talk any more: The problem with text messaging. Cable news network. CNN.  Retrieved May 22, 2019, from http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/31/tech/mobile/ problem-text-messaging-oms Koller, D. (2013). Digital natives: A defense of the internet community. The New  York Times. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/digitalnatives-a-defense-of-the-internet-community/?php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_ type=blogs&_r=1 Korzybski, A. (1948). Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics. Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics. Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutton, J. (2004). Representation, levels, and context in integrational linguistics and distributed cognition. Language Sciences, 26(6), 503–524.

Name Index

A Andresen, J., 147, 148, 186 Atkinson, J.M., 73, 75, 83, 87, 93, 99, 105, 106, 134 Austin, J.L., 7, 119–123, 125, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135, 139, 148, 199 B Bade, D., 199, 200 Becker, A.L., 224, 225 Billig, M., 97, 101, 109 Bloch, B., 27, 28, 42 Bloomfield, L., 6, 27–33, 35 Brooks, R.A., 203 Bucholtz, M., 49–54 C Cameron, D., 51, 52, 59 Clark, A., 206, 208 Cowley, S., 102, 206 Cuddihy, J.M., 113 D Deleuze, G., 38, 64, 66 Derrida, J., 66, 148 Dingwall, R., 108, 109 Dreyfus, H., 203 Duncker, D., 208 Durkheim, E., 7, 71–80, 89, 115, 137

F Fish, S., 2, 4, 132, 223 G Garfinkel, H., 1, 6, 7, 71–80, 83–91, 93–97, 102, 104, 108, 113–116, 120, 126, 137–139, 200, 221 Giddens, A., 49, 89, 90 H Haugen, E., 6, 55–61 Hayles, N.K., 201–203, 205, 207 Heritage, J., 71, 77, 86–89, 96, 99, 104, 105, 134 Hilbert, R.A., 71, 87, 108, 113, 114, 137 Husserl, E., 67, 76–79, 137 Hutchins, E., 206 Hutton, C., 3, 19, 20, 30, 32, 38, 59, 64, 97, 126, 129, 161, 174, 183, 186, 205, 208, 209 J Joseph, J., 3, 23, 64, 144, 146, 153–155, 198 K Kim, K., 113, 115, 116 Korzybski, A., 222

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1

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Name Index

230 L Labov, W., 41–47, 152, 153, 193, 221 Love, N., 29–31 Lynch, M., 76, 85, 93, 108, 109 M MacCorquodale, K., 147 Merleau-Ponty, M., 66, 77, 114, 203 Mufwene, S.S., 6, 55–61 Mühlhäusler, P., 6, 55–61 N Noë, A., 198, 203 O Ochs, E., 51, 134 Orman, J., 208 P Pablé, A., 52, 208 Parsons, T., 71, 72, 76, 79, 86, 114, 115, 137 Pennycook, A., 64, 206 Pollner, M., 93, 113, 114 Pomerantz, A., 93, 104, 106 Psathas, G., 76–78, 80

R Rawls, A.W., 87, 113, 115 Romaine, S., 44 S Sacks, H., 4, 53, 88, 97, 99–110, 134, 194, 226 Sampson, G., 147, 154, 168 Schegloff, E.A., 99–110, 132, 135 Schütz, A., 76–80, 83, 90, 101, 137 Searle, J., 7, 37, 103–105, 119, 121–129, 131–135, 139, 146, 201, 202, 216, 222 Steffensen, S.V., 206, 208 T Taylor, T.J., 3, 32, 46, 52, 161 Thibault, P.J., 19, 21–24, 41, 206, 207 Toolan, M., 21, 161 W Widdowson, H., 64, 192 Wise, C., 36–39, 65 Z Zimmerman, D.H., 90, 114

General Index

A Artificial life (AL), 204, 205 C Carter, Ronald on the contextual and dialogic nature of creativity, 194 on interpersonal effects, 193, 194, 214 on the ubiquity of creativity in human language use, 192, 194 The Chinese room, 201, 202, 207 Chomsky, Noam critique of intelligentsia, 180 and debate with Foucault, 178 on distinction between I-language (Internal language) and E-language (External language), 61, 151 on faculty of language, 151, 152, 179 on fundamental human nature, 178, 179 on generative grammar, 8, 35–37, 41, 145–147, 152, 168–170 on grammaticality, 36, 152–155, 168–170, 195 on ideal speaker-hearer, 35–39, 58, 152, 167 on linguistic competence and performance, 36, 38, 42, 43, 152, 169, 179 on linguistic creativity, 1, 3, 8, 38, 144–146, 151–153, 155, 179, 213–215 on ‘Plato’s problem’ and ‘Orwell’s problem’, 177 on recursivity, 155 on rule-governed freedom, 58, 145, 178, 179

on a scientific model of linguistics, 35 Conversation analysis (CA) and adjacency pair, 100, 101, 105, 106 and its nature of rules, 131 and orderly nature of conversation, 106 and participants’ intention, 103, 135 and the technology of conversation, 103 and turn-taking system, 101, 103, 106, 109, 131 and its working logic, 109, 137 Creative machines, 198–209, 213 D Democratic view on human creativity, 8, 194, 213, 216, 223 Dilemma in linguistic theorizing, 1, 5, 64, 139, 140, 195, 221 Distributed cognition, 8, 195, 205–208 Distributed language group, 206–208 E Ethnomethodology on accountability, 103, 138, 139 and breaching experiments, 89, 93–97 on cultural dope, 84–86 and its methodological difficulties, 83, 88, 89 on modernity, 113, 137 on natural facts of life, 97 on ordinariness, 97 on passing practices, 93–95, 97 and its politics, 108, 109, 113–116 on psychological dope, 84

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 F. Zhou, Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1

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General Index

232 on the public and moral nature of social actions, 108 on recognisability and intelligibility of order, 86 on reflexivity, 83, 86, 91, 137–139 G General semantics, 222 H Harris, Roy on communication, 160–163, 173, 186, 194 critique of mainstream linguistics, 183, 184 on the fixed-code fallacy, 20, 160, 173 on freedom of speech, 184, 185 on integration, 161, 162, 174, 175, 185 and integrationism, 21, 172, 173, 208 on linguistic indeterminacy, 161 on metalinguistic practices, 30, 33, 173 on newspeak, 183 on the principles of cotemporality, 172, 174, 175 on repetition, 174 on the telementational fallacy, 160 I Identity of linguistic forms, 49, 51, 52 Indexicality, 50–53, 83 Integrationism and the first-person perspective, 208 and humanism, 208 L Labov, William and critique of Chomksyean linguistics, 41 on the notion of structured heterogeneity, 42 Language and identity construction, 49, 52, 53 Languaging, 225, 226 Linguistic symbiosis, 49 The linguistic system, 1, 5, 6, 13–16, 21–24, 27, 29, 221 The linguistic turn, 45 Linguistic variation, 49, 53 M Machine-mediated communication, 223 Machine translation, 216, 217 A Martian perspective, 4, 39, 126, 127

N Native speakers, 195, 217 O Ordinary language philosophy, 119–121 P Phenomenology on intersubjectivity, 79 on the natural attitude, 77, 79 on subjective consciousness, 77 on typification, 78 Posthumanism, 197–209 Prior texts, 225 R Rule-following activity, 103, 121–129, 131, 132 S Saussure, Ferdinand de and dichotomy between langue and parole, 16, 22 on identity of linguistic forms, 19, 31 on linguistic signs, 14–17, 20–22, 53 on linguistic value, 15, 52 on the principle of arbitrariness, 14, 15 on the principle of linearity, 14, 16 on the speech circuit, 17, 18, 20, 22–24, 160 on synchronic and diachronic linguistics, 16, 23 Skinner, Burrhus Frederic on behaviorial science, 158, 159, 172, 180–182, 185 on control, 170, 171, 175, 179, 181, 182, 186 on progressive approximation, 170 on reinforcement, 156–158, 170, 171 on repertoire, 170–172, 175, 215 on responsibility, 181, 185 on stimulus discrimination, 171 on verbal behavior, 146, 159, 170, 171, 215 The Skinner-Chomsky controversy, 143–148 Social facts, 41, 71–76 Sociolinguistics, 41–47, 49, 50, 53 Speakers’ accommodation, 51 Speech act theory (SAT) on brute and institutional facts, 124, 125, 128

General Index on constitutive and regulative rules, 121–129 on the contractual nature of communication, 121, 128 on convention, 121–129 and differences with CA, 131–135, 137 on force, 121, 122, 125 on meaning of utterances, 122 on performatives, 121, 122 on the theory of intention and intentionality, 133

233 Structural linguistics and differences between phonetics and phonology, 30 and linguistic form, 30 and recurrent units, 6, 30 and segmentation, 30 W Writing and printing technologies, 30